Perfect Product Suite 5.2- Did you Know? - By Barry Unger, Sr. Technical Specialist

FullTilt continues to enhance the Perfect Product Suite product solution. Customer feedback, with the additional input of business and market drivers, are driving the product forward to further expand its capabilities and streamline user requirements.

Although most of our customers already have the latest 5.2 version operational, I wanted to make sure to highlight some of the new capabilities module by module.

The following lists new features and new things you are able to do with Perfect Product Suite 5.2 within each category:

Import Manager

• You can defer the start of an import batch to improve network traffic considerations.
• The Batch workflow has been compressed to greatly improve performance.
• During a Batch workflow miscellaneous queues can be optional.
• Ability to view current vs. proposed version of product from the update final queue.
• A new scheduled job is available to dynamically create custom catalogs that reflect "product company associations". The job is called "Classify Products associated to Company". To make the new job available, the system administrator must modify the Perfect Product Suite's db.cfg file - add com.fulltiltinc.ImportManager.jobs.ClassifyProductsForPCAJob to the jobClasses entry.

Product Manager

• You can have derived numeric attributes (e.g. Price = Cost * 1.5).
• You have enhanced search options that now include unique id, date added/changed and template code.
• One, or more or all attribute groups can be chosen for display on product detail screen(s) and template maintenance for ease of viewing and maintenance.
• When you do a Group edit of URLs - we've improved the parsing of URLs for improved side by side comparison presentation.
• The product detail's product description textbox has a new "stretchable control" formerly associated with "enhanced text" attribute datatypes.
• Product Company Association (trading partner) mass add support is now available from Products Found.
• Parametric search now supports searching for "null" attributes.
• You can copy a catalog.

Export Manager

• A Quick a/c/d export was added that uses dates of prime objects to find candidates and not just compare.
• A new UI was added to add/extend the export mapping table.
• The Export formatting was streamlined into a single pane with Filter selections, etc.

Performance

• Searches that exclude text (part number, product state, company, etc.) no longer require searchtext to be in place.
• The Import attribution, finalization and duplicate handling was greatly enhanced.
• The performance of spreadsheet conversion to XML was greatly improved.
• Template, catalog and products found displays have been streamlined to avoid gathering all product data upon initial display.
• We added an advanced search and replace tab. This new option permits discreet selection of individual attributes for search and replace.
• The selection of company filters on mapped templates in a catalog was improved.

Events and Notifications

• Generic e-mail notification mechanisms now support product detail in mail subject and hyperlink in content.
• You can publish events when a product is checked in or checked out in a product versioning environment.
• You can trigger events when attributes of interest change (at check in).

Administration

• You can search for bad/broken URL's.
• The purge table job to support cleanup of batches - pre-import-root was enhanced.
• Security was enhanced by adding a new privilege "cangroupedit" to lock down the powerful group edit function.
• We added support for JTDS jdbc driver for SQL Server.
• Generic Email Notification now supports a new option - "Consolidate into a single Notification". Selecting this causes events that are "close in time" that match the filtering criteria to be consolidated into a single e-mail.
• You get Notification failures (exceptions) for the same notification definition that occur "close in time" are consolidated into a single e-mail to the administrator.