July 24 to July 28, 2023 Release Notes

Features & Improvements

We made some pretty big changes to Calendar that should A) speed things up a bit and B) enable many future improvements not otherwise possible before. Essentially, we cut the cord with Google Calendar; all calendar events—school, course, person, groups, et. al.—now reside in Populi (previously, they existed in Google and we drew them into Populi). Here's a full rundown of the changes:

• Any Google-based calendars will no longer be brought into Populi. Instead, all calendar events will be stored in Populi. Among other things, this will make many course views (Dashboard, for instance) a lot faster since Populi no longer needs to wait for Google to send in calendar events.
• Calendars now generate an iCal subscription link that you can add to other calendar programs. For example, you can use a course calendar iCal link to add course events to your personal Google calendar. You can subscribe to the following Populi calendars:
  • My Calendar
  • School Calendar
  • My Courses
  • Individual Course Calendars
  • My Groups
  • Individual Group Calendars
• Users will no longer be auto-subscribed to any calendars in Google. You'll add Populi calendars to Google (and other calendar apps) using the subscription links described above.
• Changes made in Google calendars will not transfer back over to Populi.
• The Google integration no longer includes any calendar settings.

The Calendar help article has been updated, and if you have further questions or run into any problems, we want to hear from you!

Bugfixes

Numerous tiny issues were dealt with, none of which apparently merited any specifics. Probably all technical back-end stuff.

Videos and Focus Sessions

Next week's Focus Sessions will be...

• Introduction to Financial Aid kicks off the month of August with a look at financial aid settings, awards, packaging aid, disbursements, aid applications and so on. This will be most useful to Financial Aid and Financial Admin users. It's scheduled for August 1st, 2023, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
• Introduction to Populi will get you acquainted with setting up your Populi account, logging in, adding new users, login approvals, roles, search, basic reporting, Populi's global settings and so on. This will be most useful to Populi Account Administrator and Academic Admin users. It's scheduled for August 3rd, 2023, 11:00 AM Pacific time.

Josh prepped for this video about Rubrics by staying up late, drinking coffee, and watching episodes of Columbo starring the inimitable Peter Falk.