Sneak Peek at What's New in Version 9.2

This message covers the following timely topics:

What’s New In This Release?

Shortcuts for: Admin Control Panel | Customer Web Storefront

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What’s New In This Release?

ECi will soon load the major release Version 9.2 live on ECinteractive® and is.D-Force® 2 Web servers. This software update is currently slated 9 PM CST Saturday, July 31, to 6 AM CST Sunday, August 1.

Since this falls within ECi's Standard Weekly Data Center Maintenance timeframe, it does not require any changes to Site Maintenance schedule.

In this release, you'll find the following software changes:

• Admin Enhancements:
  1. Customer Management Revamped with Dashboard, Wizard
  2. Customer Settings Redesigned To Make Exceptions Easy to Manage
  3. Approval Group Pages Revamped Into Wizard
  4. Account Administrator (Formerly Super User) in Domain Management
  5. Admin Favorites Redesigned to Import Lists, Streamline Assignment
  6. Import Rich Content for United Non-Catalog Items in Smart Search
  7. CCI Viewer - Monitor Status of Catalog Combination Index
  8. Itemless Email Marketing Flyers — Share News Without Having to Attach Items
      
• Shopping Site Enhancements
  1. Let Shoppers Go Social with Shared Favorites
  2. Shopper's Account Administration (Formerly Super User)
  3. Online Chat via ProvideSupport
  4. Print Invoices on the Pay Invoices Page
     
     
• Other Software Changes in This Release

What You'll See in Your Admin Control Panel

Customer Management Revamped with Dashboard, Wizard

Version 9.2 introduces a streamlined Dashboard and Wizard to your Customer Management interface.

Best of all, you can easily Copy a customer. It all minimizes clicks and page loads required to manage customer accounts.

Dashboard View. See popular stats (Orders Placed Today, Current and Previous Month Sales) and actions (Search by Customer Identity Field, Add Customer, or Edit Guest). Pick from a list of Recently Accessed Customer Records. Pick from Recent Site Customers, and know how many are currently online out of your total number of users.

Step-by-Step Guidance. A wizard interface and progress bar guide you through each step, including Info, Acct, Dept, Attention, Location, Contract, Alt/Sub, Checkout, Communication, Feature, Marketing, and Price.

Progress bar. Labeled wizard page buttons and page breadcrumbs make every feature and field easier to find. You can switch between a drop-down list fields and filterable search grids as needed to select accounts, departments, and other records.

Finish Early with Guest Defaults. Once you enter a user's unique contact and account information, you can click Finish. Most dealers set up new users to match their Guest experience. Default settings are now based on your Guest User. Of course, you can always navigate via the Progress Bar or the Next or Previous button to customize user settings as needed. There's even a checkbox at the top of the Add Customer pages to "Add another customer when finished"!

Customer View. See all customer information and actions in one place, including identifying and Account information, Group settings, Catalog Combination Index, Location, Catalog Groups, Contract/Laundry List, and Approval Groups.

Copy User. Quickly add new users for the same account, just by entering unique contact information. There's even a checkbox at the top of the Add Customer pages to "Copy another customer when finished"!

Detach from Setting Group. Detach a shopper as needed from a Setting Group for granular control over their experience. Re-apply a Setting Group to make settings easier to manage.

View Customer Log. Know which Admin User made what changes to what settings on what customer accounts.

Feature Settings Grid. A search grid shows not only how many customers are assigned to each Settings Group, but also quickly edit each associated customer account as needed — making it easy to manage exceptions.

For details, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

Customer Settings Revamped To Help Manage Exceptions

All Customer Settings pages have been redesigned to reflect changes in the Customer Management pages. You can still assign a customer to a group setting. However, now you or an account administrator can change parameters within a setting group from the Customer View page.

Detach User from Setting Group. Once you edit a setting so that the current customer differs from the setting group, the newly saved setting is unique to the customer. You no longer need to create a separate group setting manually.

New Search Grid for Managing Setting Groups, Exceptions. Each Setting Groups page — Alternate/Substitutes, Communication, Checkout, Feature, Marketing, and Price — opens with a streamlined, expandable, filterable Search Grid. Each Setting Group record is expandable to display a list of the customer accounts assigned to this group. You can also filter by each column header, add a new setting group, or edit or delete individual settings groups.

For details, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

Approval Group Pages Revamped Into Wizard

We’ve implemented wizards and dashboards for your Approval Group Management pages to make it easier to manage your customer’s approval chain setup.

Streamlined Wizard. It's a breeze to add or edit an approval group, set its level of approval (top, customer, or department), and assign members, limits, and approvers.

Multiple Top Levels, Memberships. You can create multiple top levels per account. And any user may belong to multiple approval groups according to their departmental access.

Search Grids. The expandable, filterable search grids make it easy to look up members at different approval levels. New locks prevent you from deleting a group that has subordinate groups assigned to it (so you have a chance to reassign groups as needed) or that have orders awaiting approval (so you have a chance to reassign them).

For details, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

Set Up Customer Account Administrators
(Formerly Super Users) in Domain Management

"Keys to Your Domain" analogy: A domain, which replaces Super Users from legacy Web storefronts, is like a set of keys that you might give to trusted visitors to unlock parts of your secure facilities.

You can grant customer user accounts limited rights to manage other user accounts, even multiple domain administrators.

Granular Domain Privileges. You can extend the privilege of administering shoppers, account news, admin favorites, and approvals to your customers. In turn, an Account Administrator can grant similar rights to users under their accounts.

Domain Management. The new grid makes it a breeze to set up, look up, add, edit, and copy these customer domain privileges.

Wizard Interface. Get as granular as you like with the privileges you grant to Account Administrators. It uses the same interface as the Customer Management and Approval Groups wizards. The Progress Bar guides you through Domain Name, Account, Admin, Preference, Contract, Global catalog, Custom catalog, Alt/Sub, Checkout, Communication, Feature, Marketing, and Price.

Account Administrator Dashboard. Like the Customer Account dashboard, you'll find a bird's eye view of the privileges assigned to to each administrator. This includes the Accounts, Customers & Preferences; User Group Settings, Contract/Laundry Lists, Global Catalog Groups, and status. By default, each Account Admin is inactive until you activate it.

Emulate Domain Admin. Emulate what your customer account administrator will see after they log in: limited forms of the revamped Admin Control Panel pages you use to perform the same tasks. This protects the security of your user's login password, and gives you a chance to make sure all their privileges are correct before you activate their access.

Copy Domain User. Re-use the settings from the selected Domain User to shortcut the process. Once you’ve entered contact and account information from a copied account, you can click Finish. Or you can customize further.

Multiple Accounts Per Domain. This feature is so flexible you can assign multiple accounts to a domain. You may find this useful for customers where you have set up multiple accounts on your back-end system to meet their requirements to bill different subsidiaries, locations, or regions separately.

Site Text for Account Admin News. You can create text that can be shown at the top of the end user’s Account Administrator Dashboard. By default, the Account Admin Dashboard does not show a news box. To display news on their Dashboard, you must first set it up in the Text Editor and Site Text Assignment pages, under the side menu for Site Text or the top menu for Site Config. In the Account Administrative News tab, Edit the Account Admin News, click the down arrow in the Text Description box, select the text to display, and save your changes. For more details, see your Administrative online documentation.

For help in configuring domain privileges and account administrators, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

To help train customers on managing their accounts, the Account Administrator Guide to ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Front-End Site (pdf) is now available, along with your shopping site's online help.

See also Customizing Site Text and Messages in ECinteractive (pdf).

Admin Favorites Redesigned to Import Lists, Streamline Assignment

Instead of adding items one at a time to an Admin Favorites List, you can manually mass add items, or you can import favorites items using a delimited file.

The Assign Favorites page has been updated to help you more easily assign favorites lists to your customer accounts as well as any departments within the account.

For details, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

Import Rich Content for United Non-Catalog Items in Smart Search

United Stationers has developed a rich content library of over 9,000 items that can be used with their Smart Search offering. These items include:

Products United sells but do not appear in a current catalog or flyer.

Items sold only to authorized dealers (e.g. Green Mountain coffee)

Non-United products which many dealers want in their online offering but are purchased from other suppliers;  for example soft drinks.  (Note:  Access to non-United product content is by subscription.)

For any or all of the above product groups, you can now import a list of the desired SKUs to be validated against your back-end system and synchronized with United Smart Search.

Then, add the list using the Custom Catalog Group Management page, so that those items will be added to each shopper’s individual Catalog Combination Index (CCI).

Imported items will be marked Uncatalog in the CCI Viewer and Custom Catalog Management lists; if they were previously marked Custom, this setting will be replaced.

Once indexing is finished, the United Rich Content or the relevant non-catalog products — including all the rich content attributes — will be displayed via Smart Search.

For details, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

To obtain item lists for these non-catalog products, contact marketingtechnology@ussco.com.

CCI Viewer: Monitor Status of Catalog Combination Index

This filterable, expandable grid works with the Catalog Combination Index. It lets you view the CCI activity and status, including Enhanced Content Provider (ECP) activity.

Each CCI record can be expanded to display a list of items in the CCI. For each item, you can see the Item's prefix, number, source (custom, ECP, manufacturer, or uncatalog), and status.

If you click the manufacturer's name, shown in the Source column, it opens the Find Catalogs by SKU page.

For details, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

Itemless Email Marketing Flyers

Originally, Integrated eMarketing email messages were designed to be linked with products to track associated clicks and sales.

Now you can send news — without having to attach catalog items.

Go beyond promoting item discounts to prospects and customers. Use your imagination. Engage your visitors with polls, surveys, quizzes, contests, sweepstakes, Webinars, local news and other social media.

For procedural details, see Setting Up & Using Integrated eMarketing (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help.

What Your Customers Will See In Your Web Storefront

Going Social With Shared Favorites

The Manage MyFavorites page now allows any user to Share their personal lists, including any comments about products, and select accounts or departments to grant access to their lists.

For example, they can share a list made up for a particular classroom, event, or supply closet location.

Details for Selected List has new button: Share.

New column under MyFavorites Lists indicates if a list is Shared.

Shoppers can share with their account or selected departments (if they are allowed to shop for multiple departments).

List item comments can flow to checkout, order notes, and delivery manifests.

To enable this feature for your shoppers, use the checkbox for Allow Sharing Favorites under Feature Settings. See also ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and your shopping site's online help.

Shopper's Account Administration (Formerly Super User)

Once your domain account administrators log in, they have a new option under My Account: Account Management.

It launches a new window showing an Account Administrator Dashboard, with access to limited forms of the Admin Control Panel pages a dealer uses to perform the same tasks, depending on the privileges you've granted:

Customer Management

Site News

Manage Domain Administrators

MyFavorites Lists

Approval Management

The look and feel, however, uses your storefront's navigation menu and colors.

To help train customers on managing their accounts, the Account Administrator Guide to ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Front-End Site (pdf) is now available, along with your shopping site's online help.

Chat via ProvideSupport

Another way to enhance your shoppers’ experience is to let them chat with one of your friendly representatives, one-on-one in real time without picking up the phone.

ProvideSupport.com, our new partner for live chat, gives your operator amazing interactive features:

Greet your customers when they visit your site.

Show products of interest based on browsing history or keywords.

Share promotions and discounts.

Answer questions in real time.

Look up a console of keywords, campaigns, and analytics about your visitors.

Co-browse to provide specific help on the Web pages your visitors are seeing.

Opt for email inquiries when offline during lunch, breaks, or after hours.

For details on how to set up your ProvideSupport chat, see ECinteractive & is.D-Force 2 Administrative Site: Software Version 9.2.0 (pdf) and the Admin Control Panel's online help, and the www.ProvideSupport.com site.

Print Invoices on the Pay Invoices Page

Your customers will be able to print copies of their selected outstanding invoices from the Pay Invoices page. They will be able to print to PDF, which can then be saved or used to print to a printer. This ability previously existed only on the Order History page.

Other Software Changes in This Release

This release also includes nine other software changes:

1. 8219: Enhanced to be consistent when displaying customer names on the Administrative Web pages. Both the Customer Management and Approval Management pages now display customer names in first name/last name order.
2. 9810: Enhanced by adding the ability to change a shopper's user name. This can helpful when dealing with unmarried users (Amy Smith - asmith) who then marry (Amy Jones - ajones). This allows you to change the user name also. Previously, if a user name was edited, favorites lists were no longer associated with the updated user name. This has been corrected to allow changing user names while also retaining user favorite lists.
3. 11150: Enhanced the system to better manage shoppers who access the site without having an account or department set up with default information. The system now notifies the shopper that the request cannot be processed due to missing required data. Previously, the site displayed an Unhandled Exception (UE) error.
4. 11725: Enhanced by adding a warning message at the top of the Admin Mass Setting Management Web page. If changes are made, the system now displays the Executing These Updates Cause Changes to Take Effect Immediately and Cannot be Undone Without Help from ECI Support message.
5. 7630: Corrected to allow the ability to remove a single or group of department authorizations. Previously, if a user was authorized for multiple departments and needed to be de-authorized for any number of departments, all department authorizations had to be deleted and then rebuilt.
6. 10501: Corrected so when printing an order from the end-user's Order History and Pay A/R Invoices web pages, the title shows the text Invoice. Previously the text was shown as Your Order History.
7. 10904:Corrected so when selecting items from a multiple page Favorite List, the system does not deselect the originally checked items and choose instead items that were never checked. Previously, if a user selected items 1, 3, and 4 on the first page and moved to the second page, all items checked on the first page were being deselected and items 1, 3, and 4 on the second page were marked.
8. 11482: Corrected so if a user makes G/L or Inventory changes to a customer's account, the information is properly logged.
9. 11323: Corrected so shoppers can properly access departments on the front end site. Previously, the system was restricting displaying departments when a shopper had access to more than one account in the Administrative system and one of the accounts had only one assigned department.

For more details about your Web storefront, see also ECinteractive FAQs
(www.DDMS.com/support/doc/ecInteractive.htm).

To Learn More, Sign Up for Free Webinars!

Join ECi Technical Support in one of our 2-hour Webinars to demonstrate the new features in the Version 9.2 release.

Wednesday, August 4, 10:00 am - noon CDT

Wednesday, August 5, 10:00 am - noon CDT

On the Virtual Class page, click any available session link to register. Connection details will be sent via confirmation email. Please check your Inbox. Check your Spam or Junk folder as needed. If you have any questions about the Virtual Classes, please write us at training@eci2.com.

In the next few months, the ECinteractive team has an aggressive schedule to release more hot priority features to make your Web presence more competitive and efficient. We have made significant strides in implementing advancements vendors make in content. We continue working with our trading partners, our mutual goal being a better experience in searching and shopping for your customers. Log into your Admin Control Panel for more details on the Home page.

To find out more about the ECinteractive family of products, see our ECinteractive Product Information (www.ecisolutions.com/products/ecomm/ecinteractive), where you can access a demo site, marketing tools, and color themes.

Need Help? (800) 366-4778 • https://support.ecisolutions.com • ddmssupport@ecisolutions.com