CMS TEN Release Notes

Introduction

Lots of great things going on in Development here, so much that we couldn't get it all into one release! CMS 10.0.5 supports our new Amazon and Volusion modules, performance improvements, updates to most all reports, and support for running CMS on Windows 10 workstations. Close on its heels we expect 10.0.6 with many new reports and forms and other exciting changes.

There is a small postal rate change effective Sunday August 28th, 2016that only affects First Class Package 3oz. That rate change is included in this update or can be set manually in CMS if your postponing your update.

There are changes in the credit card industry scheduled for October 2016. These include 19 digit card numbers and MasterCard numbers being issued that will begin with the number 2. There were no changes necessary in CMS to accommodate them.

Release Notes from all previous versions can be found on our Release Notes page.

End of Life Announcement - WinXP and Server 2003
Microsoft has announced they will no longer provide support or updates for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.

This is a fairly critical situation. XP and Server 2003 will no longer receive security patches which, aside from the obvious security threats, also means that you cannot be PCI compliant.

We have already started to see some ramifications to our clients running on these unsupported operating systems. PCI is dictating a shift away from using SSL and TLS 1.0 since they are now considered to be insecure methods of connection. As our partners start to follow this dictate and remove any support for those older forms of secure connection, you will need to be on a current operating system that includes support for TLS 1.1 or later. (Windows XP and Server 2003 do not support them)

For a complete list of operating systems we support for use with CMS, see our System Requirements wiki article.

PCI Compliance - CMS TEN has been successfully validated against the PA-DSS 3.0 specification by Coalfire Systems. Software changes that could affect your compliance are only included in major CMS versions (e.g. 9.0, 10.0) or minor versions (e.g. 9.2, 10.2) and never in releases (e.g. 9.0.5, 10.0.2) or builds (e.g. 9.0.6.159, 10.0.1.123). You can read more about our versioning methodology HERE.

CMS 10.0.x is listed on the PCI Council’s directory of Validated Payment Applications and its validation is good through October 2019. We file updates with the PCI Council annually to maintain our status and

Database and XML Changes:

There were also several in 10.0.1 with the initial release of CMS TEN.

Integrations - New integration options available for Amazon and Volusion. All other integrations will continue to work as they had previously including CommerceV3, Magento, UPS Worldship, FedEx Ship Manager, Endicia/DaZzle, ShipRush, Malvern, MPS, TransFirst, and Authorize.net.

CMS TEN - ENHANCEMENT DETAILS

  1. Amazon Integration - Optional Module (Beta)

    Amazon merchants with a paid (professional level) account can download orders to a file that is compatible with the new Amazon plug-in for CMS. you can now import your Amazon order file into CMS. It then follows the normal flow for imported orders. Once shipped, you can generate an order status file to upload back to Amazon updating all shipped orders with shipped date, carrier, ship method, and tracking number.

    This module has now been in production since July and is working smoothly. We intend to keep its status as beta through the end of 2016 to receive enough feedback to ensure the solution is well-rounded.

    Contact your account representative to learn more about this module and to obtain a release code that will enable it for you under CMS 10.0.5.

  2. Volusion Integration Optional Module (Beta)

    Volusion is shopping cart solution growing in popularity and we launched our pilot client on it earlier this year. Capabilities of this CMS Plug-in include:
    • Order download
    • Catalog request download
    • Order status upload

    Like Amazon, we expect to keep this in beta status through the end of 2016. Contact your account representative to learn more about this module and to obtain a release code that will enable it for you under CMS 10.0.5.

  3. USPS August 2016 Rates

    The rate for First Class Package 1-3 oz has increased from $2.45 to match the 4-8 ounce rate, now all $2.60. This change is effective August 28th, 2016. More information is available on Endicia's page on the topic.

  4. Windows 10 Support

    We now support installing/running CMS on Windows 10 workstations. For machines that are upgrading from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 you will want to reinstall CMS.

    WARNING - We've learned that Honeywell has not updated their bar code scanner drivers to work with serial emulation USB under Windows 10. If you will be running CMS on a Windows 10 machine with a scanner, be sure to get a model that supports USB HID POS mode, such as the model 1300g.

  5. Payment Adjustments for Tax calculations

    For companies that are required to collect sales tax, you may run into issues with your website calculating tax differently than CMS does, resulting in a over or under payment when the order comes into CMS. To help manage this issue we've added a new option to alter the payment amount of uncaptured credit cards on imported orders to match the new invoice total.

  6. Email Confirmations for Back Orders and Returns


    You're now able to automate the creation of emails to your customer that have placed orders that contain back ordered items. Often times websites don't track inventory so, at the point the order confirmation email is sent by the site, stock availability is not yet know. Once the order is imported into CMS and saved, CMS will check your configuration to see if it should create a back order confirmation email for that order source. There is also logic in place to automatically cancel that email if the order is canceled or fulfilled before the email is sent.

    A similar option is available for returns now too. After processing a return, a confirmation email can be created. Like all of CMS's confirmation emails, you can design the email yourself and opt to include a copy of the invoice as an attachment, in this case the return invoice.

    These emails are sent (released) along with order and shipment emails, typically as part of an end of day procedure. You can configured these new email options under Fulfillment Options.

  7. Order Imports - Update Mailing Address


    When you import an order for an existing customer, the addresses they are providing may be updated from what you have on file. While CMS has a mechanism in place to update the customer's default billing and shipping address, there was no way to update the mailing address. There's a new option that makes this possible.

    Once enabled, this update will only occur in situations where the order matches to the customer either by customer number or email address, essentially exact matches. As such you'll also want to make sure you've got the option enabled to match by email address.

  8. Performance Enhancements

    1. Fulfillment Manager
      We've overhauled the code in this section of CMS to improve performance, particularly noticeable in larger fulfillment runs (thousands), and to improve the user interface. Changes include:
      1. New style of grid pointer for multi-selects allowing for scrolling through the grid without losing/changing the selected records. This is helpful if you're using Ctrl-click for multi-selects to only fulfill selected orders.
      2. CMS now defaults the Processing Option to 'All Orders Shown'
      3. Selecting an individual order automatically changes the Processing Option to 'Selected Orders Only'
      4. Optional fulfillment speed timer for benchmarking performance (contact Support for more info)
      5. The cursor now follows orders in the grid as they are fulfilled
      6. The window will no longer update to display items/address for each order as it is being fulfilled (further improvement to performance)
      7. You are now able to click Cancel to stop a fulfillment run in progress
    2. Keyed Imports
      1. The solution implemented in 10.0.1 (Carrier Packages) that was designed to improve the speed of shipping integrations via keyed imports (those processed outside of CMS) has been further enhanced to improve speed and reliability
      2. An option has been added in the ship method setup to indicate if you want packages shipping via this method to be available for keyed imports. There is some performance to be gained here, particularly in large fulfillment runs, if CMS does not need to make packages available for keyed imports.

  9. CV3 - Support for Parent items

    CommerceV3 (CV3) supports a feature called Parent Items that allows you to create something akin to a landing page for a series of other products (that share the same description/image, for example). Since this is not a real product itself, there is no corollary to this parent product in CMS. Unfortunately CV3 loses the relationship between the parent product and its children if a product upload is done without the parent product included. To address this CMS is now connecting to CV3 to download a list of the parent products and their related products so it can be appended to the product data CMS is going to upload.

  10. Minor changes

    1. TLS 1.2 - CMS is now compatible with email servers that require TLS 1.2 secure connections
    2. Emails no longer prompt for save - When sending a unique email to your customer CMS will no longer prompt you to save
    3. Scheduled emails to opt ins only - Scheduled emails will now only be created for customers that do not have have the flag checked for 'No email advertising'
    4. Order Entry handling of $xxx,xxx.xx - The Complete Order column has been widened to handle the display of amounts up to $999,999.99
    5. Shipmeth Active filter - In Setup, when modifying shipping methods, you can now filter the display to show only Active methods
    6. Crystal Pick Tickets - There is a new Crystal form type for Pick Tickets
    7. One-time items Flagged - One-time items, those added to an order that are not part of your product list, are now easily identifiable in Order Entry. The product code is now preceded by an asterisk in both the Items and View Invoice tabs of Order Entry. This should be particularly useful when verifying imported orders so you can now see at a glance if any of the products on the order did not match to those in your product list. This change was made available in some earlier versions of TEN but was previously undocumented.
    8. Weight added to SKU Wizard - You can now use the SKU Wizard to set or update the weights for a product's SKUs
    9. Package ID increased from 3 to 4 characters enabling orders in excess of 999 recipients and/or items. There are still performance issues that come into play when you work with orders of that size, so as a rule, you are typically best served keeping the orders less than 999 where feasible.

  11. Reports

    There's been a herculean effort to review every single report/form to update, optimize, and enhance them. Those updated reports are included with 10.0.5. (many new reports coming in our next release) Some highlights included:
    1. Order Processing Summary - more sub reports
    2. Batch Status - improved handling of data from external shipping systems
    3. Customer Order Summary - new parameter for A/R only

  12. Bug Fixes and modifications

See Release Notes