• Updated UPS Realtime to force TLS 1.2 to match recent changes required by UPS
• The following AutoResponder Templates were enhanced to obey quiet hours: Revolution Personal Message – Email to Rep, Revolution Personal Message – Email to Customer, Revolution Personal Message – SMS to Rep, Revolution Personal Message – Email to Lead, Alert Email, Alert SMS
• Cart 2.0: the Quantity and Add to Cart functionalities were enhanced to work based on the value set in Inventory Shopping Cart Quantity field, which offers greater control to the quantity field options if something other than an input box is desired.
• Cart 2.0:  Inventory relationship item dropdown listing and Cart Check out page were enhanced to support the stock check functionality.
• The Shopping Cart Category display was updated to reload data upon user login to ensure proper categories are refreshed with the latest data.
• Enhanced the checkout process by making it mobile responsive for customer shopping on Shopping Cart 2.0 to optimize user experience from start to finish.
• The Revolution Responsive Alert system was enhanced through optimizing procedures to minimize page load time.
• Gained efficiencies by moving SOAP API logs out of Freedom Transactional Database improving API response time, reducing database size increment rate and reducing overhead on any database mirroring.
• A zoom feature was developed to enhance the customer experience while browsing products on Cart 2.0 mobile platform.
• The Comp Orders report was broadened to encompass Comp/Replacement Orders.  Also, a column was added to easily distinguish between comp orders and replacement orders.
• Improved JS App Alerts and Contact card displays for enhanced user experiences.
• The shopping cart was enhanced to save Inventory Relationship item details when added from the wish list to offer better details on the shopping cart summary page.
• The Shopping Cart loading process, which requires cookie generation, was enhanced to display a message notifying user that the reason the cart is not loading is due to the ‘blocked cookies setting’.
• The order of visual elements in the graphical genealogy was enhanced to reduce windows opening behind windows.
• Revolution “Downline Sales Graph” was optimized for faster loading.
• Additional translation fields were created for the party validation within the Shopping Cart.
• An additional translation key was created for the gift certificates invalid card number in the Shopping Cart.
• A new Revolution Translation Key was created for the column label to display “Total Price”.
• Enhanced the check for duplicate emails to allow for rep, customer, or rep and customer scan. Improved the options to prevent possible issues that could occur with cross referencing.
• The GetDashboardData API was updated to return results for all agents and not just agents with sub agents.
• The Back Office Rep Edit was updated to only evaluate SSN rules if changes were made to this field during the full page EDIT/SAVE operation.
• The Inventory Collection display was updated to show inventory items without a description.
• Validation was added to the enrollment form for specific placement.  If specify placement is selected but left blank, the enrollment will assign to the sponsoring rep.
• The Remember Me functionality in Revolution Login page was improved by allowing recall of the username or email on next logon.
• The Rep number column in Rep Upline page was enhanced to show the BC number and position based on the respective settings.
• The Adyen Tokenized Processor was enhanced to handle the result code “Received”. When Adyen payment processor responds with this particular result code, Freedom will be able to correctly accept Adyen payments in pending status.
• The Credit Card Retry process was updated to allow configurations to use the credit card initially attempted or the updated credit card info from the AutoShip payment profile. When the AutoShip retry process is run, it will use the CC from the AutoShip profile, not reuse the last CC on the prior batch. This will help increase retry success.
• The EmployeeID that gets sent to GPG with payment requests was updated. For Customers, changed from CustomerID to CustomerDID. For Reps, changed from RepID to RepDID.  This is due to changes requested by GPG to ensure a smoother integration.

 

5 Quick Tips to Diagnose Performance Issues

As companies grow and software progressively gets fancier, we expect more from our technology.  When it comes to performance issues, a number of different issues can mask themselves making it difficult to pinpoint what’s really going on.  Here are some tips to help you diagnose why things might be running less than optimal.

1. Are other users having the issue? All of them or some of them? If not, what is different? Are you using the same browser? Are you on the same network?  In the same geographical area or region?  Is there country-specific configuration differences?  Unique credit card processors or shipping locations at play?
2.  Is there a problem with the internet between you and Freedom?  Are other sites slow?  This issue is difficult to get to the answer because it requires additional tools like “tracert” (verbally pronounced “trace route”).  For novice users, Google “free traceroute” and you will find tons of online tools that report the speed between each hop on the internet.  Some conduct the same tests from different areas around the globe which further helps isolate if a single region is the problem.  Advanced users favor a command prompt solution, “ping” and “tracert”, to capture the same details.
3.  How big is the page you are viewing? You can typically check this by right clicking on the page and going to properties in your browser. Larger pages can take more system resources on your computer to display. This can happen if you run a large report and attempt to view too much of the data at once.   Try reducing the date range first to see what the tolerance thresholds are.
4.  Are there any large processes running?  Are multiple people running large processes? We offer a report that might be helpful:  Freedom Back Office:: Administration > Tools > Process Logs.  This may help identify if two people or scheduled jobs are trying to do two or more resource intensive jobs tasks.  For example, purging 100,000 reps while running commissions might not be the best choice.   Resource contention may occur.

If the above checks haven’t brought you to the cause of a performance issue, give us a call.  When you do, let us know what steps you took and the results of each. This information can go a long way to narrowing down what the cause might be. As with any performance issues, the exact time experienced is very important to us.  This will help us as we comb through logs trying to put the puzzle together.  If a performance issue self-resolves itself, without the exact time of the incident, our jobs gets much more difficult.

5. Lastly, don’t forget at the end of the ticket to ask us “how could I have troubleshot better” or “what steps did you take that perhaps I could have taken”?    We are happy to share the last puzzle piece that solved the problem to aid in everyone’s faster future resolutions.

 

The Benefits of Service Oriented Architecture

While working with ByDesign, you may have heard the acronym “SOA” while referencing the Freedom Software.  What does it mean, and what are the benefits to you?

“SOA” means Service-Oriented Architecture. At its core, SOA is just this. It’s a design style that relies on services instead of applications. Software services are a set of functions that can be made available to many different applications and users. Each service is responsible for a specific piece of business logic, and only responsible for that portion. While SOA means many applications, it also means only one instance of its services.

As a result, we built the software using many well-defined software services that are only loosely-coupled to one another or to the application that you are using.  From a larger perspective, this means that the software has more emphasis on simplicity and precise requirements and business rules.  There is also a level of abstraction between the user experience and the services that the application is built upon so that any service we change will have little or no impact on another.  Many of these services are exposed directly as APIs that our Enterprise clients can use as well as our applications.

We’ve used the SOA platform while creating the new shopping cart, new Freedom BackOffice, and a new Restful API backend. The new shopping cart calls our SOA APIs directly. The new BackOffice has the services running locally, and they are used for many parts of the system already.

This new architecture and new applications allow us to write software that is more aligned to the needs of your business without being constrained by the implementation details of any one module.

For example, there are many places in the Freedom system where we may need to know information about a given rep.  By having one service specifically for handling rep information, both ByDesign and our Enterprise clients (via the API) can build software around that one service.

These are just the highlights of the benefits this new system provides. Furthermore, ByDesign will continue to add functionality to these areas and work towards making it easier for you to run your business without having to worry about friction between your goals and your software platform.