Overview
Enterprise Component Series 5.0 (ECS 5) is the currently available major release of SemaTree CRM framework. The major focus of this release was architectural enhancements to support our new ECS WebQuote module. This article describes the major enhancements included in ECS 5.
Architecture Enhancements
ECS 5 introduces several new enhancements to its underlying architecture. These are listed in the table below.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| BMP Persistance Model Replaced | ECS 5 replaces the original BMP beans with a highly optimized DAO layer in conjunction with Database Dialect meta-data. |
| Spring Framework adopted | ECS 5 has adopted the Spring Framework as the basis for bean lifecycle management. The Spring Framework's AOP model and configurable bean factories make customization and extension of the ECS Applications simple. ECS Also relies on Spring for Transaction Management, enabling the ECS Web Applications to run in a simple web container as well as an application server. |
| Auto-Creation of DB Scripts | ECS 5 improves extensibility by shipping the schema in meta-data, complete with an application that can be used to generate "delta" scripts for your target database. Also, the required setup data is now encoded in a db-agnostic format, which improves ECS's migration capability to new database platforms. |
| Stored Procedure Support | ECS 5 provides easy integration of existing customer stored procedures into the CRM application providing maximum reuse of existing software assets. |
| New Meta-Data driven UI | With the development and deployment of the new module - ECS WebQuote - (see below), SemaTree has re-tooled our web framework and now provides new platform for developers to create their own modules with. The new platform is a 100% meta-data driven UI that uses the ECS components for Login, Transaction Logging, etc. |
| Configurable Login Module | ECS 5 utilizes the Spring framework to specify what the user login module used to authenticate users. ECS 5 defines an authentication interface that can be implemented by a developer. |
| JDK 1.5 Support | ECS 5 supports JDK 1.5. |
ECS CRM Feature Enhancements
ECS 5, aside from the architectural enhancements enumerated above, is mainly focused on the release of the Quoting and Order features of ECS WebQuote and ECS WebOrder.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| ECS 5 and ECS WebQuote | ECS 5 integrates ECS WebQuote, a module that allows organizations to create quotes based on a product catalog. These quotes are a central part of a Lead to Quote to Order sales cycle, which can be closely tended by both the Sales Representatives and the Sales Managers, each of whom have their own "Dashboards". The quote dashboards have been designed to show tons of at-a-glance information, and all feed into the sales and revenue forecasting for the organizations. |
| ECS 5 and ECS WebOrder | The final part of the WebQuote sales cycle is the conversion to order. ECS 5 integrates with ECS WebOrder to complete the sales cycle and expose the information from the ERP system for Sales Management. A scheduled job runs nightly, and pulls the reconciled orders from the ERP system, populating ECS as a reporting database. Then the total revenues are available for analysis from the dashboards. |
