New features since Emerald version 5
Emerald version 6 introduces both major new features and incremental improvements to address growing service provider requirements and improve operator productivity. Every aspect of the Emerald client has been considered for improvements based on customer feedback.
Billing & Marketing
- Customer referral credits offers incentives for existing customers to refer friends and family
- Promotional codes offer region time and quantity limited short term or long term service discounting as well temporary or permanent modification of service parameters such as bandwidth allocation
- Contract early termination fees with allowed service downgrade floor
- Automated multi-product discounting including classic double and triple play scenarios
- Itemized discounts presented on invoice and statement provides customers with savings feedback
- Promotional and seasonal pricing
- Market Engine offers a powerful language for expressing marketing strategies driven by simple facts "market tags"
- Revocable pay period discounts on early cancellation
- Loyalty discounts to reward long term customers
- Time limited discounting from a single day to years
- Credit Card tokenization
- Multiple CC/EFT transactions can now be processed concurrently to increase throughput
- Payment plans for POS invoices including option for automatic CC/EFT processing
- New late fee management system offering tiered percentage or static amount by number of days late
- NSF Charge adjustments when dishonoring payments
- Importable tax rate tables
- Tax by address data field / geographic area / shapefile
- Scheduled service upgrade/downgrade and temporary hold/cancellation period
- Configurable per account snowbird schedule for free or reduced access/cost
- Quantity discounting for recurring services
- Location dependent pricing
- Purchase order management for invoices
- Pay method discounting
Platform & Account Management
- Updated HTML5/CSS3 interfaces
- Search filters for quick lookup of commonly used administrative settings
- Web service API for account management automation and systems integration
- IPv6 feature parity with IPv4 throughout Emerald suite
- Expanded accounts search fields and options
- Payment search and MBR payment history displays including CC/EFT transaction and line item payment distribution details
- Single click auto void/create/process transactions option when managing an MBR configured for credit card autopay
- Currently unapplied charges displayed when accessing MBR invoices menu
- Simplified signup server setup and updated service selection UI
- MBR and Service level reporting
- Document management (File upload/download, labeling, storage and required document alerts) for MBRs, services, invoices and payments
- Improved POS invoicing supporting both charges and sales from inventory
- Expanded status check and alerts integrated with MBR and service displays
- Improved address system provides management of billing, shipping, service and contact addresses while minimizing duplication
- Field visibility options for most elements of Emerald client globally, by group, operator group and per operator
- Operator customizable dashboard
- Information bar messages and status notification
- Account change timeline manager and reinvoice
- Invoice, statement search and MBR history improvements
- Usability improvements specific to smartphone/narrow portrait displays
- Nested services and service categories replace Emerald v5 packages supporting hierarchies of dependent services within an MBR
- Bank lookup by routing number when entering ACH
- Non-recurring services within recurring MBRs
- Quick sync easily synchronizes any Emerald data to a web service
Customer Account Center
- New customer center UI
- Service upgrade and downgrade scheduling options
- Change of address
- Change bill delivery method
- Force password change on first login
- Session usage graphing including interim accounting detail
- View upcoming appointments
- Enter promotional codes
- Improved customer center time & data purchasing interface with automatic void of previously unpaid customer-initiated POS invoices
Security / Access Control
- Certificate based two-factor authentication for operator access
- Time of day, day of week and holiday access restrictions for operators
- Windows SSPI and Linux PAM authentication pass-thru for externally authenticated operator accounts
- Improved database encryption supporting data authentication and increased encrypted field length
- Two person key management
- Password complexity enforcement for services and operators
- Random service password auto assignment options
- Reverse proxy server support with client certificate and address forwarding
- Trusted template execution supporting limited unauthenticated access for custom public services and external data exchange
- Encryption of stored operator session state
- Transactional change logging enables consistent detailed review of field level operator changes over time
- PCI compliance checker
- Password and billing contact change notification (CPNI)
- Access labels feature restrict availability of account options by operator group. For example 'VIP' service type requires supervisor privilege to assign to customers.
- Authentication lockout setting for configurable number of failed attempts before lockout interval is activated
- HSTS options to assist in reducing insecure access to Emerald
- Secure TLS-SRP operator password mutual authentication for client and HTTP API access
- TLS cipher strength and forward secrecy options to better manage security and backward compatibility
- Improved operator group access management interface and permissions copy function to reduce redundant rights assignments
Geography, Sites & Towers
- Geocoding of Emerald address information to determine lat/long coordinates
- Geographic query feature provides general ability to automatically map geographic information to address data fields based on address location.
- Tax, billing and reporting based on imported geographic datasets
- Customer tower selector reporting towers with compatible distance, direction and service
- Line of sight path profile graphing terrain, path loss modeling and fresnel zone of fixed wireless links between customer and tower
- Antenna pointing assistance by service address
- Site, tower and antenna management
- Supports readily available worldwide elevations datasets in heightmap format
- Includes US census tract datasets. Shapefile conversion utility coming soon
Incidents & Appointment Scheduling
- Resource specific calendars offer companywide view of availability when scheduling new appointments
- Per operator schedule for managing operator assigned appointments
- Automatically sync appointments to popular third party calendaring software and services
- Global and operator daily or time slot specific availability including business days, holidays, seasonal and scheduled time off
- Operator site configuration for distance optimized role assignment strategies
- Related incidents may be associated with an event and bulk closed once event is resolved
- Incidents may now be created at MBR level rather than service
- Support for manual operator assignment
- Time based escalation based on count of minutes open
- Improved incident search forms add custom data fields, date, appointment, market and location searches
Inventory Management
- Product categories, subcategory and product hierarchy with item, product and category level data attributes
- Reorder point, warehouse and location references for physical inventory management
- Operator defined product states supporting custom process
- Receiving interface for single item and bulk recording of items into inventory
- Sale of inventory items via POS invoice
- Assignment of inventory to service and configuration of inventory product requirements by service type
- Historical tracking of changes to inventory items over time
- Integrated IP Address Management (IPAM)
RADIUS & Rating
- Regular expression attribute filter matching operations
- Reduced storage requirements for interim and stop records
- Interim usage rating to support time dependent pricing of data consumption
- Costing in terms of time and or data remaining while rating usage
- Rating engine support for step pricing
- Add-on services such as a "speed booster" can affect attributes of parent service
- Service level attributes may now be merged with service type defaults rather than strict replacement
- Service attributes influenced by active market tags and assigned inventory
- NAS-Port no longer necessary for online list and concurrency enforcement
- Class based time reference improves replay resistance and support for NASes with low quality session identifiers
- CoA session probe periodically scans for and removes stale sessions in cases where stop records are unavailable
- Session manager service authorization change detection
- Voice rate table import and expression based capture format configuration
- Inventory based static IP/subnet assignment (Formerly IP pooling)
- Native MAC authentication support with per-NAS MAC password configuration and Calling-Station-Id check
- Time/day/week/month/holiday access time options for server access
- Significantly increased database throughput of RADIUS accounting transactions
- Heuristic creation of missing stop records when interim accounting data available and session previously cleared from online list
- Service type level authentication failure attributes may now be configured separately for each failure class
Reporting & Alerting
- MBR & Service level reporting
- Operator group based report security replaced with access label by report or report group
- New client reports are now automatically made available for use during maintenance update
- Quick report feature allows custom reports to be configured only by defining a report query
- Quick report data file export options (TSV, CSV, XML, Excel, HTML)
- Syslog server supports CIDR source classification and expression based message classification
- Expression based Alert triggers for received syslog messages
- Externally triggerable alerts
- Syslog message trimming configurable by source and message type
- Improved syslog search reporting
- Interface for custom post-processing of rendered reports
- SNMP and ICMP based service level data collection
- Gauge reporting supports graphing and threshold triggers of metrics such as signal characteristics on per service basis
- Automatic alerting on gauge metrics integrated into service alerts
- Conditions based gauge rollup preventing abnormal transient conditions from being averaged out
- FCC BDC/477 reporting and data export
- Emailing of Client and MBR reports
Notification & Messaging
- SMS Poller supporting Internet SMPP connectivity and serial AT interface
- SMS notifications with default and per-customer quiet hours
- Pluggable expression based message processors for handling incoming SMS messages
- Improved bulk messaging interface with expanded parameters and SMS support
- HTML formatted email notifications with embedded HTML editor
- Messaging profiles enable series of search parameters to be stored and recalled for bulk email/SMS
- Classification of notification purpose for improved customer control over received messages
- Administrative options to set messages appearing within operator infobar by operator group