Previous Upgrade: February 2013
General Information
The SmartSimple platform is upgraded with new features and enhancements approximately every 2 to 3 months.
This page will provide a general overview of each upgrade, with links to the Wiki articles describing the new or updated features and how to use them. You can also subscribe to the Technical Journal that is sent out prior to each upgrade on the Newsletter Signup Page. (Unsubscribe here).
System Upgrade Process
The objective of the System Upgrade Process is to ensure that customers have a chance to review, without compromising the integrity of their production system, how their applications and information will work following the upgrade. In order to take advantage of this you will need to know how to access your backup instance of SmartSimple. If you need assistance with this either refer to the Backup Server and Testing Instances Wiki article, or contact the SmartSimple support desk.
Backup Server Update
- Each backup server will be updated to the "release candidate" one week prior to the upgrade date.
- This update will provide for instance specific testing of release candidate, as you can log into your respective backup server and test the the changes against your most current data and configuration.
- Internal staff will also be using these servers to perform instance specific testing.
Update Go/No-Go
- Subject to satisfactory testing on both the pre-production server and the production backup servers, the go/no go decision will be made on Wednesday at 12:00pm.
Next Upgrade: October 2012
The following server will be upgraded on Thursday October, 2012 at 10pm EST:
- smartsimple3.biz
The backup server (*.smartsimple3bk.biz) will be upgraded on Thursday May 10th for testing.
The following servers will be upgraded on Thursday October, 2012 at 10pm EST.
- smartsimple.com
- smartsimple2.biz
- smartsimple4.biz
The associated backup servers will be upgraded on Thursday May 17th for testing.
The following servers will be upgraded on Thursday October 2012 at 10pm EST.
- smartsimple.ca
- smartsimple.us
- smartsimple.biz
- smartsimple.ie (after 10pm GMT)
- factorial.ca
The associated backup servers will be upgraded on Thursday October th for testing.
Important: The upgrade will be applied to your backup server 1 week prior to the scheduled upgrade date for your production server. You are encouraged to log into your backup server during this period to test the changes against your most recent data and configuration. Backup Server and Testing Instances
If your organization has a dedicated SmartSimple server or you host in-house SmartSimple will be in contact with your system administrator to schedule the upgrade of your server after June 1st.
We will be sending our Technical Journal in advance of the upgrade as well. If you would like to receive the Technical Journal you may subscribe here
The following is a tentative list of the features included in the upgrade.
Communication
- A new version of SmartSimple's Add-In for Microsoft Outlook has been released an will be available in the Downloads section. The Outlook Add-In will synchronize Contacts / Companies and Calendars, as well as the ability to attach emails to either contacts or Level 1 records. This version replaces all previous versions.
- There is now a Group Email button at the bottom of UTA list views when enabled in Advanced Logic. By filtering using the List View search, a specific set of records can be included in the Group Email recipient list. The "Owner" and "Person" standard fields are also available as recipients for Group E-mails.
- When using the "Forgot Password" option on the login page, the e-mail will now be sent out immediately.
Standard and Custom Fields
- There is now an "Appear Mandatory" setting for custom fields which will make the field appear as mandatory to the user even though the "Allow Empty" setting is selected. This is useful when using JavaScript validation on the field.
- HTML entered into the template on Web Page Fields will be displayed with syntax highlighting.
- If a Tool Tip has been defined on a custom field, the field name caption will display with a dotted underline indicating that the user can "mouse-over" the field name and Tip text will appear. Also, if there are field services (e.g. Map or People Search) or Track History enabled, then those options will be displayed by hovering the mouse over the field.
- Additional capabilities have been added to the Browser Script custom field which allow it to trigger system functions (e.g. workflow, activate user) with options to trigger on load, on save, or on demand.
- A new custom field setting to make it easy to select the level 1 template(s) and level 2 types on which a field will be visible, rather than using the visibility condition.
Workflows
- The following workflow task types have been added:
- Add new user
- Remove a user role
- Activate a user
- Deactivate a user
- "Update Custom Field Value" and "Change Status" tasks have been added to transaction Workflows.
Reports
- Custom Field Settings are now available as a Recordset table for reports to show the properties of custom fields configured on your system.
- You can set any report to ignore the Global Report Template and use the template defined in the report settings.
Autoloader
- Contact and Company events can now be uploaded using the autoloader.
- Ability to load to "Owner" or "Person" standard field and match to a custom field on the contact.
- Transactions can now be autoloaded and attached to Level 2 records.
Miscellaneous
- Two new date functions have been added:
@date(currentdate)@ will return current server date as YYYY-MM-DD @datetime(currentdate)@ will return current server time as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
- A setting to specify where a note type is available in the system. You can restrict note types available to the following entities:
- Contacts
- Companies
- Events / Activities
- UTA Level 1
- UTA Level 2
- A new UTA setting will allow you to define a template for the browser to use when the user deletes the record that they are currently on, rather than being brought back to the parent record. This can be applied to all UTA Levels (1, 2 & 3) under UTA Entity settings.
- An "All Record" check box has been added on the deleted companies/contacts list view so that when selected, it can restore or purge all records in the database that are flagged as deleted.
- Two new manager permissions have been added for Sales Tracking Opportunities:
- "Sales Tracking - Hide Settings Tab" - hides the settings tab based on role for Opportunities in Sales Tracking.
- "Sales Tracking - Restrict Deleting Opportunities" - restricts deleting Opportunities for specific roles on both List View and while editing the Opportunity in the Sales Tracking application.
- Provides the ability to access rootcompany objects through the variable processor.
- The maximum number of records that appear in a Ajax list has increased to 50.
- The SmartSimple currency function, ssFormatCurrency(num) has been updated to accept any currency symbol. The format of the function is now: ssFormatCurrency(num,sym)
Previous Upgrades
Click on the links below to find detailed information on previous upgrades.
- The date listed indicates when the upgrade cycle commenced. Not all servers were upgraded on that date.
