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New features since version 4.5
Interface / Manageability / Platform
 | Common platform independent reporting |
| RDBMS support for Oracle 10 and MSSQL 2005 in addition to previously supported MSSQL 2000 and Sybase ASE 12.5+ |
| Native IPv6 transport |
| Admin "Apply" button ensures changes made in the Emerald Administrator go into effect by reload Emeralds internal configuration as well as sending change notifications to local and remote instances of RadiusNT/X and the Emerald task scheduler |
| Automatic Language selection based on browser language setting. 10 automated language conversions are currently available including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean and Arabic. New languages can be added and existing translations updated using the included language editor. |
| Dynamic forms provide for a better user experience by hiding irrelevant fields and values |
| Data banking similar to Time banking enabling enforcement of network data usage restrictions |
| Many previously "Global" options now separately configurable at the billing group level |
| CSS centric theme system allow branding, custom appearance, content and logos according to criteria such as operator, IP address, browser and device, group, site and time/day |
Account Management & Support Features
| "Hot Key" support for faster menu system navigation |
| Automatic determination and entry of city/state based on postal code |
| Automatic payment and account lookup using credit card swipe reader |
| Automatic invoice and statement lookup using printed barcode scanner |
| Custom data now integrated into Service / MBR detail display and Service / MBR edit forms |
| Call center automated account lookup provides identification of incoming calls by location, phone company and matching Emerald accounts if available. The included CallerID Search 'pop up' application supports modem call notification, modem Dialing, YACC call notification and Asterisk call notification |
| Operators can now perform RADIUS authentication tests against services to verify accessibility |
| Dynamic client field validation and security based field change lockout |
| Session Disconnect support (RFC3576) for sessions appearing in the Emerald online sessions report |
| Email notification system alerts operators and customers to important events such as pending account or credit card expiration, low time remaining, incidents needing attention or having been resolved, payment transaction status, new customer welcome messages and much more as configured |
Customer Account Center
| Customers can now add new services and change or cancel existing services |
| Customers can now view and print detailed invoices, statements and payment receipts from the customer center |
| Customers can manage email notifications they receive for announcements, account status, incidents and more |
| Several improvements for one-time access purchases |
| Customers can view all customer viewable incident, add new incidents and add actions to existing open incidents via the customer center |
Customer Signup
| Signup integrated within Emerald closing the need for a separate web server and SSL certificate |
| Leverages themes and packages to provide custom look and feel as well as customized access plans |
| Support for prepaid card pay method at signup |
| Customize required and visible input fields providing a simplified sign-up process |
| Supports creation of one-time accounts as well as recurring access accounts |
Reseller Billing
| Real-time usage rating done simultaneously at the end-user and reseller levels |
| Resellers can set custom pricing on a per service type basis |
| Operators can set reseller pricing on a per service type basis |
| Support for detailed (per account) or summarized (by service type) invoicing of resellers |
| Support for fractional or whole month billing |
| Separate tracking and reporting of monies for each reseller/organization |
| Place limits on each resellers Active MBR count |
| Proxy realm billing to charge external accounts for network access |
Prepaid Cards
| "Direct Use" accounts allow the user to directly access services using the login and password provided on the pre-paid card without an initial signup process |
| Integration with signup server allows collection of customer information, selection of plan, access login funded by pre-paid card |
| Rechargeable - Existing accounts may be recharged by additional pre-paid cards |
| Integrated account generator supports creation of secure custom sequence algorithms for login and password generation |
| Stored profiles provide simplified configuration when creating additional pre-paid card batches |
| Prepaid data easily exportable in CSV and XML forms |
| Batch and account level pre-paid card management and statistics |
| Card use isolated to accounts associated to the same organization as the pre-paid card |
| Leverages customer account center to provide customer driven provisioning of accounts or additional access funded by prepaid cards |
| Limited shelf life: Prepaid batches can be configured such that cards having not been used over a period of time automatically expire |
| Enforce Access Limits: Expiration, session time and data limits, concurrent access limits and currency based rating required for advanced services such as prepaid telephone cards are possible with Emerald and its integrated pre-paid card management system |
Incidents / CRM
| Available incident states now configurable per incident type |
| Custom data fields by incident type |
| Incident fields can be hidden or displayed as appropriate per incident type |
| Incident priority settings |
| Incident Due Date / Resolve By fields with email overdue warnings, overdue escalation and reporting |
| Role based incident assignments provide for grouping of operators with similar job functions, automatic distribution of new incidents using a load balancing method and a tiering system for overflow assignment |
| Incident and action time tracking feature for informational purposes or documentation of billable hours |
| Support for escalations and escalation notification |
| Incident status change email notifications |
Real-time Rating
| Rating based on time of day, day of week, day/week of month and holidays |
| Per session rounding including per interval up, down, nearest, 6 second and 60 second rounding |
| Rating data sources provide for the rating of external data |
| Bill concurrently for time and data usage |
| Bill multiple parties such as end-user and resellers for the same usage |
| Rating classifiers provide flexible association of data to Emerald accounts for billing |
| Determination of time remaining based on available balance or credit |
| Criteria based pricing such as source and destination telephone number or prefix, IP network, device port or other available data |
| Authorization parameters for RADIUS authentication allow enforcement of access restrictions based on bandwidth consumed and other criteria as defined |
Billing
| Introductory Offers where an accounts service Type is configured to change automatically after a period of time |
| Recurring billing cycles can now be based on days as well as months |
| Packaged Accounts allows multiple service types to be billed together |
| Improved Tax structures allow any number of taxes to be assigned to service types, package types and charge types based on locality and exemption status |
| Point of Sale invoices can now be created as "Estimates" and modified as necessary before final conversion to invoices |
| Service level cancellations |
| Payment tracking provides historical accuracy for some tax and payment reports by tracking the association of credits and payments to invoice line items over time |
| Support for non-recurring prepaid services and billing |
| Send methods can now be configured to allow sending of postal and email invoices and statements or to send them even when the customers pay method is credit card or bank transfer |
| Per service type pro-rate settings for the following actions: service open, service change to, service close and service change from |
| "Real-time" balance displayed based on currently available network usage |
| Late payment fees |
Payment Processing
| Multiple batch payment processors by Organization, Billing Group and Card Type |
| Support for Auth Only, Credit and Void transaction types |
| Support for prepaid access cards |
| Automatic CC/EFT pay methods no longer dependant on statement creation |
| Improved configuration to support additional export formats and payment processors |
| Payments can be modified or voided regardless of weather they have been applied to statements |
| Credits can be issued against credit card payments if supported by the batch payment processor |
Security
| Detailed client action/access logging |
| AES data encryption for sensitive information such as passwords, credit cards and account numbers |
| Additional accounting access rights and restrictions including limiting of payment amounts and payment types |
| Password & Secure data visibility options for operators and administrators |
| Emerald 'Active Sessions' showing which operators and customers are currently using Emerald |
| Short term operator account lockouts for failed authentication attempts |
| Improved operator cookies and cookie management |
| New object groups for most administrative areas provide for delegation of many global admin functions to global operators |
Performance
| Several times speed up using emerald report rendering |
| Improved client performance over slow dialup links |
| Real-time call records processing |
| Improved data caching |
| Real-time scheduler notification provides faster CC/EFT processing |
| Supports RDBMS MVC concurrency models |
Network traffic accounting
| Real-time rating for static usage fees and conditional fees based on network, protocol, port and traffic |
| Promiscuous mode passive ethernet data collection, IPFIX and additional Cisco NetFlow formats |
| Integrated flow cache for improved performance |
| Support for multiple CPUs / concurrent execution threads |
| Detailed internal statistics provide collector status and troubleshooting information |
| Simplified per MBR account configuration to enable traffic accounting |
| Collector addressing prevents double billing when multiple collectors or netflow exports are enabled throughout the network |
RADIUS
| Session management server continuously monitors active sessions for changes in account status mitigating risk for prepaid services by enforcing status and authorization changes. The management server may be used to enforce concurrency control, time limits even where multiple sessions for the same account are open concurrently, enforcement of bandwidth usage restrictions, enforcement of account status changes such as disconnecting sessions of accounts having been closed or inactivated and enforcement of authorization attribute changes such as a change of bandwidth allocation. |
| Improved Attribute filtering interface with new filtering options |
| Integrated real-time rating engine supporting enforcement of balanced based session limits |
| Conditions based rating can modify authentication response allowing configuration of rules such as "256k bandwidth per month up to 20 gigs then bandwidth is limited to 128k for the remainder of the month" |
| Improved session management with some hardware and improved use of interim accounting updates |
| Accounting timeout to automatically clear any accounting related deadlocks |
| ODBC Connection groups allow data filter access to any number of database servers to scale custom applications |
External Systems Support
| Service types can now have multiple external systems associated with them enabling single account access to a multitude of services |
| Support for popular hosting control panels such as Helm, DirectAdmin and cPanel |
| Mail domains can now be assigned at the MBR level |
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