Features & Improvements
The guys stayed up past their bedtimes last night to release a pile of updates. A lot of it is stuff you won't ever see, and so will go unmentioned below; here's the stuff you're more likely to bump into:
The Enrollment Agreements report has a new action that lets you add a lock to the students shown onscreen. That report also got our handy new checkboxes.
Course schedule PDF exports now support Chinese characters. Previously they'd spit out ?? so this is kinda also a bugfix. Maybe I'll mention it down there, too.
Aid Award Letter layouts have some new variables, to-wit:
{!CFP_NET_COST!}{!PELL_AMOUNT!}{!MAX_PELL_AMOUNT!}
Aid applications now have a data point that indicates whether the aid applicant's parents have provided information to the FAFSA/ISIR. In the event that the parents are being stubborn about it, the student's awards will all be set to Not Syncable except for the DL UNSUB. Yet another Financial Aid wrinkle to keep in mind!
New field for aid awards!!! OMG so exciting!!! We're calling it "Original Accepted Amount" (just like the DOE!) and you'll set it when the award is added to the student. If the award has the original amount set, you'll be able to edit it, but if there's nothing entered there, the field will not appear.
More financial aid stuffs: aid applications now give you the option to carry forward a previous application's Aid Classification.
Added some validation to something called the Zoom endpoint URL.
Added a payment status called "processing" because of some Stripe updates. This is one of those improvements that none of you will ever see—in fact, 95% of us will never see it... it exists to help one guy do one fraction of his job 2% more betterer. But the task description (in our internal development-tracking site) for this new status ran to 475 words. Super-detailed, exhaustive in its explanations... meanwhile, the task description for Forms—a feature that customers had pined after for years, that added a whole new chunk of incredible functionality to Populi, that involved the creation of new data models and whatnot—ran to... 5 words: "[School name] wants to beta this."
Speaking of Forms, conditional fields can now be triggered by an answer to a previous field that is left blank.
Added the ability to localize/translate custom fields and options.
Restricted your ability to delete people with academic or financial records. To delete someone with academic records, you must be an Academic Admin; someone with financial records, you must be a Financial Admin.
Added datepickers (those little clickable calendars in date fields) to a bunch of spots that didn't have them but needed them.
Cinched down who can reset whose passwords—previously, anyone with the Staff role could send anyone a reset password email. Now you need to have at least the same roles (or higher) to do so. And if a Populi Account Administrator needs a reset password email, only another PAA can do that. Better hope you have more than one PAA listed!
Date/time conditions in filters used to default to 12:00am. We changed that to 11:59pm to better encompass the entirety of the date you're using in your filter.
Library barcode labels used to print for all copies of a given resource, and not just for the copies you wanted to print labels for. Now that barcode-generator is more smarter.
Bugfixes
Looks like our Max Flux Factor was "insufficient". I think that's the thing from Back to the Future? Anyway, we don't use ours for time travel; ours is used for organizing the backup CSV files we generate in Account > Backups. And it was insufficient for some aspect of that task.
Last week we fixed a problem with an automation double-adding a communication plan when it was triggered. That fix proved insufficient so we made some more fixes and deployed those and things seem good now.
The Actions button on the Donations > Donors report had duplicate actions for "Compose Letter," "Print Mailing Labels," and "Print Envelopes"; despite this being a surfeit of actions, their presence made for an INSUFFICIENT Action button.
If you added a resource to a student's Library checkout and then nixed that resource checkout from the resource copy's page, you could no longer check anything out from the checkout page without logging out and then back in. This behavior was deemed insufficient and was ameliorated with a bugfix.
Fixed some loopholes here and there that allowed an insufficient workflow wherein you'd schedule to send an email template with an attachment, delete the attachment, and then the email would send anyway.
Videos, Focus Sessions, and Whatnot
Oh, and speaking of release notes, there's a blog article about how the low-key releases depict things we try to cultivate in this company, especially when it comes to attending to our customers.
Next week's Focus Sessions:
- Introduction to Admissions covers application settings, designing your application, processing applications, managing leads and so on. This will be most useful to Admissions and Admissions Admin users. It's scheduled for January 24th, 2023, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
- Introduction to Running Courses covers course settings, lessons, assignments, discussions, tests, grading, and so on. This will be most useful to Academic Admin, Faculty, and Teaching Assistant users. It's scheduled for January 26th, 2023, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
0 Comments