Hi Advantage Users,
As most of you are aware, we have an Advantage Upgrade coming up Thursday, June 8th - Sunday, June 11th. We plan to bring the area down on Thursday, June 8th at the close of TCC’s business of 8pm EST. I will be following up with another communication the week prior to the Upgrade that will include more definitive times such as expected down time, applications affected, reporting delays etc. This should answer many of the questions you may have. Additionally, we will be sending communications via StatusPage during the entire Upgrade weekend to report on our progress, status of the applications, and when all systems and reporting are caught back up.
We had many things to consider in making this decision and after years of de-prioritizing necessary maintenance to the application we, along with all of our 14 WestTechnologies Teams, are very excited for what the Upgrade and stabilization will provide.
Our mission is to modernize critical business components, establish sound patterns for integrations, enable 14 WesTechnologies and Affiliate developers to easily consume our APIs & events by building a modern, scalable architecture that fosters agility and simplifies integration.
And so, with this Upgrade we focused our efforts on a New Version of Advantage, a New Environment (including modernizing infrastructure by moving to AWS Cloud Platform, hardware, servers), ongoing Data Cleansing via purging efforts and shrinking our database footprint, modernizing integrations, Streamlining setup for easier support and training, and Easier access for remote employees.
We’ve gone from an 11 Terabyte database to a 2 Terabyte database! We’ve completed many of our Hit List items such as our clean-up efforts for credit policies, delivery codes, Active/Inactive publications, Active/Inactive Lists. We’ve purged old Note records and have gone from 138 million to under 10 million. We’ve optimized our Jobstreams and Processes so that it has less effect on your work day (gone are the days of waiting for Month End Processing to finish on the 1st of every month), we’ve integrated Advantage with OneLogin for easier access. We’ve even established a list of Best Practice Business Recommendations in collaboration with Legal and Accounting (coming soon!). These are just a few highlights of what we’ve been up to.
Along with all of the above, we are happy to announce some new features we are rolling out with our June Upgrade that we think will be a pleasant surprise! We encourage you to provide us feedback with any questions, suggestions, or concerns regarding this release by raising a ticket to the Advantage Team via the Support Portal.
Advantage Application to Web UI: With this release, the presentation of the Advantage application has been migrated to a web user interface and is now behind OneLogin.
But how do I access Advantage? It is now accessed through 1) either a tile on your OneLogin Portal or 2) as a favorite saved on your browser! Advantage will no longer be accessible via the LaunchPad or as an application on your desktop.
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*Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome are supported for the Advantage web UI. Support for additional browsers is planned for a future date. *
Opening a Control Group: To open a control group, a ribbon shortcut has now been added, along with Balance and Release. Balance and release will default to the control group you currently have open, but will prompt for you to confirm before doing so.
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Note: you will no longer see “Current Control Group” box at bottom of your views.
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Change Ribbon: If you switch betweenribbons, you will now do so by navigating to the Preferences Tab on your ribbon and selecting the dropdown for available ribbon options.
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Ribbon relocated to a left-side navigation: This is more consistent with the approach taken by other current software packages, and should feel more familiar to users. When you access the application, it will open in your default ribbon. See here for more information.
In addition, an auto-collapse feature (pin/unpin) for the side ribbon frees up vertical space across the page, reducing the user’s need to scroll.
As you open successive Advantage views, the system preserves these as tabs across the top of your session. You can then easily move back and forth between recently used views.
You can mark views as “Favorites,” which saves them to a group on the ribbon for quick access.
Changes to theming options have increased the opportunities for text contrast on the screen, leading to overall improved readability. This includes an optional “dark mode” for maximum contrast effect.
Numerous changes and improvements have been made to layout and spacing. The goal was to reduce…and if possible, eliminate…the user’s need to scroll horizontally within the application.
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BCL is now included in Customer Activity screen: You will see the Club/Class/Series listed under the Item Number column, and right clicking on the line you highlight will bring up available Book Club actions as detailed below in the screenshots. *If desired, we can work with the businesses that use BCL to personalize/customize the phases/tabs in Customer Activity screen*
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“Is Refunded and Reversed” Flag: If users would like to identify a refund that has been reversed, an “Is Reversed Refunded” flag column is now available in the ARPCAR list frame. You will need to customize your list frame to include “Is Reversed Refund” in order to see this column.
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Enhanced Subscription Cancellation Refund and Credit Handling: Users can now adjust credit and refund handling separately for the current as well as all future terms during a CIR subscription cancellation in the UI. See here for more information.
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Search Changes
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· Clear Search Icon: Various search views offer Primary Search Fields and Promoted Search Fields. The new “Clear” action can be used as a means of quickly resetting your search fields along with the promoted search field values (not the saved Promoted Search Fields). This action is represented by a “broom” icon located at the top of the search frame alongside the gear and pin icons.
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· Edit “My Filter”, you will have to select the gear icon, then choose “Maintain Filters” and then choose the pencil to edit your Filter. Helpful Tip: My Filter will be your Username
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Due to Search changes with this Upgrade, we highly recommend making use of "Promotable" Search Filter Fields(released in 2015): If you’ve ever used the ‘filter’ on a searchable view for the same thing more than once, you’re going to want this. In any view that has the radio button style ‘search by’ area, you can bring the background filter fields into your regular search area.
“What would I even use this for?” Well, if you’re a customer service agent who only wants to see search results from a specific affiliate you can bring the “owning organization” field forward and not have to go into the filter dialog to search for just the org number you’re working with.
“So how do I do this?” Open up Advantage, go to the view with the search you want to customize. Click the Gear icon, and choose “Promoted Search Fields” and select anything from the left Available Fields options that you would like to add.
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Thanks,
The Advantage Team