This document provides an overview of the CMP 8.9 release with specific focus on the additional functional and non-functional enhancements with respect to CMP 8.8.
This document is aimed at internal and external audiences familiar with CMP, to explain the key features of the release including any changes in how existing functions or processes are working.
With respect to CMP 8.8, CMP 8.9 introduces new functionality as well as changes to existing functionality and non-functional improvements. These changes can be summarised as follows:
NetEngage provides a Policy Control and Charging solution to allow both postpaid and prepaid subscribers' usage to be fully managed in real-time. CMP 8.9 provides an integration to the NetEngage Online Charging System (OCS) to support:
The specific components required for the integration as described in section 3.9 below.
In previous versions of CMP, the SIM Upload Job supported the ability to specify an MSISDN that was linked to a specific SIM serial number but no rules were in place to ensure that this MSISDN was automatically allocated to a subscription when the associated SIM serial number was specified as part of the subscription creation or number change. CMP 8.9 now supports auto-selection of paired serial numbers as part of a subscription creation and number change.
In CMP 8.8, if a network action, such as adding an allowance, failed, then it was not possible to retry the action and the failed action needed to be sorted manually. CMP 8.9 now provides a user with the ability to retry failed allowance actions as described in section 3.1.2.4 below.
The ability to create a payment plan against an account was introduced in CMP 8.0.1 but only supported the capability to create and maintain a payment plan through RESTful APIs. There was no capability to create, view and manage payment plans through AgentView.
CMP 8.9 now provides the capability to add a payment plan to an account and define either the monthly instalment amount or the number of instalments over which debt could be cleared, view plan details or approve or cancel an existing payment plan. Details of the new capabilities and screens are specified below.
CMP 8.8 supported the ability to make a refund for an overpayment or for a credit invoice. The refund was made back to the payment type on the account.
CMP 8.9 now allows overpayments made by a card to be refunded back to card from which the overpayment was made, assuming the card is still valid.
Usage class discounts were introduced in CMP 8.8 but it was not possible to see the usage class group discount values that had been configured for a subscription.
In CMP 8.9 a new popup has been added to show the usage class groups associated with a usage class discount and allows a privileged user to change the discount values associated with the discount.
A new advance notification job has been introduced in CMP 8.9 that targets prepaid subscribers that have not made a purchase within a configurable period. If the subscriber fails to make a purchase after a further configurable period then the subscription is disconnected.
In CMP 8.8, an issue was observed with some data warehouse extracts that meant not all data was being reported correctly after a previous unsuccessful extract. As a result, a number of data warehouse extracts have been updated to extract data from the last successful run rather than the last run, successful or otherwise. The affected extracts are listed below.
The list of available log files that can be accessed through the Logs option of System Monitoring has been extended in CMP 8.9. The list of additional log files can be found below.
The SubscriptionCreation and UpdateSubscriptionSerialNumbers SOAP web services have been updated to support the MSISDN/SIM pairing changes introduced in CMP 8.9. The details of the changes are described in section 3.6 below.
The GET Payment Plan and GET Payment Plan List REST web service responses have been updated to correct the payment status returned for payment plan instalments. The POST Payment Plan REST web service request has been updated to remove the 'Status' attribute
The GET Payment and GET Payments web services have been updated to align the response data. The POST Payment web service has been enhanced to now allow a refund to be made back to the original payment card in line with the new 'Refund to Card' functionality.
The GET Subscription Spend Cap and GET Subscription Spend Caps web services have been updated to add the following new elements to the response. The POST and PATCH Subscription Spend Cap web services have been updated to make the unitOfMeasure attribute optional within the requests.
The GET Subscription web service has been updated to return additional information in the response.
The endpoints and responses of the GET Tariff Spend Cap and GET Tariff Spend Caps APIs have both been updated.
The details of these changes and other RESTful web service changes are detailed below.
The functional and non-functional changes highlighted in section 2 above have had an impact CMP in the following areas:
CMP 8.8 support the addition of a payment plan against an account to allow payment of a large invoice over multiple monthly instalments. CMP 8.9 extends this capability by enabling a payment plan to be set up through AgentView.
To support this a new swish, 'Payment Plans' has been added to the Financials menu option on the Account Summary screen. Clicking on the 'Payment Plans' menu option displays the Payment Plans Lower panel showing all payment plans that are or have been created on the account. The payment plans can be filtered based on their status.
The following right-click options are available from the Payment Plan lower panel:
Right-clicking anywhere in the payment plan lower panel, except on an existing record, provides an option to add a new payment plan, providing the account has a debit balance and no payment plan is currently active. The Add Payment Plan popup allows the user to specify the monthly repayment amounts or the number of instalments over which the outstanding balance on the account will be repaid. The user can also specify an administration charge for setting up the payment plan or a delay period before the payment plan starts.
Right-clicking on an existing payment plan record on the payment plan lower panel provides an option to view payment plan instalments. The Payment Plan Details screen shows all the instalments associated with the plan including the instalment date and status.
Where a payment plan is currently active for if an account, the final instalment date is shown on the Account Summary top panel. Clicking on the date hyperlink takes the user to the Payment Plan lower panel.
CMP 8.8 introduced usage class discounts that enabled discounts to be applied to subscriber usage. CMP 8.9 builds on the core capability by enabling the usage class groups, associated with the discount scheme on the subscription, to be viewed. The new popup is available by right-clicking on a specific usage class discount record on the Subscription Discounts lower panel and selecting 'Usage Class Groups'.
Right-clicking on a specific usage class group row and selecting 'Change' allows the percentage or fixed amount discount to be changed for that specific record.
In CMP 8.8, through the Payments swish, accessible from the Financials menu option of the Account Summary screen, it is possible to refund an overpayment or a credit invoice. The refund could only be sent to the current payment type of the account.
In CMP 8.9, this functionality has been enhanced to now enable a refund to the original card the payment was made from (if applicable). If this card has subsequently expired, then the user has the option to choose another non-expired card providing one is already registered on the account. If no other card is available, then the existing functionality refunds to the current payment type of the account.
To support this capability, the existing 'Add Refund' popup panel has been enhanced to include a radio button to select between using the current payment type of the account for the refund or using a card. If a card was used for the original payment, and it hasn't expired, then the card radio button option is automatically selected and the card details displayed. If the original card has expired then any other valid registered cards on the account are displayed in the card dropdown. If no other cards are registered on the account then the 'Current Payment Type' radio button is automatically selected.
In CMP 8.8, the final panel of the subscription creation wizard allowed an agent to select or manually enter an MSISDN and/or SIM Serial Number to be used for the subscription. With the support of MSISDN/SIM pairing in CMP 8.9, if an MSISDN or SIM serial number is selected that is paired, the corresponding serial number will be automatically displayed.
In CMP 8.8, the subscription number change wizard allowed an agent to select or manually enter an MSISDN and/or SIM Serial Number to be change to for the subscription. With the support of MSISDN/SIM pairing in CMP 8.9, if an MSISDN or SIM serial number is selected that is paired, the corresponding serial number will be automatically displayed.
The process event popup panel has been enhanced to support the retry of workflow events containing failed 'allowance' actions. The retry radio button is available if the workflow event is in a status of 'Confirmation Error' and the event only contains 'allowance' actions. Selecting the 'Retry' option and pressing 'Finish' results in the event and associated actions being reset such that they are processed again by the Provisioning job.
In CMP 8.9, the Key Info quick link on the left hand menu has been deprecated as this functionality has been superseded by subscription and account attributes.
In CMP 8.9, the Sub-Code Overrides menu option, available from the Profile swish on the Account Summary screen, has been deprecated as it is no longer supported in CMP.
CMP 8.9 does not provide any new Bulk Actions.
CMP 8.9 does not provide any enhancements to the existing Bulk Actions.
In order to support validation of a JSON schema, it is necessary to generate the schema using draft version 2019/2020. In CMP 8.8 draft version 3 was used which didn't support the validation property so this has been changed as part of CMP 8.9. This change has had no impact on the JSON itself.
No new jobs or daemons have been introduced as part of the CMP 8.9 release.
For the CMP 8.9 release, the Advance Notification job has been enhanced to provide a capability to identify prepaid subscribers that have not made any purchases within a configurable time period, and send them a communication to advise that they will be disconnected if they son't make a purchase within a second configurable period. If the second period is reached then the subscriber will be automatically disconnected and an email communication sent out to them.
To support this advance notification, two new configurable properties have been added to the module properties as follows:
In CMP 8.8, an issue was observed with some data warehouse extracts that meant not all data was being reported correctly after a previous unsuccessful extract. As a result, the following data warehouse extracts have been updated to extract data from the last successful run rather than the last run, successful or otherwise:
As a result of the integration to the NetEngage Online Charging System as part of CMP 8.9, some changes have been made to the provisioning outbound JSON schema. Optional attributes have been added to specify the OCS rate identifier (corresponding to a CMP tariff) and the OCS prepaid balance identifier required by the NetEngage OCS for subscription creation. In addition, NetEngage require allowance values to be supplied when adding an allowance to a subscription so a number of additional fields have been included in the allowance element of the 'allowances' array:
In CMP 8.9, the External Trigger Notification Daemon has been enhanced to allow an MSISDN to be supplied in the notification JSON instead of a subscription number. This is required as NetEngage provides an MSISDN for notifications instead of a CMP subscription number.
To cater for this, a new optional attribute, serialNumber, has been added to the commsExternalTrigger JSON schema. In addition, the hierarchyEntity attribute has now been made optional.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Management menu option in CMP 8.9.
The list of available log files that can be accessed through the Logs option of System Monitoring has been extended in CMP 8.9 to include the following additional log files:
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Configuration menu option in CMP 8.9 .
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Administrator menu option in CMP 8.9 .
There are no new Business Configuration screens that have been introduced in CMP 8.9.
The Usage Classes list screen, accessed from the Usage Processing menu option, has been updated to output a description for the 'Usage record type' rather than the internal numerical value received in usage records from the network.
The Package Groups menu option, accessed from the Propositions -> Packages menu options, has been removed as Package Groups are not currently supported.
There are no new Pricing Configuration screens that have been introduced as part of CMP 8.9.
The Pricing Model configuration option in Pricing Configuration has been enhanced in CMP 8.9 to include the ability to edit an existing flat rate or fixed rate Pricing Model. In both cases, the pricing model description and rate can be changed. For flat rate pricing models, the rounding used can also be changed.
No new SOAP web services have been introduced as part of the CMP 8.9 release.
The SubscriptionCreation SOAP web service has been changed in the CMP 8.9 release to support the MSISDN/SIM pairing feature introduced as part of the release. If MSISDN and SIM details are both provided as part of the creation request then, in addition to current validation, these values will be checked in CMP to make sure that neither value is paired, or if they are, that they are paired to each other. If the request contains just an MSISDN, and that MSISDN is paired then the appropriate paired SIM is then used for the subscription creation. A similar approach is adopted when only a SIM serial number is provided as part of the creation request.
The UpdateSubscriptionSerialNumbers SOAP web service has also been changed in the CMP 8.9 release to support the MSISDN/SIM pairing feature introduced as part of the release. If MSISDN and SIM details are both provided as part of the number change request then, in addition to current validation, these values will be checked in CMP to make sure that neither value is paired, or if they are, that they are paired to each other. If the request contains just an MSISDN, and that MSISDN is paired then the appropriate paired SIM is then used for the number change. A similar approach is adopted when only a SIM serial number is provided as part of the number change request.
No new RESTful web services have been introduced as part of the CMP 8.9 release.
The GET Payment Plan and GET Payment Plan List REST web service responses have been updated to correct the payment status returned for payment plan instalments. The payment status returned now has the following possible values:
The POST Payment Plan REST web service request has been updated to remove the 'Status' attribute as this is always set to 'UNAPPROVED' when a payment plan is created.
In CMP 8.8 the POST Payment web service only allowed for a bond payment to be created for a credit or debit card. This functionality has now been extended to allow a bond payment to be record via cash/cheque
The GET Payments web service has been extended to add the details of the bond if the payment was a bond payment.
The GET Payment web service has been extended to add the following objects to the response:
The POST Payment web service has been enhanced to now allow a refund to be made back to the card used for the original payment that is being refunded. If this card has subsequently expired, then the refund will be made to the current payment type of the account.
The GET Subscription Spend Cap and GET Subscription Spend Caps web services have been updated to add the following new elements to the response:
The POST and PATCH Subscription Spend Cap web services have been updated to make the unitOfMeasure attribute optional within the requests.
The introduction of MSISDN/SIM pairing in CMP 8.9 has necessitated updates to the POST Serial Numbers web service as follows:
The GET Subscription web service has been updated to return additional information relating to the tariff and price plan. The tariff code and description are now returned within the 'plan' object and the 'planChangeStatus' object has been enhanced to include plan and tariff information associated with a pending plan change.
The GET Tariff Spend Cap and GET Tariff Spend Caps APIs have both been enhanced as follows:
No changes have been made to integration adapters in CMP 8.9.
NetEngage provides a Policy Control and Charging solution to allow both postpaid and prepaid subscribers' usage to be fully managed in real-time. CMP 8.9 now provides an integration to the NetEngage Online Charging System (OCS).
The NetEngage-specific adapters are optional components of the CMP deployment that are based on the licence agreement with MDS Global.
When CMP is being used in conjunction with the NetEngage OCS, subscribers created in CMP and requiring real-time control of their usage need to be provisioned to the NetEngage OCS along with any allowances purchased as part of the registration process and any spend caps automatically assigned.
CMP consumes standard JSON format provisioning requests and connects subscriptions on the NetEngage OCS via its standard APIs. The Provisioning Adapter supports the following operations to the OCS:
Allowance Management is responsible for handling synchronous interactions with the NetEngage OCS such as balance enquiries or other online transactions. Allowance Management supports the following operations to the OCS:
The NetEngage OCS can be configured to generate threshold notifications when a subscriber's inclusive allowance allocation, spend cap or prepaid balance falls below a pre-defined level. Multiple thresholds can be configured against each allowance (credit token), for example, so a threshold notification can be triggered when the allowance level gets low or is consumed completely.
The Notification Adaptor receives threshold notifications from the OCS and converts them into a format that can be processed by the CMP communications module to send a notification to the end subscriber in their preferred notification method.
As the subscriber access network services, the NetEngage OCS will rate the usage and apply the charge to any inclusive allowances, spend caps and prepaid balance as appropriate. The rated usage generated by the OCS for CMP subscribers needs to be loaded into CMP for consultation and subsequently for inclusion on invoices.
CMP collects rated usage files in the proprietary unaggregated rated usage format from the NetEngage OCS via SFTP and transforms them to the standard CMP rated usage JSON format so that they are ready to be processed by the CMP Rated Usage Loader.
The Openet-specific adapters are optional components of the CMP deployment that are based on the licence agreement with MDS Global.
No changes have been made to the Openet adapter as part of CMP 8.9.
The Lifecycle-specific adapters are optional components of the CMP deployment that are based on the licence agreement with MDS Global.
No changes have been made to the Lifecycle adapter as part of CMP 8.9.
No changes have been made to UK-specific adapters in CMP 8.9.
In addition to functional and non-functional changes and improvements, the CMP 8.9 product also addresses a number of application support issues. This section provides a summary of the issues fixed in this release.
The following issues have been addressed within this release:
| Reference | Area | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CMPIS-2425 | Core Provisioning | In some cases, the Confirm Action Item Request records were being processed by the Action Monitor job before the provisioning response daemon had all the child records created resulting in some records not being processed correctly. |
| CMPIS-2416 | Pricing Configuration | Refactoring of Pricing Configuration resulted in a number of issues with Pricing Configuration screens. |
| CMPIS-2414 | Business Configuration | When multiple entitlements were configured on a single offer in Openet, the allowance configuration screen showed each entitlement as if it was a separate Openet offer. |
| CMPIS-2412 | Invoice Production | Invoice production failed when trying to handle a discount with a fixed value band. |
| CMPIS-2404 | Action Item Job | Adding a bar at account level caused misalignment in the networkRequestLog table leaving action items in an unconfirmed state. |
| CMPIS-2403 | Action Item Job | The response from an OCS Bar request was causing misalignment in the networkRequestLog table. |
| CMPIS-2389 | Rated Charge & Allowance | The processing of a date without milliseconds, in the rated charge load daemon, was not handled correctly. Only specific timezone formats were supported. |
| CMPIS-2388 | Data Warehouse | Billed Usage Analytics failed with an SQL error on the mobileCountryCode table. |
| CMPIS-2387 | Data Warehouse | If there was no discount value on any of the records that were extracted as part of the unbilled usage extract then the discount value field was missed in the output file causing alignment issues. |
| CMPIS-2383 | Web Services | The Set Feature REST web service allowed a feature to be added to a subscription that didn't have a corresponding network feature default record which causes the QuerySubscription SOAP API to fail if the 'FEATURES' dataset is included in the request. |
| CMPIS-2381 | Comms | When defining an external comms it is not possible to select a language however the comms job incorrectly expected a record in the commsCodeLanguage table for the preferred comms language of the customer. |
| CMPIS-2377 | Comms | When sending out a comms for a subscription, if there was a record for both an account and subscription with the same Id, then no comms was sent. |
| CMPIS-2374 | Web Services | When WSO2 was deployed onto port 443, the ansible installation scripts ignored the port number when populating the WSO2 endpoint in various application property files. |
| CMPIS-2372 | Web Services | The REST GET Usage web service was providing some erroneous attributes in the response |
| CMPIS-2365 | Pricing Configuration | The Pricing Models list view had no Search, View, Sort or Pagination on the panel. |
| CMPIS-2343 | AgentView | When adding a payment refund to an account that had an address line greater than 40 characters, the refund failed. |
| CMPIS-2323 | AgentView | The Reverse Payment function security was not fully restricting access to the reverse payment functionality. |
| CMPIS-2322 | AgentView | View Account Payment Details (VIEWPAYDTL) function security was incorrectly required for a user to add a payment. |
| CMPIS-2315 | Service & Discount Management | Adding discount schemes to subscriptions caused a variety of issues. |
| CMPIS-2311 | Pricing Configuration | When adding a destination zone there was no validation to ensure that the destination zone code and prefix were unique. |
| CMPIS-2310 | Pricing Configuration | When editing a destination zone there was no validation to ensure that the destination zone code and prefix were unique. |
| CMPIS-1764 | CMP Sales Ledger | After approving a Payment Plan, the Ledger Monitor job was setting all the sales ledger transaction records to 'Error'. The records in the salesLedgerTransaction table should have been updated to 'Complete' and the instalment dates of the Payment Plan should have been shown in the Transaction panel within AgentView. |
The product documentation is available online on the documentation portal. This online portal requires authorised access, which can be obtained by contacting MDS Global support. The documentation is also available as downloadable PDFs as follows:
| Document | Version | Document Changes |
|---|---|---|
| Installation Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Technical Architecture document as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Technical Architecture | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Technical Architecture document as part of CMP 8.9. |
| CMP Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the CMP Overview as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Documentation Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Documentation Overview as part of CMP 8.9. |
| System Administration Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the System Administration Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Security Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Security Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| AgentView Function Security Guide | 1.0 | This document has been updated in line with the function security implement for the new Payment Plan screens and Workflow Event Retry functionality. |
| Operational Overview | 1.0 | The Operational Overview has been updated for the changes to the jobs and daemons highlighted in section 3.3 above. |
| Business Configuration Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Business Configuration Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Billing Functionality Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Billing Functionality Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Communications Functionality and Configuration Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Communications Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Payments Functionality Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Payments Functionality Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Extracts Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Extracts Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Purge Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Purge Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Standard Reporting | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Standard Reporting Guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Batch Jobs and JSON Schemas Guide | 1.0 | The Batch Jobs and JSON Schemas Guide has been updated to include the changes to the jobs and daemons highlighted above. |
| RESTFul Web Services API Guide | 1.0 | The REST web services guide has been updated based on the changes highlighted in section 3.7.1 above. |
| SOAP Web Services Semantics Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the SOAP web services guide as part of CMP 8.9. |
| Business Configuration RESTFul Web Services API Guide | 1.0 | The Business Configuration REST Guide has been updated to include the changes specified in section 3.7.2 above. |
Online help is available in AgentView, Business Configuration, the Administration Console and the Bulk Actions console. The following table summarises the current versions of the online help and the changes since CMP 8.8:
| Online Help | Version | Document Changes |
|---|---|---|
| AgentView | 1.0 | The following topics have been added or updated as a result of changes made to AgentView in CMP 8.9:
|
| Business Configuration | 1.14 | The following changes have resulted in changes to Business Configuration online help:
|
| Administration Console | 1.10 | No changes have been made to the admin Console help. |
| Bulk Action Console | 1.4 | No changes have been made to the Bulk Action help. |
The CMP 8.9 installer includes the capability to upgrade a CMP 8.8 installation without the loss of configuration or customer data provided that the software, file system and database structure of the installation in question are at no point manually modified.
The CMP 8.9 Installation Guide, and the details below, should be read before attempting the upgrade to CMP 8.9.
It is important that the following sections are read prior to performing the upgrade, specifically the Configuration Changes section, as it may be advisable to backup relevant configuration prior to performing the upgrade to ensure the configuration can be replicated, if necessary, post upgrade.
It is important that the existing installation is left running before starting the upgrade. There is no reason to shutdown any components however service may be affected whilst performing the upgrade.
No changes have been made to the Inventory Configuration Tool as part of CMP 8.9
No third-party libraries will be updated as part of the installation/upgrade.
No new tables or views have been added to the database schema with respect to CMP 8.8.
The following table attributes have been added in CMP 8.9:
The following tables have been dropped in CMP 8.9:
The following table attributes have been dropped in CMP 8.9:
The following table attributes have been modified as part CMP 8.9:
The Advanced notification job requires additional configuration to be defined using the CMP Business Configuration. These are summarised as follows:
Through the Communications option of business configuration, new comms codes need to be defined for the disconnection warning message and the final disconnection notification message that are generated as part of the new advance notification detailed in section 3.3.1.2 above. As the subscription will be disconnected when the final notification is sent, it is advisable that this is sent as an email comms. A corresponding email template will also need to be configured.
In addition to the comms codes created above, it is also recommended that new workflow events are configured to be raised by the Advance Notification job when it detects that a prepaid subscription has not made a purchase within configurable periods. A workflow is required for the warning event and the final disconnection event that will link to the corresponding comms created above.
To support the new advance notifications, the following new workflow event properties will need to be configured with the corresponding workflow events created above to allow a workflow event (and end customer communication) to be generated:
| Property Group | Property Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ADVANCE_NOTIFICATION | prepaidActivityWarning | Raised by the Advance Notification job as a warning to prepaid subscriptions that they need to make a purchase otherwise they will be disconnected. |
| ADVANCE_NOTIFICATION | prepaidActivityFinal | Raised by the Advance Notification job to disconnect prepaid subscriptions that have not made a purchase for a long period of time. |
As part of CMP 8.9, the standard data population scripts used to auto-populate a number of CMP configuration tables for a greenfield installation have been updated. For existing installations, the configuration specified in this section will be automatically injected into the appropriate database table and therefore will not need to be manually configured.
The following entries will be automatically added to the roleDiseFunctionName table as part of the installation or upgrade:
| diseFunctionName | Role |
|---|---|
| RETRYEVENT | maintain-customers |
| ADDPPLAN | maintain-customers |
| CANCPPLAN | maintain-customers |
| APPRVPPLAN | maintain-customers |
