Two weeks' worth of release notes in one article. All the incredible, low, low price of... free.
Features & Improvements
You can now put program and "expiration dates" on student ID cards.
You can now export transcripts in bulk and do mass label printing using the Data Slicer.
Added first name, last name, and middle name (but not in that order) to the linked fields in applications.
Added a few new API calls: you can now use it to set someone's primary email address as well as finalize courses. You can also update someone's gender and birthday with it. Go nuts with this, developers!
You can now add your own text to the notice Populi sends out for aid disbursements and refunds. We added a few new settings for the feature, too:
- Do you want to send emails for disbursements/refunds by default? You can override this setting for individual batches.
- What do you want those emails to say? We've added a few new variables to make these emails more meaningful (things like amount, award, term name, etc.).
- Three different wash cycles: normal, pot-scrubber, and china/crystal. It also comes in stainless steel and white.
- Okay, we replaced financial aid with a dishwasher. If no one likes it, we can just push a button and change it back.
Added city and state variables to the filters in the Donors, Inquiries, and Leads reports. Now your donations and admissions junkets can be targeted with laser precision.
You can now export the answers for deleted course evaluation questions. We had to build a flux capacitor to do this—not to mention speak with the OED about re-defining the word deleted.
Mailing list exports now divvy up first name and last name by default. Mail merges will be simpler than ever, presumably.
Customers ran into a thing: Discipline is all date-based, and sometimes the discipline doesn't overlap with an academic term in which the student is enrolled. In such cases, the discipline doesn't show up on the transcript at all. Well, we figured out a way to run a post-term discipline check to catch those "non-conforming" events, and if it finds anything, it slaps them on the student's transcript.
Added a paid date column to the Unpaid/Unapplied Deposits report. 'Cause sometimes you just wanna know when they were paid, right?
Bugfixes
Get this: even if you hadn't set up Campus Life, you could still "successfully" add a violation or consequence to a student. Why don't you try it right now? See that? That doesn't happen any more because we fixed it.
Fixed a small-to-medium pile of issues with the video encoder.
Financial aid awards have a Report as... setting. Well, we were totally ignoring that setting when you created, for example, a custom Pell Award and looked at the IPEDS financial aid report. Great, huh? Fixed.
Fixed a number of truly arcane, edge-case bugs with 1098-Ts and T2202-As.
Fixed a bug on the IPEDS report that incorrectly recorded Associates' degrees alongside Bachelors' degrees in graduation rates.
In the words of the guy who fixed it: "Oops... we were letting advisors remove courses on the registration page if the course was past the add/drop time. Nuked."
Some people wanted to export Email addresses from the Master Change Log. So now we let them.
Squashed a server error when you'd try exporting student ID cards from a filtered student dashboard.
The application fee field wasn't showing a dollar sign. We wanted to add one like this but we opted for a more genteel $.
It was once possible to add an inquiry, get an error saying that it didn't work, and nonetheless have successfully added the inquiry anyway. We put a stop to this madness.
There was a wonderful thing happening where Financial Aid users would try to export 1098-Ts and get a tripwire. I mean, what Financial Aid user would care a lick about those forms this time of year? We opted to snip the tripwire.
Fixed a bug that wouldn't let you remove communication plans in bulk.
Fixed an issue that used Any as a gender as opposed to Unknown. Little known fact about computers and stuff: words like "any" break themJKLD78ds7&UsSO J+Dkflks Woah, see that? They prefer "unknown".
Occasionally you could print an aid award letter and get extra lines of text indicating that the student had been awarded an award with no name in the amount of $0. Despite the extreme usefulness of this feature, we're a bunch of jerks who got rid of it.
Ensmartened the standard-term overlap-check so that it only catches terms that... actually overlap.
Likewise ensmartened the Pay Now calculation to take payment plan due dates into account.
Also ensmartened race/ethnicity exports according to IPEDS Race/Ethnicity, Hispanic or Latino, Race(s) definititions.
The export helper on the Leads report showed deleted fields. How silly.
The program filter on the course evaluations report was, as one developer put it, "subtly buggy". With hints of cocoa, cassis, and stone fruit, it should have been a real winner, but there was also a strong note of wet cardboard, which made the filter thing completely undrinkable. We decided to add a catalog program filter, which doesn't really fit with the wine metaphor joke I was working on (got distracted, sorry). Whatever the case, the program filters on course evaluation reporting are now useful.
Degree honors were including courses taken after the degree granted date in their calculations. Ridiculous.
The Lead Source filter condition was broken in every report in which it was used. Don't know what happened—maybe it got wet? Anyway, fixed it.
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