This document provides an overview of the CMP 8.14 release with specific focus on the additional functional and non-functional enhancements with respect to CMP 8.13.
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 8.13, CMP 8.14 introduces new functionality as well as changes to existing functionality and non-functional improvements. These changes can be summarised as follows:
A new bulk action has been introduced in CMP 8.14 to support the addition of anonymous subscriptions. Like other bulk actions, the Create Subscriptions bulk action is driven by a spreadsheet of subscriptions to create with dummy personal details.
CMP 8.14 introduces three additional advance notifications as follows:
CMP 8.14 provides further support for TM Forum Open APIs with certification against TMF632 - Party Management API.
In CMP 8.13, when an account balance was written off as the last action of a Credit Control procedure, the identity associated with the account was automatically marked as blacklisted. The account and any subscriptions using the same identity were shown as blacklisted in AgentView. In CMP 8.14, this feature has been enhanced further to now support write-off and blacklisting as separate steps in the credit control process.
In CMP 8.13, the retrieval of PDF documents for letters, invoices and receipts was achieved using configured username and password credentials. In addition to username and password, CMP now supports the ability to use SSH key authentication.
In CMP 8.14, the System Activity Purge has been enhanced to support the purging of probe and alert history.
CMP 8.14 introduces four new web services as follows:
In addition, the POST Order and POST Subscription web service requests have been updated to include the possibility to provide a contract number, password and/or external reference as part of the request. The POST Change Subscription Price Plan web service request has been updated to enforce a future date for the price plan change. The GET Subscriptions web service response has been updated to include information relevant to an installation that limits the number of active subscriptions in CMP that have the same customer identifier. The GET Payments web service has been modified to allow a payment date/time filter to be specified. The GET Consolidated Sales Ledger Transactions web service has been modified to allow transactions to be filtered by transaction date. The GET Usage List web service has been modified to allow usage to be filtered by date/time.
Additional changes to the POST Subscription, POST Disconnect Subscription, POST Change Subscription Serial Numbers, GET Subscription, GET Compatible Price Plans and the GET Usage Summary web service have been made in CMP 8.14, details of which can be found below.
The functional and non-functional changes highlighted in section 2 above have had an impact CMP in the following areas:
No new screens have been introduced as part of CMP 8.14.
CMP 8.13 introduced the ability to blacklist a customer identity as part of Credit Control. The Personal Address popup shows the identity of the customer associated with the address and a checkbox next to the identity number field can be used to whitelist a blacklisted identity. If an AgentView user wanted to bring an identity out of blacklisting by checking the override checkbox, the change would take effect immediately and could not be cancelled. This has been enhanced to force the user to save the change or cancel it. Saving the change whitelists the identity.
Whitelisting an identity is now controlled with the field security code OIDN.
In CMP 8.13, it was possible to request a price plan change immediately or at some date in the future. This caused issues with customers being charged for the day the price plan change was effected as they were charged to the end of the day on their current plan and from the start of the same day on their new plan. The price plan change wizard has been updated in CMP 8.14 to now only support a future dated price plan change.
A new bulk action has been introduced in CMP 8.14 to support the addition of anonymous subscriptions. The bulk action automatically creates the account, agreement and subscription based on a simple excel spreadsheet input file.
The Excel spreadsheet template provided must be populated with a unique identifier to reference the subscription being created and optionally an MSISDN and/or SIM Serial number. If no MSISDN or SIM serial number is provided then, if available, numbers will be automatically assigned to the subscription as part of the creation process. Once the template spreadsheet has been populated with the basic information for each subscription to be created, then the Create Subscription bulk action wizard can be used to process the file. The wizard allows a Price Plan to be selected against which all subscriptions will be created. In addition, a connection date can be specified to allow either immediate or a future dated connection.
The module properties for the new sabre-create-subscription bulk action allows a default name and connection reason to be specified for use in creating the subscriptions.
The user requires the WSO2 role bulk-create-subscription to be able to see the bulk action template and menu option in the Bulk Action Console.
No Bulk Actions have been changed for CMP 8.14.
No new jobs or daemons have been added for CMP 8.14.
The Advance Notification job has been extended in CMP 8.14 to support three additional advance notifications:
The additional configuration that is required to support these three new advance notifications is defined in section 6.5.2.2 below.
The Workflow Monitor job has been enhanced in CMP 8.14 to optionally support the blacklisting of identity numbers as a separate step of the Credit Control process. When an account balance is written-off as part of Credit Control, the identity associated with the account can be also marked as blacklisted or the blacklisting action can be performed as a separate credit control step. All subscriptions using the same identity, whether under the same account structure or not, will also be marked as blacklisted.
In CMP 8.14, the Managed Number Monitor job has been extended to check if there are numbers allocated to salespersons and unallocate those numbers into the pool of available managed numbers if the salesperson reservation period has lapsed. This job also takes into consideration numbers that have been permanently assigned to a salesperson.
The System Activity Purge job has been enhanced in CMP 8.14 to support the purging of probe and alert history.
In CMP 8.13, the comms field 'ACCOUNTAMOUNTDUE' did not handle a credit/negative account balance in communications. In CMP 8.14, if the account balance is in credit, then a zero amount will now be returned.
In addition, a new default field code, LATESTINVOICEDUEDATE, has been introduced to support the ability to provide the payment due date for the latest invoice generated. This can be used in bill ready notifications to specify the due date for the invoice payment.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Management menu option in CMP 8.14.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Monitoring menu option in CMP 8.14.
In CMP 8.13, when module properties were changed through the Administration Console, a copy of the related properties file was generated and stored locally on the CMP file system where it took priority over the original file when the module was redeployed. This was problematic for two main reasons:
In order to mitigate these issues, the changed properties are now stored in the CMP database enabling users to easily backup, restore, export & import configuration and will negate the issue around multi-instance deployments.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Administrator menu option in CMP 8.14.
No new Business Configuration screens have been introduced as part of the CMP 8.14 release.
As part of the CMP 8.14 release, the Add and Edit Default Field panels within the Communications configuration option have been modified to support the increase in length of the description field from 30 to 50 characters.
As part of the changes to separate account balance write-off from identity blacklisting as summarised in section 2.1.1 above, a new usage classification of 'Identity Disallowed' has been added to the 'Usage' dropdown of the Add Account Type panel.
There are no new Pricing Configuration screens that have been introduced as part of CMP 8.14.
No Pricing Configuration screens have been changed as part of CMP 8.14.
No new SOAP web services have been introduced as part of the CMP 8.14 release.
No SOAP web services have been changed as part of the CMP 8.14 release.
A new POST Account Serial Numbers web service has been added to support the addition of serial numbers to a specific account.
A new POST Serial Number Reservation web service has been added to allow a dealer (salesperson) to reserve a set of serial numbers for a configurable number of days. Configuration restricts the maximum number of serial numbers that a dealer can have reserved at any point in time.
A new GET Subscription Price Plan web service has been added to return detailed plan information (current plan plus any pending plan change) for a particular subscription i.e. allowances, services, and so on.
The GET Invoice Detail list web service currently only uses the invoice id to retrieve details of an invoice which is inconsistent with the Get Invoice PDF web service. In order to align the APIs and force an extra level of security for calling systems, a new web service has been created with the accountId as a path parameter.
The new connection POST Order web service request has been updated to include the possibility to provide a contract number and/or a password as part of the request. In addition, it is also possible to supply an external reference associated with the new connection.
In line with the changes for the create order web service, the POST Subscription web service request has been updated to also allow a contract number and/or a password to be specified within the subscriber creation request. In addition, the following changes have been made to the web service:
lastConnectionEventNumber attribute has been added to the response object.The POST Disconnect Subscription web service request has been updated to allow a non-network disconnection to be performed against a subscription.
The POST Change Subscription Price Plan web service request has been updated to enforce a future date for the price plan change. The price plan change takes place at midnight on the day requested. This change aligns the subscription charging so that the customer is not charged twice for the day of the price plan change.
The meta object of the GET Subscriptions web service response has been updated to include information relevant to an installation that limits the number of active subscriptions in CMP that have the same customer identifier e.g. passport number. The response returns an indication as to whether additional subscriptions are allowed to be added and if so, how many additional subscriptions can be added.
When subscriptions are created using the Create Subscription web service, it is possible to supply an external reference which is stored against the newly created subscription. This is done so that the external reference can subsequently be used by 'client' applications and/or customers to retrieve subscription details. The web service has been enhanced to allow retrieval of a subscription by its external reference.
The GET Compatible Price Plans web service has been enhanced to include unit of measure information for each allowance in the response. If no compatible plans are found, then information related to the subscriber's current price plan is returned.
The POST Change Subscription Serial Numbers web service has been modified to allow a managed or non-managed number to be blanked out for a subscription.
The GET Payments web service has been modified to allow a payment date/time filter to be specified. The filter supports an exact match on date/time as well as payments before or after the date/time specified. The filter can be provided as either a date/time or just a date.
The GET Consolidated Sales Ledger Transactions web service has been modified to allow transactions to be filtered by transaction date. The filter supports an exact match on date or supports filtering transactions before or after the date specified.
The GET Usage List web service has been modified to allow usage to be filtered by date/time. The filter supports an exact match on date/time as well as usage records before or after the date/time specified. The filter is only available for unbilled usage.
The GET Usage Summary web service has been modified to return billed usage for a given invoice or invoice/subscription combination.
The following additional web service changes have been made in CMP 8.14:
No new Business Configuration RESTful web services have been introduced in CMP 8.14.
No RESTful web services have been updated as part of the CMP 8.14 release.
The CMP 8.14 release supports the third TM Forum API set around Party Management. This has been certified by the TM Forum against the TM632 API specification.
No changes have been made to integration adapters in CMP 8.14.
The NetEngage-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 NetEngage adapter as part of CMP 8.14.
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 8.14.
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 8.14.
No changes have been made to UK-specific adapters in CMP 8.14.
In addition to functional and non-functional changes and improvements, the CMP 8.14 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-2958 | AgentView | The termination fee calculation was using the termination date to calculate termination fees rather than the day after. |
| CMPIS-2944 | AgentView | In the situation where CMP is not integrated to an OCS or where the OCS is unavailable, AgentView now handles this without an on-screen message. |
| CMPIS-2943 | Payments | The Recurring Payment Rejections job had been failing with a Persistent Object Exception. |
| CMPIS-2934 | REST APIs | The Audit User was being set incorrectly for Create and Update REST API requests. |
| CMPIS-2908 | Action Monitor | Action Monitor was failing due to incorrect syntax to specify the default value in Spring annotation expression. |
| CMPIS-2905 | Comms | Letter communications were being generated incorrectly with a dollar sign in front of an amount field. |
| CMPIS-2902 | Comms | When the field LATESTINVOICEAMOUNT was included as part of a communication, the value for that field on the Comms Request Field Detail table was being set to NULL incorrectly. |
| CMPIS-2901 | AgentView | The calculation of 'Other Charges' in the termination fee calculation was returning incorrect values in certain scenarios. |
| CMPIS-2900 | Rated Usage | A duplicate write was attempted on the Rated Usage table resulting in the rated usage batch ending up with a stage status of 'error'. The Rated Usage job has been modified to check for all possible duplicate records at the start of processing a batch. |
| CMPIS-2897 | Business Configuration | It was not possible to generate letter communications due to missing records in the comms language table. |
| CMPIS-2895 | Business Configuration | The resetIntervalLength attribute on the Usage Cap table was incorrectly set as NOT NULL. |
| CMPIS-2890 | Jboss | It was observed that if customer specific changes were made to the JBoss standalone.xml file, these changes would be lost on a subsequent CMP upgrade. |
| CMPIS-2879 | Jboss | A production issue was observed that caused some services to become unresponsive. This occurred because both SOAP and the Published Interfaces Layer were using a shared number of threads. The PIL was unable to secure any additional thread as these were consumed by SOAP. |
| CMPIS-2876 | Billing | An issue was observed in production where a subscriber was overcharged on disconnection. |
| CMPIS-2874 | Comms | An intermittent issue was observed whereby a communication for a successfully received payment was not being sent for some accounts. This occurred when a subscription-level comms was being processed at the same time as the account-level comms. |
| CMPIS-2866 | REST APIs | When using the REST Add Package, an error was observed in rest log due to an incorrect dependent library being used. |
| CMPIS-2824 | REST APIs | An issue was identified where a customer had cancelled a recurring bolt-on after just one day and was charged an extra day for the service by mistake. |
| CMPIS-2819 | AgentView | In AgentView, the Identity Management Override checkbox was immediately triggering an override and was unaffected if the action was cancelled. |
| CMPIS-2818 | Billing | Invoice Production was creating partitions in the wrong table space. |
| CMPIS-2817 | Billing | An issue was identified when billing a service in arrears that occurred after a change to the bill cycle where the service was billed incorrectly. |
| CMPIS-2812 | REST APIs | The elements of the 'postalAddress' in the get Contact Details API response container should have been returned in camel case but weren't being. |
| CMPIS-2790 | REST APIs | In the REST GET Account response, if the account was in credit i.e. has a negative balance, then the overdueValue was showing as a negative value rather than zero. |
| CMPIS-2687 | REST APIs | An IndexOutOfBoundsException error was observed in the REST Create Order Request for a Number Change when the number of subscriptions in the subscriptionIdentifier container was different to the product quantity. |
| CMPIS-2686 | REST APIs | The REST Create Order - Number Change request was allowing an account number and a subscription number to be passed in that did not belong to the same structure. |
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 | The High Availability Prerequisites topic has been updated to include the shared storage directory for the Artemis messaging server. |
| Technical Architecture | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Technical Architecture Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| CMP Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the CMP Overview as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Documentation Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Documentation Overview as part of CMP 8.14. |
| System Administration Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the System Admin Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Security Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Security Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| AgentView Function Security Guide | 1.0 | The function security related to the ability to bring an identity out of blacklist has been added to the AgentView Function Security Guide. |
| Operational Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Operational Overview as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Business Configuration Overview | 1.0 | Updated the Identity Management section in the Credit Management topic to include changes made to separate the Write Off and Disallowed credit control process in 8.14. |
| Billing Functionality Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Billing Functionality Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Communications Functionality and Configuration Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Communications Functionality and Configuration Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Propositions Functionality and Configuration Guide | 1.0 | Changes have been made to the Configuring Tariffs topic of the Propositions Functionality and Configuration Guide for CMP 8.14. |
| Payments Functionality Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Payments Functionality Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Extracts Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Extracts Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Purge Guide | 1.0 | The System Activity Purge topic has been updated with the new probe and alert history purge option. |
| Standard Reporting | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Standard Reporting Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Batch Jobs and JSON Schemas Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Batch Jobs and JSON Schemas Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| 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 Semantics Guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Business Configuration RESTFul Web Services API Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Business Configuration RESTFul web services guide as part of CMP 8.14. |
| Glossary | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Glossary as part of CMP 8.14. |
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 8.13:
| Online Help | Version | Document Changes |
|---|---|---|
| AgentView | 1.4 | The following topics have been added or updated as a result of changes made to AgentView in CMP 8.14:
|
| Business Configuration | 1.18 | The following changes have resulted in changes to Business Configuration online help:
|
| Administration Console | 1.16 | The following changes have resulted in changes to Administration Console online help:
|
| Bulk Action Console | 1.8 | The following topics have been added in the Bulk Action Console help in CMP 8.14:
|
The CMP 8.14 installer includes the capability to upgrade a CMP 8.13 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 8.14 Installation Guide, and the details below, should be read before attempting the upgrade to CMP 8.14.
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 latest CMP 8.13.0.3 patch is applied prior to commencing the upgrade to CMP 8.14. If the patch is not applied first, then the upgrade will fail.
It is important that the existing installation is left running before starting the upgrade. There is no reason to shut down any components however service may be affected whilst performing the upgrade.
The Installation Configuration Tool has been updated as follows as part of CMP 8.14 as follows:
No third party libraries have been updated for CMP 8.14.
No new tables have been added in CMP 8.14.
No new views have been added in CMP 8.14.
The following table attributes have been added in CMP 8.14:
No tables or views have been dropped in CMP 8.14.
No table attributes have been dropped in CMP 8.14.
The following table attribute has been changed in CMP 8.14:
The addition of functionality in CMP 8.14 to allow managed serial numbers to be reserved for a specific dealer as described in section 3.7.1.2 above has introduced two new parameters for the Managed Number Monitor job as follows:
These properties only need to be populated in the Managed Number Monitor job properties if this funtionality is to be used otherwise these properties can be ignored.
The addition of functionality in CMP 8.14 to provide a count of the number of subscriptions that can be added with a specific personal identifier as described in section 3.7.2.5 above has introduced a new system property MAX_NUMBER_OF_SUBSCRIPTION_IDENTITIES defined under the GENERAL_SETTINGS parameter group.
This can be configured through the External Configuration module if the functionality is required.
The ability to optionally use SSH keys for accessing invoices, receipts and letters, as highlighted in section 2.2 above, has resulted in two additional system properties being added that can be configured through the External Configuration module under the parameter group REMOTE.STORAGE:
The addition of the new Bulk Add Package option, as described in section 3.2.1 above, has introduced a new WSO2 role, bulk-create-subscription, that may need to be assigned to all users who have access to the Bulk Action Console.
In order to support notifications for the 'Manual Payers Payment Due' advance notification then the following configuration is required:
NEXTPAYMENTDATE field can be used to specify the payment due date in the communicationADVANCE_NOTIFICATION and a property name of manualPaymentDueDate and linked to workflow created in step 2.
In order to support notifications for the 'One Off Bolt-on Package Expiry' advance notification then the following configuration is required:
PACKAGEEXPIRYDATE field can be used to specify the package expiry date in the communicationADVANCE_NOTIFICATION and a property name of oneOffBoltOnPackageExpiry and linked to workflow created in step 2.
In order to support notifications for the 'Post Connection' advance notification then the following configuration is required:
ADVANCE_NOTIFICATION and a property name of oneOffBoltOnPackageExpiry and linked to workflow created in step 2.
In CMP 8.13, a number of default fields were only applicable to the advance notification job and if used within regular communications, would not be correctly populated. In CMP 8.14, these fields have now been re-classified to have a category of 'Advance Notification'. In order to support this, the following configuration changes are necessary:
ADVANCE with description Advance Notification should be added using the 'Description Title' option within the 'System' configuration menu option of Business Configuration.WORKFLOWEVENTATTRIBUTESBEAN should be updated to 'Advance Notification' through the 'Default Fields' option within the 'Communications' configuration menu option of Business Configuration:The addition of the new default field code, LATESTINVOICEDUEDATE, requires a new default field entry through the 'Default Fields' option within the 'Communications' configuration menu option of Business Configuration as follows:
The introduction of the additional field security around being able to take an identity out of being blacklisted requires manual addition of the following records into the database:
Any user with a profile that includes the 'maintain-customers' role will be automatically given access to override a blacklisted personal identifier.