Release Notes - 12th July 2010
We've released a host of new features across a whole range of areas in the Insight platform. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.
Enhancements to the Mailing Wizard
You can now mail staff and payment group bookers & delegates
We've added a whole new level of flexibility to the Mailing Wizard by allowing you to specify what sort of person you want to contact. So now you can not only email users (or organizations) in groups, but you can also email the staff associated with an organization, or you can email bookers or delegates in payment groups.
On the first step of the Mailing Wizard, you'll notice a new drop-down menu for "Recipient Type", from where you can choose who you are mailing. In addition, you'll find that when you come to write your message that there are now additional mail merge fields relating to the recipient type you have selected.
Mailing templates can now be made available to sub-groups
When you save a mailing template, you now have the option to make the template available to sub-groups of the group in which you save it, thus allowing you to create site-wide mailing templates.
The templates remain editable only by users who have the mailing permission.
Mail sent status now available from the user record
We've added a column to the user's mailing history so that you can see the sent status for a mail. If a message that you send bounces, we record the error message so that you can see why they did not receive the message.
This information has always been available in the Mailing Wizard, on the mail itself, but we've added this additional column for convenience.
More flexible permissions for content
One of Insight's most powerful and flexible features is the fine-grained control that you have over permissions, ensuring that content is only viewable and editable by exactly who you want.
We've now made it even easier for you to control the visibility of your documents, events and media by enabling them to inherit the security of the group to which they belong. Previously, you had to set the visibility on each item of content that you created, meaning that if ever you wanted to change a group's visibility you also had to change every item of content in the group.
Now, all you have to do is select "Inherit visibility setting" on the Properties tab of a document or "Inherit access permission" on the "Recording Properties" tab of an audio/video recording or the "Event Details" tab of an Event. For new items of content, this new setting will be selected by default. With this setting selected, the content's visibility will be determined by whatever you set on the summary tab for the Group, so that you don't have to go through and change every item.
Home phone number on user record
Home phone numbers are editable on the family tab, rather than on the user record. However, understandably, many of you have found this frustrating because you want to see all of a user's numbers in the same place. So, we've added the home phone number, read-only, to the user details tab along with the other numbers, and there's a link that takes you straight to the family tab if you need to edit it.
More Query features
Head of Family Criteria
In a query for users, there is now an additional criteria 'head of family' which would allow you to return a list of only those users who are listed first in the ordering defined on the family tab. This is useful, for example, if you want to draw up a list of contacts, and only want to contact each household once.
More columns for staff results
For staff role queries, we've added more details for both the organization and the underlying user - address, email, phone and title.
Financial reporting
Some time ago, we added an assignment report to the Financial Reports in the Web Office that allowed you to see how much your discounts had cost in your site's payment groups. However, this didn't help in situations where you had discounted the full cost (i.e. a 'free' registration) because there were then no assignments to report on! We have plugged this gap by adding similar functionality to the receivable reports, where you can now choose to report receivables by Payment Group Discount, and Payment Group Discount & Scheme, in addition to all of the existing reports. To report specifically on 'free' registrations, select the "Amount = 0" check box under "Advanced Filters".
Organizations
Preferred address setting
You can now indicate the preferred correspondence (email or postal) addresses in much the same way as you can for users.
Display improvements
We've made some improvements to the display in the directory component and there is now an option in the module's configuration settings to exclude the country from the displayed address if it is the same as your site's region.
Even more flexibility in meta tag creation
Better inheritance
You can set meta tags on a site or group level and allow any sub-groups or articles to inherit these settings (similarly with store categories and items). However, up until now, if you wanted to override these meta tags on an individual group or article, you would lose all the other inherited tags.
Now, when overriding tags, we have added an option which allows you to inherit any tags that aren't explicitly re-defined at the current level. Just tick the box that says "Inherit tags not defined above."
Additional fields
Group description and document summary are now available to be added to meta tags.
Other enhancements and bug fixes
- The Java applet that customers use to download digital files in the shop has been upgraded so that it no longer displays security warnings.
- The pay later option now appears correctly for sites using PayPal.
- The calendar component can now display up to 100 events for up to the next 365 days.
- When the items selected in the shopping trolley did not meet the criteria for a particular delivery method, the message to explain this was not correctly displayed. This is fixed now.
- In some browsers, QuickTime movies were not scaling correctly. This was due to a workaround that we introduced for a bug in Apple's player. As Apple have now fixed this bug, we were able to re-introduce the correct scaling. If you are still experiencing issues with the QuickTime player, do ensure you have the latest version.
- In payment groups, the option to prevent repeat registrations was incorrectly preventing people registering in the rare case that they were the booker (but not a delegate) on an earlier registration. This is now fixed.
- The task in schedules to check for double bookings was inadvertently removed in the recent overhaul. Although this task was still available through the Reports tab, we have reinstated it to the main rota creation interface, where it can be found on the Properties tab.
- In My Area, a redundant link to 'My Involvement' still appeared even if you had removed all of its sub-options. This is now fixed, so that 'My Involvement' only appears if one of its sub-options are available.
- We've made some changes to make the membership report (on the Reports tab) more accurate and consistent. As part of this change, we now automatically populate the date field to today's date when you change someone's membership status (on their user record) from current to former.
Let us know what you think!
We'd love to hear your comments - good or bad - on our latest release, so leave a comment below and let us know what you think! |