Alliance

ISSUE/QUESTION: I am not seeing Orders History tab in my Alliance Partner Portal, why? How can I get access? ENVIRONMENT: Alliance Partner Portal AUDIENCE External/Internal RESOLUTION/ANSWER: You can accomplish this by following these steps: On the header ribbon, you will see Home and then existing tabs. Click the New Tab button which will open a list. You will then be able to select tabs that you wish to add. You can add Orders History tab, or others that you need.

Hello! Effective immediately, our Support 1-800 number has changed from 800-735-4222 to 800-773-5193. If you need to reach us by email, our address is still support@astea.com We look forward to assisting you with your support needs. Astea Customer Care team

When using TLS 1.2 with Single Sign-on (SSO), users running Alliance 14.0.0.24 may encounter the following error that the “Astea Application address is not valid.” If this happens, it may be because the 64-bit Publisher with TLS 1.2 support has not been installed on the Publisher server(s). Please check the publisher server to ensure that publisher was installed using Alliance Publisher 14.0.0.24 Full (x64).exe. We recently had a client that utilizes TLS 1.2 and SSO and received this error after re-installing publisher. This was because the server only supported TLS 1.2; however, the 32-bit version of Publisher was installed without TLS 1.2 support. The client browser could not establish a connection with the server to verify the Alliance URL and as a result, the following error was displayed: To resolve the issue, the client uninstalled Publisher from the publisher servers and re-installed using the 64-bit version with added TLS 1.2/SSO support.

Is there anyone currently utilizing the email listener for all their customer email interactions? If yes, would it be possible for me to see an example of it in real-time? I would like to understand if it is actually going to provide any value for my organization. The workflows don’t seem very straightforward. I am trying to cut down on the number of steps it takes for my team to interact with customers, the explanation of how it works I got makes it seem like it might add more complications than necessary. Follow-up question - Does anyone know what the “inbox” in Alliance actually does? I would have figured the Listener puts emails into the inbox of the owner of the Customer Support ticket, but that doesnt seem to be the case. Ian

There is a known issue with the GPS tracking for users that are running version 3.3 of the Astea Mobile Native App on Android Devices, this issue does NOT APPLY to iOS Devices. If MOE -10131 is set to a value of 1 the mobile device does not capture GPS coordinates, we are currently working on the fix for this issue and will include it in the upcoming 3.3.1 Native App release (the release date is still yet to be determined). As a temporary workaround in the meantime you can change MOE -10131 to a value of 3, have your impacted technicians log out of the application and log back in again (this will download the updated MOE value to their mobile devices). Then have them go to the Communication Diagnostics module and enable the “GPS Tracking” toggle on this screen, this will ensure that their GPS coordinates are captured in the meantime. MOE -10131 Location Tracking: (1: Hidden but Location Tracking Enabled, 2: Hidden but Location Tracking Disabled, 3: Visible and Tech can edit, 4: Visible

The default date format in the reports (ActiveReports) is US format (mm/dd/yyyy). This is not desirable for the customers where date format is dd/mm/yyyy (UK, Australia, etc.). In Alliance browser, there is a browser option called ‘Use Local Date and Time Format for Reports’, but there is no such option in non-Alliance browser. One idea is to change the default date format for the entire system in the Configuration Editor by replacing the culture code as below. This can be done only at the server side. Result:

Hi Does anyone know how to see if the dispatch console is live or not? We are having issues with the dispatch console intermittently not auto-refreshing and it’s hard to see when the last time it was updated. The little icon in the corner (above the “schedule”) is green and says connected so it seems like it should be updating. Also, is there a refresh setting anywhere? dispatch console settings has very little options and none of them relate to the refresh time

Question – “deployment we were instructed to use the below GIS rules. Are these rules to support the GB address validation only or does it support GB and US?” Resolution: The GeocodeOnly applies for all countries.

​Clients using the hosted Alliance solution can view application error logs via the Log Viewer module in the Alliance Employee Portal. This can be achieved by disabling Event Log logging mode. Steps to enable database-level event logging: Navigate to the Configuration Editor module Click the Configuration > Globals section Set IsEventLogLoggingMode to False Click the save icon Steps to view and export application events: Navigate to the Log Viewer module Click the Refresh button to refresh the log The log can be exported using the “Export” button and if necessary, sent to IFS Alliance Support. ​

Hi, if you do come across a technician reporting the error below whilst using an Apple device, and on Mobile Universal (the issue has been addressed in Mobile Edge), it is due to them logging on using their email address which is longer than 30 characters, for example, 36 characters, as per a recent issue. The current Mobile Universal limitation is 30 characters, so to get around this, advise the technician to log out of his account, perform a ‘Switch User’ and then log in with his employee id (this will be less than 30 characters). Interestingly, i found that using an email address >30 characters, did not present an issue when accessing Mobile Universal on an Android device - in this particular scenario, a Samsung A70.

Is it possible to make an inventory type obsolete, unusable, etc. so that it can no longer be used? We are attempting to more accurately align and describe our inventory types, but seem unable to make the originals not show up as an option in transactions. Suggestions?

Often a user who uses the Alliance Dispatch Console (DC) in the Astea Browser (Alliance 15.3 and earlier) may wish to open the DC in the same context as shown within a service order. This could be to look for other users in the node or group to quickly make a decision to reassign the ticket to another user based on the data in the service order. Alliance allows you to click on an icon within the Service Order - Service Info page to directly load the DC using the same context as the node or action group currently displayed. This is a shortcut to the method compared to opening the Dispatch Console module, Selecting the context (Session, Node, Action Group) and then selecting the value required if you only need to view the current node or action group. See the screen shot below: Open DC in Node Context In versions 14 and earlier, there is a similar icon link to the left of the field. Please note, this shortcut is only for the Astea Browser at this time of writing.

Is there a more effective way of managing multilingual description fields than through XML API imports? Would love to move this responsibility to users that don’t work with imports.

You can change the Retrieve rows limit by going into Catalog → Options → Settings. The change here will take effect on all modules.

One way to improve search is to use the percent sign sign as a wild card. For example if you are looking for a product that starts with an M and ends in 01. you would enter M%01 in product id field to search for all like products.

if one comes across the following alert within Mobile Edge repeatedly whilst working on an order, please be aware that that the alert is being caused by the fact the tabs defined within MOE -10117 are missing in MOE -10113, therefore the default workflow will be used. it can annoying but the technician can still continue working and complete the order. The solution in this example, is to re-add the ‘bsafe’ value back into MOE -10113 and then get the technicians to log off and back on again.

The default email message from Mobile Edge that we are getting is: “Dear customer, please find attached the Service Order Report for Work Order: SV2104200007@@1.” We’d like to change that if possible, does anyone know where this is stored and if it is editable?

​A new version 3.3 Native Application will be rolled out to the Play Store shortly, updates are included for the following items: Display "Service URL" in settings of AsteaMobileEdge GPS support for Android 11 Baidu notifications support Fix audio attachment uploads New policy link available on server URL screen

Alliance is using caching mechanism to optimize the system performance. Most of the ‘static data’ or data that rarely changed are kept in the cache, so the application does not need to get them from the database over and over again. A couple of examples are Product Description, Pricing Rule template. The cache should be refreshed when user change those values from Alliance UI or IIS is being reset. However, there were cases when customer is trying to update, i.e: Pricing Rule Description using Import Utility, but they still see the old value even though the update was successful. This is because the value you see is the value from the cache, not from the database. In order to turn off the cache mechanism during import, you need to select Refresh Cache option in the Setting section. This will bypass cache mechanism in Alliance.

You can control the maximum number of material catalog products downloaded to device by using MOE -10154

What can be wrong if you can't see Element ID? You will normally see it on the left bottom side of the application if you put cursor on the column, but it shows a lock icon instead. Lock icon:

By turning the ‘Audit APIs for this user’ option on in Employee Security module, you can view the API logs for this user. Go to Inbound Data Audit module.

When adding a new activity in Mobile (Mobile Edge 15.3.0.0.1), we need to find the required activity by searching on the description. We really need to be able to do a complex search, such as %EU%cal%10% or the like. Is there any way we can use wildcards in mobile searches? I tried using % and also * but they don’t act as wildcards. Thanks.

If I am working on a Contract Quotation, Customer Contract, Service Order or Customer Support Order, I can easily change the Payment Terms by just going to the Billing tab and changing it in the Payment Terms field but when working on a Field Quotation, there is no field available to change/set the payment terms when a change was agreed with the customer (other than changing in Customer Center and re-adding the customer to the FQ) Is there a setting somewhere to make that available? We are using 14.0.0.24 currently (V14.5)

We are using AD login in our V14.5 Alliance (14.0.0.24), which works well generally except if you get kicked out on a timeout or suchlike. Then when you login again, instead of just logging in, it asks for your full username and password again. If I just click in any field and press “Esc”, it will close it down again and next time when I login, it goes in right away. Is there any way to stop this behaviour so that the login page resets properly, as it does when you exit the right way, even when you get kicked out? So that regardless, every time you try to login, the AD will work properly? Thanks.