Update: Jan 18 2023

Our two main initiatives underway include:

• reworking how PrismPOS communicates with pin-pads

• revamping our cloud infrastructure

Both have the goal of added resiliency related to credit card processing.

Our progress with reworking PrismPOS communication with pin-pads has been fantastic - we’ve started discussions with Shift4 on a certification plan. To summarize this initiative, we are removing the long-lived channel between the Shift4 UTG (and eventually FreedomPay FRCC) that is on-premise on our customer’s network, and our cloud infrastructure. This change will add resiliency against any internet/network related disruptions between our customer’s networks and our cloud infrastructure, allowing credit card transactions to continue to process. Our goal is to spend Spring 2023 testing this initiative with a Summer 2023 wide availability. We will have the ability to migrate individual customers to the new credit card communication model (it will not be forced upon all customer simultaneously).

Similarly, our progress with revamping our cloud infrastructure has also been terrific. This initiative is migrating our legacy virtual servers to a modern cloud platform and will again add resiliency related to network communication back to customer on-premise systems. We’ve completed most all of the development work for the ancillary pieces and are now focused on the main part, NBCTransfer. Again, our goal is to spend Spring 2023 testing with availability in Summer 2023. We will also migrate customers individually to this new infrastructure (no firewall changes or other customer network changes will need to occur).

PrismPOS Stability Updates

We are aware that many customers are experiencing frustrating issues when using our system to process credit cards and 3rd party debit interfaces.

We know there's never a good time for transactions to be down; our goal as an organization is to bring our stores and their customers closer together, and any outage or delay has the opposite effect.

All of that is to say, this is a critical issue for us.

Over the last several years we have been making modifications to PrismPOS to help us detect, diagnose and prevent these occurrences.

Some of our past changes in this effort have included

Adding retry logic to credit card transactions transactions: When PrismPOS believes a transaction has failed, it will check invoice status with the processor and retrieve the good token if it exists. If the token is not received, PrismPOS will send a reset message to the pinpad to clear any open sales, and also send a void message to ensure no payment was captured, reducing the risk of a double charge.

Adding support for Microsoft Application Insights: These application insights capture, report, and group errors. This gives us a view of common errors across all sites. Customers can assist us in this effort by allowing outbound communication in their networks.

Sales Reconciliation Tools: Sometimes completed sales are not imported into PrismCore, which can cause confusion at the end of the day when totals don’t match up. We have added tools that allow PrimsPOS to view which sales successfully imported into PrismCore, what sales day they are being counted toward, and fix inconsistencies by re-sending sales and applying the correct date.

Heading into rush, we have even more coming your way with our August release.

Credit Card Communication Retry change

In reviewing transaction logs, it became clear that the credit card communication retry logic was not always functioning as intended. Specifically, when PrismPOS believes a credit card transaction failed because the communication between customer server and cloud has faulted. In the August release we have added code to help prevent issues where a credit card payment was approved by the gateway, but the message was not received by PrismPOS.

Intermittent Outage Issues

For a while we have been tracking a problem where many customers at the same time will see “No connection to POS server.“ errors when processing credit cards. We believe we have identified a maintenance job that is causing this behavior. In this release, we will be testing disabling this maintenance job.

With those changes in place, we will continue to actively monitor. Additionally, we are working on new changes to improve our reliability as well as accelerate our ability to safely roll out improvements.

After rush we will be focusing our efforts on the following improvements for future releases.

Environment Rework

We have started the process of eliminating virtual machines from our cloud infrastructure and leveraging Microsoft’s serverless solutions. This will reduce the potential for environmental issues to create problems for customers.

It is our goal to complete this work and be fully tested prior to spring rush.

Phased Deployments

We have identified a need to implement the concept of early releases into the PrismPOS deployment process. This new phased release pipeline will allow us to deliver fixes faster and more frequently to customers and turn on new features with less risk to stores.

NBC Transfer Replacement

We will be designing and implementing a simplified, modern communication link between registers, pin pads, PrismCore/Mosaic and our cloud servers. This new transfer service will streamline our data transfer process and simply the environment to reduce the opportunity for lost data between products

Please visit this page in the future for frequent updates and additional information.