We extend warm congratulations to American Master Products (AMP), who went live on their new release in late February; TN Marketing (TNM) who cut over in early March, and God’s World Publications (GWP) who upgraded in April.

Daryl Vautouroversaw the AMP and TNM upgrades, while Philippe Rowland took the helm for GWP.  Of course no upgrade project can be successful without generous help from many ACS’ers as well as the client-site team.  Daryl and Philippe wish to thank everyone who had a hand in bringing these projects to completion.

This Tech Tip discusses the user id processes use in the server context. This is now available to display as a column at the OPRDAT processing list frame.

The Server Process ID Background

When you request a process, the Advantage monitor makes a request to the server to run it. The server assigns a Process ID (or PID) which you can see within Advantage by inquiring on the process. Beginning at revision 2010R1 you can also you can customize the OPRDAT process list frame to view it directly in the list:

To include the Server Process ID column in the OPRDAT Process List Frame:

1) Right-click in the Current Processes list frame area

2) Choose Customize from the right-click menu

3) Click on the Server Process ID from the list of Available Fields and click the "Add >" button – see below

4) The Server Process ID column will now show in the list frame – see above

5) Click Okay

 PA-DSS stands for "Payment Application – Data Security Standard".  This standard was developed to establish specific guidelines to prevent credit/debit card fraud and malicious use of confidential credit information.  For certification, software vendors like ACS, whose software is used to process credit and debit cards are required to:

• Develop software that complies with the guidelines for storing, processing, and transmitting credit/debit card information.
• Establish internal policies and procedures to ensure that software is developed and installed according to defined standards.
• Create an Implementation Guide that instructs clients how to implement Advantage in order to ensure compliance.
• Pass a formal review by a qualified auditor.

Knowing that Advantage is PA-DSS certified means that it will be easier for you to be PCI compliant.  The first certified release of Advantage was 2011R1, and we expect to be notified of certification of the latest releases shortly.  Going forward, we will seek certification of each new release as a matter of course.

Contact your ACS account manager if you have any questions about PA-DSS certification.

Customer Service Reps can enter applied returns directly at SVCDAT/PRO, which supports entering the return in a customer service situation without routing to MSTDAT/FST.

Once the user selects the order at SVCDAT/PRO, clicking the Applied Return button would start the return process. The following dialog would show:

The credit reason entered at this dialog will be used with each returned order line. You can override this credit reason if the Quick Return All option is not used.

You are also prompted whether you are performing a Return Authorization (Y/N). The default is N.

Quick Return All allows you to process the return quickly by returning all eligible lines on the order. The quick return assumes the following:

• You do not need to override the default credit reason you have entered
• You are returning all order lines
• You do not need to vary the quantity returned on any of the order lines
• You do not need to grant partial credit for any of the order lines

If you need to vary any of the above handling, do not check Quick Return All and click OK instead, and the system will prompt for further information. This dialog also lists previous returns and claims for the order lines. For orders with a lot of lines, you can enter the item# you want to return to go straight to that order line.

If you check the Partial Credit box, the following dialog is displayed (for each item on which you indicated partial credit). This is the same dialog that is displayed at MSTDAT/FST.

Applied returns entered at SVCDAT/PRO are entered into the last control group you opened, but only if it is currently in a closed status and no one else had opened the control group.  Otherwise, the Applied Return button at SVCDAT/PRO will be unavailable.

ACS is pleased to welcome Mike Jahn to our Advantage family, specifically, the eCommerce and Enterprise Integration team led by Matt Varblow.  Mike comes to ACS with more than four years of experience as a systems engineer for an enterprise content management company in Southfield, Michigan. There, he worked on coding and systems integration as well as interfacing with customers.

A Michigan native, Mike grew up in Canton and, after high school, he spent a year at the Air Force Academy before deciding that the military was not for him.  He then returned to Michigan and enrolled at Eastern Michigan University. 

At Eastern, Mike earned Bachelor of Science degrees in math and computer science.  Although he originally thought he would like to be a math teacher, he found that he really enjoyed coding and decided to pursue a career in computer science.

Mike lives in Ann Arbor and most of his spare time is spent working out for, practicing, or playing Ultimate (lay-people might call it Ultimate Frisbee).  He is on a team called Overhaul, who last year placed 11^th in the nation.  The club season keeps him busy from May through October and tournaments have taken him all over the country.  He also played once in Italy, as the sport is catching on in Europe as well as Canada, Japan and parts of South America. 

When he’s not playing Ultimate, Mike enjoys exploring new types of music.  His current favorite genres include indie and classic rock and rap.

Welcome, Mike!

Stephanie Widrig recently joined ACS as a member of the client services group under the direction of Tim Zapawa.  Stephanie joins the team led by John Sheehy, and is currently learning the ACS project management methodology.   She is also doing some SQL analysis and learning Advantage, in part by doing QA. 

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Stephanie earned a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial and operations engineering.  Her studies included courses on optimization and lean manufacturing, which are applicable to many areas of business.  Stephanie wanted to find a job at a company where she could combine working with people and technology, and the position on the projects team at ACS fit the bill.

Stephanie was born in Farmington Hills, Michigan and also lived in Saginaw and Cadillac.  She is currently living in Ann Arbor and enjoys spending time with her friends.  She loves the outdoors—especially the water.  In the summer, she can be found water-skiing and boating and she enjoys skiing in the winter as well.  She is also involved in many activities at her church and if she has any time left, she likes to read.

Welcome, Stephanie, to the Advantage family! 

Every 10 years or so we invest deeply in the product to move it forward to a new platform.  We are just completing the final touches on Advantage 2012r2 (available 6/30) which brings Advantage fully into the .NET environment.  This technology leap is a springboard for further development of Advantage in all kinds of directions.  It removes the borders around the software and opens up vast possibilities for integration, globalization, and deployment.

As a non-technical guy, let me explain what this means.

First of all, we are not announcing a new product which our clients will have to re-license.  Our clients’ licenses to Advantage are a protected investment.  We always provide an upgrade path to the latest release, and this huge leap forward is no exception.  Our clients will have a guaranteed upgrade path to Advantage 2012r2 from any prior Advantage release and will move into the .NET world without a big investment on their part. 

This is not a trivial point.  Many software developers announce new products, but they force their clients to buy a new license to keep up with technology.  We do it differently. That’s one reason why Advantage clients end up being so satisfied over the long haul.

Advantage is now running in an environment which has extensive libraries of development tools.  These include Unicode, which means our clients can store data from non-Latin character sets starting at this release.  Many publishers want to handle Chinese characters in their database, for example.  Advantage now supports that and all the other major languages right out of the box.

.NET provides a framework for extensibility which is like opening a dam and letting the water gush through.  Advantage integrations with enterprise applications are easier, more reliable and more scalable.  User interface design changes can be made in a fraction of the time it used to take.  We have re-designed the user interface for 2012r2 to make it more intuitive, improve discoverability, and reduce spin-up time for new users.  We want to make our users more efficient.  That improves both their satisfaction and their bottom line.  Any problem with that?

The new platform gives our developers access to state-of-the-art tools for coding, debugging, testing and configuration control.  As demand for our world-class software and services increases globally, we knew we had to be able to scale our development to keep up, and the completion of our move to .NET puts us squarely in a place where we can now increase our development throughput while also expanding our resources.  As the global leader in our field, we are winning more and more business as a result of our development agility and quality of service to our clients.  We want to be positioned for whatever our clients require, and breaking through the "borders" of our product is a big part of that.

Advantage 2012r2:  Software without borders.

Join us in Oxford, England for the annual European Advantage user meeting October 30 – 31^st.  It will take place at the offices of Oxford University Press and we’ll discuss the following topics:

• ACS news / direction / future
• Latest product features
• API capsules
• Support
• Other topics

In addition to all the great information, it’s a terrific opportunity to network with your fellow Advantage users.  You can register at the ACS LinkedIn site - http://linkd.in/L25C1s.

For more information, contact Bob Thornton at rthor@advantagecs.com

This release is packed full of great stuff, in addition to being fully .NET.  Here are some of the features you’ll find in 2012r2, which will be available June 30:

• A dedicated AMB E-mail table has been added, similar to the tables for CIR, PRO, and CEM e-mails. For a given participant/access point combination on an agreement, you can record one or more e-mail addresses, and use these to focus communication with the customer regarding that access point.
• Search capabilities for AMB customer service have been enhanced to include a "search by participant" feature across agreements.
• An AMB "Save the Cancel" feature has been added. This allows the rep to record an explicit transaction when (for example) on the phone with the customer, which represents a successful attempt to dissuade the customer from canceling. The transaction also records the remaining liability on the agreement at the point of the save.
• A geo-based promotional pricing feature has been available for subscribed publications. Under this feature, you can set up alternate promo item pricing based on the customer’s location---state/province, country, and region. You can also require that an explicit geo-based record be present…to restrict sale of the item at that promo price to a certain location. With this release, the same pricing feature is available for products. As with the subscribed publications feature, you can also specify the geo-based pricing on the choice (item choice), and require the presence of a geo-based record to restrict the availability of the promotion price.
• All items available for sale in Advantage must be set up at the product master (INVDAT). While item inventory records include such critical elements as pricing, the required inventory records for publications, access points, and conferences do not carry as much data---and are often easily overlooked as part of setup.   With this release, you can have Advantage auto-create the background inventory item record whenever a publication, access item, or conference is added at the normal setup views for these modules.   The feature makes certain default assumptions regarding population of the Title, SAC Code, etc. on the item record. Once the record is auto-created, it can be maintained as normal at the INVDAT view.
• The Item Status and Item Saleable Flag features at INVDAT have been enhanced in module-specific ways. For all modules, you can now set a future date for Item Status to represent (for example) products that you are acquiring but which are not yet active, or products that you are "retiring" a future date. The Item Saleable flag can now be set to represent a status of "no new sales, returns allowed" for PRO and "no new/renewal sales, all modification transactions allowed" for CIR and AMB.

For more information on 2012r2, contact your Advantage account manager.