Overview
The retirement of Flex4 is going to come in two stages. First, we plan to retire the Flex4 Flash application and following that, the Flex4 backend.
Stage One: Flex4 Flash Retirement
As most of our customers are aware, Adobe stopped supporting Flash in December 2020. In order to continue to give our customers access to Flex4 while Flex5 development continued, we licensed a Flash player for our Flex4 Flash Application from an Adobe partner. Our Flash license extends through the end of 2022 and once it expires, we are required to retire the Flex4 Flash application. We will continue to phase out features from Flex4 as they are ported over to Flex5.
If you still need to access Flex4 before the end of 2022, please see the Flex4 App Download Instructions.
Timeline
Notable Features Coming to Flex5 Before Flex4 Flash Retirement
- Various System Settings pages
- Report Groups
- Report Preferences
- Custom Reports
- Static Reports
- Fee Matrices
- Calendar Settings
- Sound Themes/Clips
- Sensitive Search Tokens
- "Sort Line Item" option
- Partial Invoicing
- Cheat Sheet Management
- Email Templates
- Project Element Settings pages
- Workflow Configuration
- Contact Types
- Audit Trails (Inventory and Contact)
- PO History
- Inventory Utilization/Revenue Dashboard
- Google Calendar Integration
- QuickBooks Desktop Settings
Stage Two: Flex4 Backend Retirement
After Flex4 Flash is retired, there will still be some underlying APIs still running in the Flex4 Backend. These APIs are currently called from the Flex5 UI. This is not something that is visible to you as an end user, but it is important to note that porting these APIs to Flex5 will increase the performance of these areas significantly.
Timeline
The large remaining Flex4 API’s are as follows:
- Availability API
- Report Engine API
- Workflow Processing APIs (e.g. Pull Sheet generation)
These APIs will be ported over throughout 2023. We expect to retire the Flex4 backend approximately around the end of 2023 (but there is not a hard date as of now).
Deprecated Features
While most functionality will be ported from Flex4 to Flex5, there are a few features that will be deprecated entirely during the transition. The decision to deprecate certain features has been based on extensive queries into usage data as well as customer feedback. Please see below for a list of features that will not be in Flex5:
- Recurring Billing