Meerkat

Charlie Jenkins Updated by Charlie Jenkins

The Meerkat release of Distribution Engine expands on some of our most popular features, introducing new flexibility to solve even more of your business needs. Personas for Custom Permissions allows for multiple sets of custom permissions, giving you even more freedom in deciding your team’s access levels. Success means something different to every team; that’s why in the Meerkat release, your team’s performance page is customizable, allowing you to determine which metrics are displayed. Expansion to the export/import functionality allows Classifier territory maps to be moved between orgs, without the need to recreate them. Of course, these features are supported by several other improvements to Distribution Engine.

Install Instructions

Main Features

Area

Name

Description

Custom Permissions

Personas for Custom Permissions

Allows for multiple sets of custom permissions, known as 'personas', to be created. Allowing you to configure personas with different levels of access, and assign them to your team managers as appropriate for their role in your organization. To learn more about personas, click here.

Performance Page

Custom Performance Metrics & Tags

The performance page has been expanded with the new capability to customize both the metrics and the tag collections displayed. This will allow you to tailor the performance page to show how your team is performing in the areas which matter most to your business. To learn more about the changes to the performance page, click here.

Export/Import

Exporting and Importing Territory Maps

The export and import tool can now work with territory maps, allowing you to avoid the task of having to recreate them when migrating data into production. For more information on exporting and importing territory maps, click here.

API

Classification API

A new API has been introduced allowing for records to be classified at any time, not just at creation. This API allows you to specify which classifier functions you want to use, and can also be used within Salesforce flows. For more information, click here.

Team/Distributor Filters

Distribution Delay

In order to increase flexibility around when you distribute a record, date/time fields can now be compared to the current date/time at processing, allowing you to introduce a timed delay into your distribution so that other systems have a chance to perform their processing. To read more about delaying distribution, click here.

 

Other Improvements

Area

Description

Distribution

Manual, Pull and Trigger distributors will now require the Distribution Engine scheduler to be enabled in order to be used. This helps ensure cleanup of deleted items, logs beyond their retention period, and feature availability such as SLA and Auto-Reassignment.

Sticky Assignment

New cap options for sticky assignments which allow for the option to choose between assigning to the the next team member or not assigning, if respecting caps and unable to assign to the current sticky owner.

Processing Modes

Automatic and Parallel processing modes will now only process a single distributor in batch mode, when it's required, before switching back to queueable.

Process View

Assignment process viewer is now accessible from the 'Process View' tab on the teams list page.

Process View

Selecting 'Active' on the process view filters will now hide inactive distributors within active teams.

Team Member Page

Team members' current caps are now viewable by hovering the icon in the caps column.

Performance Page

Performance data is now downloadable as a CSV from the page menu.

Distribute by Field Value

Ready for distribution and assigned values can now be empty.

Criteria caps

Criteria caps can now have up to twenty filters.

Weighting

Renamed 'Team-level weighting' tab to 'Weighting'.

Test Tool / Assignment Simulator

General optimizations:

  • Improved display of caps
  • Displays when previous assignment would cause a prospective assignment to fail.
  • Displays when user exclusion filters would cause a prospective assignment to fail.

Tag Assignment

Multiple tag assignment UI has been reworked to be more easily accessed

Tag Assignment

Inactive Salesforce users are no longer shown in the tag assignment page.

Settings

We have added a configuration option to specify how long the scheduler logs are retained, previously this was fixed at 1 week. There is also a new option to consolidate assignment scheduler logs with zero assignments, into a single log, reducing the data storage needed. This is mostly relevant for sandbox installations.

Settings

The team name on the licensed users list will now link to the team page.

Screen Widths

Optimized display area for large monitors. Minimum resolution remains unchanged, but the app will now scale to a maximum width.

Timezones

Where appropriate for the information on the page, the relevant timezone will be displayed.

Pill controls

'Pill' value lists, used throughout the application, can now have their values edited by clicking the pill item.

Pill controls

'Pill' value lists, used throughout the application, now have a 'copy to clipboard' button

Date Filters

Can now select fiscal periods on date filters throughout the application.

 

Defects Resolved

Area

Description

Distribution

When using load balancing, weighting and dynamic tags, it will now be more consistent in finding the appropriate team member, previously it could skip assignment if the user’s weighting was too low.

Distribution

For load balancing, if a user was skipped due to being a previous assignee, but they are the only valid recipient, they will now be assigned the record.

Distribution

Improved the performance of territory tag matching as it could cause CPU limit errors when there were a large number of team members.

Distribution

In some scenarios when using the parallel processing method, assignments could happen when a user was over their active caps, this has been resolved.

Classifier

Resolved an issue that meant that after a sandbox was created, loading the territory map editor could cause an error.

Classifier

Added extra validation so that a new record created through auto-conversion won’t try and assign an inactive Salesforce user as the owner.

Distribution Settings

The team filters displayed on the distribution settings page is now wider to show more information before truncating.

Auto-reassign

There was no warning that auto-reassign would be disabled when removing the SLA that auto-reassign was configured on.

Team Calendar

Holidays spanning a clock change were displayed twice for the same day in the Calendar.

Test Tool

Data popover would sometimes display off the screen if a lot of data to be shown.

Assignment Simulator

Visual issue with displaying ticks for distributors with three digit order numbers.

Distribution Logs

When using related owner, the full object path would be displayed for the related object rather than the friendly name.

Pill controls

When pasting into 'Pill' value lists, used throughout the application, quotes will no longer cause pasted lists to be incorrectly separated.

Selectors

Selector components would sometimes flow off the bottom of the screen when opened at the bottom of the page.

Patch Releases

Version

Changes

17.1

  • Resolved issue where package install can fail on orgs that don't have the Individual Salesforce object enabled
  • Improved efficiency of the housekeeping task for deleted stamp groups to try and avoid query timeouts
  • Updated handling of long numbers in distribution filters to avoid query exceptions
  • Improved spacing in scheduler logs table

17.2

  • Resolved issue that prevented long running classifier jobs, that were stuck, to be aborted
  • Update to make sure that related fields included in standard distributor filters are not queried for trigger distributors as this could lead to failures
  • Improved handling of dynamic and territory tags as processing multiple large tag filters could result in heap exhaustion
  • Resolved issue during distribution where during the Llama release a user that had been deactivated received pull, trigger or manual distributions, causing a failure after upgrade to Meerkat
  • Resolved issue with calendar integration when the initiating user didn't have a DE permission set
  • Improved handling of page loading where the user didn't have access to the standard Salesforce object Organization
  • Update queue team members to show as inactive when queues are deleted

17.3

  • Resolved issue that could cause the upgrade of new Meerkat installs to later version of Meerkat to fail
  • Increased timeout of calls on team performance page to better handle larger configurations

17.4

  • In the territory map editor, when selecting states for USA, Puerto Rico could incorrectly be selected
  • When a record was rejected, and "do not replace rejected records" is configured, counters like load balancing or caps are reverted. If this is undesired behavior for you please contact support and they can configure your org to not revert these counters

How did we do?

Meerkat Upgrade Process

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