Release Notes - 12th August 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.

More media features

We've kept up the momentum on introducing great new media features with some changes that help you produce even better looking media rich layouts.

On pages where you have an embedded video player, but don't want the video to start playing immediately, the recording's summary image is now displayed in the player until the play button is pressed. This means you no longer get the empty black player blighting your otherwise perfect layout!

Recognising that you sometimes need more than one image to summarise a recording, we have added the option for an 'alternative image' which you can include in your media list mini layouts. This can be used, for example, to include a mugshot of the speaker.

MP3 files can now play in the embedded player, so they no longer need the pop-up player.

When a media list item has finished playing, you now have the option to set the list to play automatically the next item in the list. This allows you to create a rolling playlist. The currently playing item is highlighted in the list.

You can now also configure your media lists to play the item in a player on another page when clicked. This could be used to play media in a list on your homepage in a specific group where there were a media list shows other related videos.

Find out who has read your mailings

Documents can be hidden from the site search

More layout flexibility for the Group Navigation component

New options for manipulating organisations and staff in the Query Wizard

Other enhancements and bug fixes

• Images can now have captions of up to 1000 characters (the previous limit was 200)
  
• The percentage results for polls were occasionally not adding up to 100, due to rounding errors. We've fixed this.
• We have corrected some errors on the shop sales reports that were due to incorrect time zone conversions.
• Also in the shop, there was a rare error when certain combinations of offers were applied which meant that customers could not complete the checkout. This is now fixed.
• Donation-type items that were set to be hidden were still appearing at the checkout stage. This behaviour has been corrected.
• In the 'Manage Bad Emails' area of the Mailing Wizard, you would get an error when trying to remove users from groups. This has been fixed.
• There was an error linking to images in the Internet Explorer and Chrome browsers which is now fixed.

Let us know what you think!

Release Notes - 14th 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.

Helping you keep the content of your web site interesting, fresh and relevant!

Your feedback in a recent survey was that keeping the content of your web site interesting, fresh and relevant is a key concern.

We're pleased to announce that Endis and Premier Christian Media are partnering together to bring you great Christian content and great web applications in one platform. Both organisations will be promoting Premier ChurchInsight to help UK Churches make better use of new media. Please read more on www.churchinsight.com/premier.

Over the next few months, Premier and ourselves will be working on providing several content channels -  e.g. testimonies, kids zone, etc - for you to select for your website on ChurchInsight platform.

We already have one feed - the Best of Premier. In this release, we are making available a Testimony feed. You can place this on your site as required. See the 'Premier Feeds' module (found under the 'Lists and Feeds' section in the layout editor).

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 organisations) in groups, but you can also email the staff associated with an organisation, 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 original templates remain editable only by users who have the mailing permission on the groups the templates are located in.

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 on 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

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

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" checkbox under "Advanced Filters".

Organisations

Preferred address setting

Display improvements

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 shop 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." For more information on how to set meta tags, see our article on ShareInsight.

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 was not correctly appearing where a shop's payment processor was PayPal. This is now fixed.
• 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 rotas 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!

Insight Training dates in July and August

Release Notes - 16th June 2010

More great new features and a handful of fixes. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

Media list can now play in embedded player

In a recent release, we brought you a brand new media component. We've now added the ability to link it with the media list component so that the contents of your playlists can play directly in the new media player component. So now you can create pages with rich media content that is dynamically updated and playable right there on the page - no more pop-up players!

Just head off to the Themes & Layouts area on the Settings tab, drop a media list component on the page, drop a media player component on the page and then, in the configuration settings for your media player module, choose "Media List" from the media location options. If you want to have more than one list/player pair on the page, you'll need to make sure your media list has a unique title and that you enter it into the "media list title" box in settings of the player you want that list to play to.

Mini-layouts in the media list component

Customisable 'Help' page

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!

Other enhancements and bug fixes

• We've fixed the broken link to "Update your profile" on the login box component.
• There were some outdated instructions to import calendar CSVs into Outlook 2000 that we've removed from the monthly calendar page. The export functionality remains, however.
• 'Antigua' was incorrectly listed as a European country in the delivery regions. This has been corrected.
• When creating option choices for a payment group, the display was broken in the Firefox browser when clicking the 'Add description' button. This is now fixed.
• We have added the SMIL file type to the available options for audio/video media. This currently only supports load balancing from certain streaming media providers and is not, at this stage, full support for SMIL.
• Canada and New Zealand have been added to the list of site regions for currency, language display and paper sizes etc.
• The forum threads page was aligned incorrectly in certain circumstances in Safari and Chrome. This is now fixed.
• The PDF attendance register report in the Reports area of the Web Office now matches the PDF generated from the attendance tab in the Site Manager.
• We've fixed an issue where "Loading..." was permanently displayed in the Resource Browser instead of the date.
• The anchor pop-up in the document editor was sized incorrectly in Firefox - now fixed.
• For sites that had chosen to have the group tree in the Web Office initially collapsed, no notification icons were displayed. The notification icons now display correctly in all circumstances.
• The sent date for system emails was showing incorrectly in the mailing wizard. This has been corrected.
• In the document editor, links that had been edited could not have click-tracking added due to a bug. This has been fixed so click tracking now functions properly.
• Email templates are now available when emailing a user directly from their user record.
• In some circumstances, documents that were not publicly visible did appear in lists in the Web Office immediately after they were created. This has been fixed, and all new documents should appear straight away.
• The CSV shop data export was missing some new line characters, now fixed.
• Layout components can now be added to the Welcome articles in payment groups.
• Audio/video recording publication and expiry dates weren't properly respecting time zone settings. This is fixed now.
• The NIV daily bible verse feed no longer works, so existing feeds have been changed to point to the ESV feed.
• Searching by tag no longer retrieves deleted documents.
• For sites with a larger than average font size, the 'Add card to wallet screen' contained overlapping blocks. This has been fixed.
• Apostrophes can now be entered in all 'Quick Find' fields.

Release Notes - 27th May 2010

Two great new features and a handful of fixes. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

Combinations of query results

Insight's Query Wizard already offers you powerful functionality for searching and manipulating your data. In this release, we've given you a whole new level of flexibility, allowing you to compare the results of different queries - for example, "find me all the people in the 'Leaders' group who aren't in the 'Resources' group" or "find me all the people in either the 'Leaders' group or the 'Staff' group.

When you have run a query in the usual way and have your results, you now have the option to save them - at the bottom of the results, choose 'Save & Compare' then 'Save these results' and then, as with saving queries, you have the option to either save in your personal folder or in a specific group. After the results have been saved, you can find them again by clicking your personal folder or the relevant group, and selecting the 'Saved Results' tab.

Next time you get the results to a query, you can compare the results of this query to any set of results that you have previously saved - choose 'Save & Compare', then 'Compare these results with another results set' and you can then choose the results you previously saved and say how they should be compared with your current results set:

• Union - List all items (e.g. users) that are in EITHER results set
• Intersection - List the items (e.g. users) that are in BOTH results sets.
• Complement - List the items (e.g. users) that are in one results set but not the other.

Related Group Memberships

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!

Other enhancements and bug fixes

• The list of possible tasks on the results page in the Query Wizard had become so long as we've been adding features, that it had become a bit confusing. All the same tasks are still there, but we've grouped them logically.
• In the Web Office, on some documents, there was an error when clicking the 'Viewing History' tab. This has now been resolved.
• During British Summer Time, all-day events imported into Google Calendar using iCal were not showing on the correct day. This has been fixed.
• We've made a small fix to the new rotas interface so that the rota's height is adjusted correctly when adding new events.