Enable aim to provide customers with continuous access to software product innovation, including solution improvements, performance optimisations and new functionality. Our methodology ensures our clients are free to concentrate on their core business, whilst we focus on keeping the key software platforms maintained to the highest standard. This newsletter provides an overview of our latest Enable update and how this will be deployed to our clients’ environments.
Working within a six-week development cycle, Enable take a proactive approach to Enable updates ensuring our software is constantly being improved and enhanced. This continuous approach provides our clients with Enable's most up to date functionality and ensures every client is operating with the most stable and consistent software build available.
The updates that have been implemented within this development cycle include performance improvements, general maintenance, enhancements to existing modules and brand new features.
In addition to our philosophy of constant innovation in our product improvements, client feedback remains an invaluable part of our development process. Any feedback, positive or negative, that you have on Enable can be submitted via email to projects@enable.com. Our dedicated Client Services Team will be on hand to answer any queries you may have.
Our latest update was deployed to our clients’ user acceptance testing (UAT) environments on September 22nd and is now available for testing. (This UAT environment is separate to your live environment and provides a suitable testing platform without any risk to the integrity of your live data).
This set of updates contains a combination of brand new features, enhancements to existing functionality and performance and maintenance upgrades.
Please note some of the features described in this document are only available by request as they may require additional configuration in order to be applied to your Enable system. Please contact a member of our Client Services Team for more information.
The features and improvements included in this update will subsequently be deployed to your live Enable environment on October 31st, by which time you will have had approximately 5 weeks to try out the updates.
Part of September’s product update includes dynamic new features that can be made available at our customers' request.
Some clients may have periodic deals which do not conform to regular calendar periods, such as months or quarters. In these cases, it can be beneficial for clients to configure a custom calendar. This allows faster, easier configuration of deals and reports that relate to specific periods, in the confidence that the dates configured for the deal or report are correct.
A new setting ‘Enable interim replication’ has been introduced. If this setting is off, the schemes generated through automatic scheme replication will be created as active schemes. Turning the setting on will cause automatic scheme replication to generate interim schemes as it does currently. The existing behaviour of customers Enable systems will remain unaltered unless specifically requested.
A single sign-on (SSO) mechanism has been introduced, allowing users to authenticate and logon to the Enable platform based on their session with external identity providers, such as Google G Suite or an Active Directory Federation Services instance. The single sign-on mechanism can be configured by Enable to disable the usual Enable login process, directing users to their client-specific SSO login page to sign in. When a user logs out of the external identity provider, they will be logged out of Enable. The converse of this can also be enabled. The single sign-on functionality has additionally been tested with Active Directory Federation Services.
Substantial enhancements have been made to Enable in order to strengthen the software’s already robust existing functionality. These developments are designed to boost the overall efficiency of user interactions in Enable.
It is now possible to set the daily baseline earnings calculation time using the new right panel available from the Enable configuration processing page.
In addition to this, some business logic changes have been made to the baseline earning display, meaning that the “Earnings” column displayed in “Schemes from last year” is now summed using forecast earnings rather than actual earnings. In addition to this the “{Supplier} earnings from {Previous year}, {Currency}” value is now derived using the actual forecast earnings rather than the actual earnings.
Performance improvements have also been made, resulting in a faster page load.
The notification functionality has been improved with several new enhancements. This includes:
The Scheme PDF output has been enhanced with support for additional features of a deal, where applicable. This includes support for:
A quick search feature has been added to the listing of Trading Partner Contacts to allow users to quickly locate the contact they’re looking for.
It is now possible for Enable to be configured to include additional information fields for Trading Partner Contacts.
Once the fields have been configured, they are displayed on the Trading Partner Contact edit panel to allow field values to be entered for each contact.
Performance improvements and general platform enhancements have been implemented to improve the responsiveness of the Enable interface and background processes.
The calculation processor has been updated to protect against the potential risk of database timeouts when dealing with large data volumes. The system achieves this by now performing certain resource intensive queries in batches.
This is achieved by performing some resource intensive queries in batches to reduce the overall processing time.
The Cash App CSV report generation has now been moved into a background service task. This provides improved performance by reducing the load on the web servers and allows for potentially resource intensive queries to complete successfully without risk of timing out. The user will receive a notification informing them when the report is available to download.
We have continued to extend our automated regression test coverage within the core Enable solution in response to previously addressed bugs, to protect against the risk of these specific bugs reoccurring.
In the case where an issue is encountered during the deal create process, we will queue a clean up of any incomplete data for a partially created deal. This helps to ensure that there are no invalid partially-created deals in the system, which could cause errors for end-users.
We have made further enhancements to the deal deletion background processing logic to help improve performance. This includes changing the approach for deletion such that turnover line results are now deleted in batches to reduce the chance of database timeouts.
We have modified the existing cache refresh job so that once a week the cache will be completely emptied and rebuilt from scratch. This change will prevent the build up of stale Dimension Collection Attribute Values within the cache.
The welcome email for Enable users has been updated to correct a typographical error.
The Enable user interface has been modified to reflect the Enable brand and colour scheme.
In line with Enable’s commitment to release a Enable update every six weeks, our next update will be deployed for testing within clients’ UAT environments on 3rd November 2017, with deployment to the live Enable application scheduled to take place on 12th December 2017.
As part of our November update, we will be making further performance optimisations and platform enhancements. Alongside this, we will be introducing some dynamic new features as well as enhancing existing Enable functionality.
Within this next update, significant development is being put into the Enable Cash App. This includes new client-level settings such as 'Use accrual earnings', which will enable the use of accrual earnings instead of actual earnings in Cash App calculations. Another client-level setting due for development will determine whether or not the ‘total due’ column in the Debtors report section of the Cash App includes Deal lines where the end date has passed but the due date has not yet been reached. Enhancements will also be made to the Debtors report including additional filters and new columns.
Alongside this, we will be introducing additional configuration regarding scaled accrual earning for lump sums. This will mean Deals using the apportioned external earnings or apportioned fixed amount plugins may be configured to calculate using either the ‘Apportion Deal total’ or ‘Apportion scaled total’ options. The ‘Apportion Deal total’ option will act as existing functionality and apportions the full Deal earnings value over Turnover lines in the system at the time the Deal is calculated. The new ‘Apportion scaled total’ option means that accrual earnings will be scaled based on the proportion of the Deal’s timeframe that has passed.
Further enhancements are also scheduled for the single sign-on functionality that has been introduced in this month’s update including introduction of a ‘single login page’ which will contain different components based on configurable sign-in settings.
If you have any questions regarding our current or upcoming Enable updates, please contact our Client Services Team at projects@enable.com.
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