As we’ve previously informed our Community, each major release of OroPlatform and OroCRM (such as v2.0) will be followed by several minor product versions releases that include our capabilities and features. We’re proud to announce the immediate availability of the newest OroCRM and OroPlatform 2.1 version.

The newest 2.1 release of OroCRM comes with several new features along with minor bug fixes and functional improvements. One of the key focus areas for the release was the integration of OroCRM and OroCommerce.

With OroPlatform, we have significantly improved the workflow and web API capabilities. We’ve also further improved our bulk data processing to be faster and more seamless. These changes will automatically apply to all of our Platform-based applications.

OroCRM: What’s New in 2.1

The following improvements can be found within OroCRM 2.1:

New Sales Territory feature (in OroCRM Enterprise Edition only)
New Commerce Sales workflow feature
New sales dashboard widgets
Upgraded reports and segments

Let’s take a closer look at some of the main improvements included in the 2.1 release.

Sales Territories (in OroCRM EE)

OroCRM 2.1 introduces Sales Territories – a smart tool for structuring your sales pipeline by categorizing markets that enables generating sales reports, and forecasting territory-relevant revenues. You can define Sales Territories using different factors like geographical attributes, such as country or region, or other indicators like industry, company name, lifetime sales value, etc.

Once the Sales Territory feature is enabled, it’s possible to:

Assign sales territories for leads, opportunities, and any customer type;
Specify priorities for sales territories;
Assign entities to users within particular territories;
Automatically assign and re-assign records to territories;
Filter data by territory in OroCRM datagrids, reports, segments, and dashboard widgets.

Commerce Sales Flow (Integration with OroCommerce)

The Commerce workflow is another feature we’ve previously discussed in our blogs. It enhances the application as out-of-the-box OroCommerce features can be used alongside OroCRM functionalities. OroCommerce Quotes can be related and mapped to OroCRM Opportunities. This allows to manage Quotes from either an OroCommerce entity view or directly from an OroCRM Opportunity. This function is available if an Opportunity is related specifically to a Commerce customer. Other OroCommerce sales entities will be related to the Opportunities in releases following 2.1.

New Sales Dashboards

Two new sales dashboard widgets, Lead statistics and Opportunity statistics, have been designed to replace the Business Sales Channel statistics widget to provide greater visibility into leads- and opportunities-related data. Both new tools come with advanced filtering capabilities including filtering by Sales Territory.

Reporting and Segmentation

Reports are configurable: Due to the enhanced report builder in OroCRM 2.1, admin users are now able to add the Grouping by date filtering option to any custom reports. In turn, non-admin users can enable and perform grouping by date using different time periods for one of the datetime report columns, skip empty time periods in groupings, and filter data by an attribute not included to the report as a column.
Segments have record limits: Admin users can now specify the maximum number of records in a segment. This is helpful when there’s a requirement to place restrictions on the total number of records for a given segment – like finding your top-100 customers by lifetime sales value.

OroPlatform: What’s New in 2.1

Changes made to OroPlatform in the latest version include:

Enhanced workflow capabilities
Parallel execution of import and export jobs
Web API tweaks

Below is a more detailed overview of each enhancement.

Workflow Capabilities

Workflow variables enable non-admin users to configure previously hard-coded parameters in the workflow transition and step condition.
Existing CRUD entity forms can be re-used in workflow transitions. This helps save effort and simplify maintenance. Should the edit form change at a later time, all workflows re-using it will change respectively.
No entity record required to start a workflow. It’s possible to start a workflow by an event trigger without a workflow entity record existing.
Workflow management UI can be used to configure a transition destination.

Parallel Execution of Import and Export Jobs

Through using RabbitMQ, import and export jobs can now be executed in parallel ensuring faster import and export speeds when dealing with large volumes of records. Services like Gaufrette can be used to externally store and process imported and exported files to reduce the load on Oro’s application server.

Web API

Documentation of all system API resources of both OroCRM and OroPlatform allows product developers to properly use our API and seamlessly integrate with other applications. To access documentation on our API resources, simply add /api/doc/rest_json_api to your application URL.
New actions for batch requests and responses for REST API (`get_list`, `update_list`, and `delete_list`) will facilitate efficient integrations and data synchronization jobs to be delivered in the future releases. These requests are asynchronously processed via MessageQueue.

Conclusion

At Oro, we constantly improve our products to make our applications even more viable and scalable. We hope you enjoy the new OroPlatform and OroCRM 2.1 release.

Look through our release schedule to see how long we’ll support the 2.1 version of OroPlatform and OroCRM and see when the next 2.2 version will be available.

Please feel free to read the release notes introducing deeper details of the improved functionality:

OroPlatform;
OroCRM Community Edition;
OroCRM Enterprise Edition* (the link leads to private GitHub repository, open to OroCRM EE users only).

If you are already using one of our older versions, you can use the upgrade instructions to update to the latest version. Clone instructions can be found here.

Please feel free to give us your feedback or leave comments in our forums.