Dec '19 Release 🎉

The EPC 2.0 December 2019 release is now live in production! With this release, we've made a number of new features and improvements available:

Exclusive Loan Lock Retries:

When a loan is opened by a user in the Encompass desktop client, the user holds exclusive edit rights to the loan. This means the loan can not be updated by the EPC 2.0 platform. This prevents the processing of an integration's transaction response for loans locked by Encompass users.

With this enhancement, if the loan is locked, EPC will not fail a transaction response right away. Instead, EPC attempts to update the loan multiple times in specific intervals with the transaction response. If the exclusive lock has been lifted by the time a retry happens, the transaction response will be posted to the loan.

Partner integrations will be notified when a transaction response enters and exits the retry cycle through the webhook endpoint registered with the product. You don't need to do anything to take advantage of this feature in your product; it is enabled for all EPC transactions. View the Working with Webhooks developer guide to learn about the different transaction processing events emitted by the EPC platform

Non-eFolder Document Management:

The Encompass eFolder is capable of storing a limited number of human readable file formats such as PNG and PDF. Just like an Encompass user, a partner product cannot upload a document into a loan eFolder if the document format is not supported by eFolder.

This limit presented a challenge for Partners because many of them needed to attach files like JSON and XML to the loan. With this improvement, a product can send any file format in response to a transaction. If the file format is supported by eFolder, it will be automatically placed in the loan eFolder. Otherwise, it will be added to the loan as a loan attachment. An applications front-end will be responsible for providing access to the files that are not supported by eFolder, since the standard Encompass file viewer is not capable of displaying them to the user.

Improvements to Loan Update Mechanism:

Before this release, transactional updates were posted to the loan as governed by the ordering user's loan and eFolder access permissions. This caused issues when the ordering user's permissions prohibited loan and eFolder updates. In some cases, business rules created by the users Administrator interfered with integrations ability to update the loan.

With this release, all loan updates are done by an EPC virtual (system) user that has administrative privileges to all Encompass instances that have access to a product. This virtual user does not need to be provisioned and does not count toward an instance total user count. This reduces the likelihood that a transaction response fails due to permission issues or business rules interference.

If you have any questions or comments, you can send them to us at [email protected]. You can also post your questions and look for answers on our discussion board - which is actively tracked by a community of experts available to help as needed.