Announcing
Strongpoint Version 5.4
Strongpoint is excited to announce a series powerful new features and enhancements in our latest release of Strongpoint for NetSuite, Version 5.4.
New Function 1. Learn more
New Function 2. Learn more
New Function 3. Learn more
New Function 4. Learn more
New Function 5. Learn more
Thank you very much to our extremely active, and knowledgeable, user community for their suggestions and guidance, allowing us to create incredible value in this release.
Pre-Release
Version 5.4 is now available in your sandbox for pre-release. Since we cannot push updates to your sandboxes, please update the Strongpoint bundle in your sandboxes to ensure you are using the latest version in all accounts.
Full Release
Note that we will be pushing the 5.4 upgrade to your production account during off-peak hours starting April 4, 2018.
Managed Customers
If you are a customer with a managed upgrade process, we will contact you directly to schedule the upgrade to your production account, per the process we have defined with you.
If you are not a Managed Customer and would like to know more - reach out! We’d be happy to work out the details with you.
Your account team will be reaching out to you directly to review the latest updates and answer any questions you may have. Or please contact us to set-up a walk through!
New Functionality
New Function 1
Product Area
Enterprise Compliance
Feature
Financial and Master Data Controls
Audience
Audit, Finance, Implementers, Administrators
Overview
Strongpoint includes tools for rapidly building or using predefined Financial and Transactional Controls that monitor your account and log unauthorized high risk changes to the data in your records or transactions.
Strongpoint Agent Blocking Controls gives you complete control over transactions and master data. Now you can simply and easily block users from creating or modifying system records that are in violation of these controls, and create an alert and a log of an attempted violation. Finance Teams and IT Admins will benefit from this functionality as they can easily adapt blocking to their specific controls and ensure configuration and master data are compliant with their set policies. Auditors are now assured that unauthorized high risk changes are blocked automatically, and no longer require post-incident fixes. Additionally, Auditors no longer have to manually track change logs to determine if any blocked incidents occurred since they are logged automatically.
Example
A company wants to have tight control over employee expenses. The Finance Team decides to limit expense approval limits to up to $10,000 without specific prior approval. This requirement is easily solved with Strongpoint’s new blocking controls by:
1) Creating a search as a control that ensures employees cannot have more than a $10,000 expense limit.
New Function 2
Product Area
Enterprise Compliance
Feature
Segregation of Duties
Audience
Auditors, Compliance Managers
Overview
Strongpoint is delighted to announce our new Advanced Segregation of Duties and Access Control feature! This best in class feature has been in beta mode with some customers already, with great feedback. It is fully integrated with NetSuite for ease of use when provisioning users or changing roles or role assignments. It also enables you to block access to key permissions. As with all Strongpoint tools, it is fully integrated with other aspects of the system to provide a complete solution. If you are interested in joining the Beta program, contact us and we’ll be happy to get you going!*
Segregation of Duties (SoD) reduces the risk of fraud by ensuring that employees within an organization do not have combinations of permissions that give them control over the multiple phases of a transaction or operation. SoD gives you complete separation of duties and access controls, logging violations and blocking unauthorized access to critical permissions or accesses to your system.
Key features include:
The automatic and continuous documentation of the creation and changes to roles and permissions;
Blocking Controls that prevent the user’s influence on a work flow unless there is a pre-approval allowing for it;
Detective Controls: that detect permission level conflicts and log them for audit;
Access to the Strongpoint SoD Rules Library, where you can enable predefined rules, or create your own, to manage desired permissions. You will have immediate access to over 40 pre-set rules.
Example
There are three typical use cases for SoD rules.
1) Detect and Log Permissions Conflicts in Existing Role and Permission Assignment
SoD rules can detect if there is any set of permissions, within a role or across multiple roles a user has, that violates the SoD Rules and log this violation. These violations can be monitored, investigated, and approved using the SoD reports.
New Function 3
Product Area
Intelligent Change Management
Feature
Policy Change Management
Audience
Audit Team, IT Managers
Overview
Strongpoint’s Change Policies help you quickly implement best practices, build processes for specific departments and even specific objects. All changes in the system are analyzed against these Change Policies to ensure that they are compliant. This new Policy Change Management feature prevents unauthorized policy changes. Any changes to a policy must be authorized in advance. This new feature drives value for:
IT Managers: Can prevent unauthorized changes to policies.
Auditors: Can be alerted of policy changes and audit the approval behind them.
Example: Update existing Policy Record
An IT Administrator opens the organization’s Default Policy and attempts to modify the Scripted Objects Changes control from the Change Request level to Log Changes Only level. This change would allow users to modify any scripts or workflows, without any change control or approval. With Strongpoint’s new Policy Change Management feature, the IT Administrator is now prevented from making this unauthorized change to the default policy.
For this change to be authorized in the system, the IT Administrator needs to:
Create a Change Request,
Assign the Default Policy to the Change Request, and
Follow the approval process
Strongpoint wishes to extend a special thanks to the team at KPMG for sharing their feedback and influencing this new functionality.
New Function 4
Product Area
Intelligent Change Management
Feature
Change Logging and Clearance
Audience
Developers, Release Managers, IT Administrators
Overview
Many customers use ticketing and change approval systems in the management of changes to all of their business systems not just Salesforce or NetSuite. Strongpoint is integrating with external ticketing systems to improve workflows for customers using both. Strongpoint’s Change Management capabilities are now integrated with Jira, one of the most popular issue ticketing and development project management systems. Customers are able to push Jira change tickets into a Strongpoint Change Request, enabling easy management of changes directly in their system, seamless tracking of compliant changes and automating the reconciliation of change logs during audit.
The key benefits of this integration include:
Improved team productivity by automatically detecting objects mentioned in Jira tickets, managing changes to those objects with Strongpoint’s Change Management, and synchronizing approvals between Strongpoint and Jira
The ability for auditors to track compliant changes and avoid manually reconciling change tickets to change logs during audit.
Example
A development team is working on an initiative that requires system enhancements. The team uses Jira for managing development scope and change approval processes. One of the developers on the team creates a Jira story that outlines the scope of changes being made to the system. The developer pushes the Jira story into Strongpoint and a Change Request is automatically created. Once the Change Request is approved, the approval is automatically synchronized with Jira, allowing the developer to proceed with development. This brings all the benefits of Strongpoint to Jira tickets, including the impact analysis, release management and change reconciliation features.
New Function 5
Product Area
Intelligent Change Management
Feature
Automated Documentation
Audience
Business Analysts, Developers, IT Managers
Overview
Many of Strongpoint’s customers have integrated NetSuite with other enterprise systems by using Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) tools. Strongpoint has partnered with Celigo, a leading iPaaS vendor, to see through the integration layers and map dependencies between integrated systems. This extends all of Strongpoint's documentation, change monitoring, impact analysis and change management capabilities to the entire application ecosystem. This makes it very easy for Business Analysts and Developers to understand if changes they make in NetSuite will break something in Salesforce or any other enterprise system connected via Celigo. Additional iPaaS platforms will be added this summer.
Example: Visualize Field Mappings in ERD
It is very common to integrate Salesforce and NetSuite systems together so that when Leads and Opportunities in Salesforce convert to Customers, the resulting transactions are stored in NetSuite. In this scenario it is also common for customer information to be stored in both systems, with key customer fields integrated together between the two. Strongpoint’s ERD can now be browsed to explore the relationship between records and fields in these two systems. Additionally, Strongpoint's documentation, ERD, Policy Analysis, Impact Analysis and Change Tracking tools now support multiple applications and integration technologies. Strongpoint will automatically warn of changes in one system that will affect another.
Updates
Hide "Change After" Field for Diff Comparison
When the Diff Comparison type is selected in Environment Compare, the Change After field will be hidden. All customizations that match the compare criteria will be retrieved regardless of when it was last changed.
Change Requests for Managed Bundles Must be Set to Approved
When a Managed Bundle update is made to the system, a system-generated Managed Bundle Change Request is created. With this enhancement, these Change Requests are now created with an "Approved" status to be consistent with the change logs (compliant) that are attached to it.
UX Enhancements
Predefined Agent Controls - UI Layout Adjustments
Existing Control is now called ‘Active Controls’ and the frame has been moved to the bottom right of the page. The description frame is also added to show the Control Description when selected.
Coming Soon
We are busily working on our next release in earnest. Exciting, new functionality is coming to make your lives easier and deliver best in class service! Here is a sneak peak at what you can look forward to hearing about: