Hope everyone is having a restful holiday! Although many of us here are also resting after a rough 2 years, I'm excited to share small pieces of continued innovation.
We have improved our Vanity Url capabilities to support your domain name. If your website is Example.com, and you want to host your program at OpenWater, previously you would have to use a site like demo.secure-platform.com; or you would have to give us full control of Example.com so we could add our site to it. This was a big no-no for many IT departments.
The option works similar to our old vanity URL option, and incurs the same cost ($1,200/year). The main benefit is that there is no longer any IT red tape that needs to be overcome. The setup time can typically be done within 1-2 days, instead of the 5+ days needed before.
Today I'm happy to announce an update for customers who use our platform in conjunction with other systems and integrations. We have had a long standing API and have a well documented REST API with associated libraries.
We now also have support for webhooks. Webhooks are light weight messages sent from OpenWater to your system with notifications. If you use a tool like Zapier, Microsoft Flow, or Workato, webhooks can easily be ingested by one tool and then act on another like "IF THIS THAN THAT".
If you have never heard of webhooks, you probably don't need them.
In short, this step makes OpenWater just a tad bit more easier to integrate.
The November updates are now in place for all customers.
Since nearly the beginning of the platform our URLs have ended in /a. For example if you linked demo.secure-platform.com, it would redirect to demo.secure-platform.com/a. With this update we now have support for:
Next up are updates to support our customers using OpenWater to manage their events. We have implemented the following:
Conference Sessions can now have different sets of fields depending on the type of session. For example poster sessions may collect different fields than Presenter Talks. Our “Category Groups” feature you may be used to for Applications and Abstracts is now available for Sessions.
Our gallery now has the ability to be closed off with a secret phrase / passcode. We understand sometimes you want to publish the gallery like a website, but not let everyone see it. This feature now goes behind our login restrictions to have an extra layer of privacy during roll-outs.
Developers who want to make quick integrations can take advantage of Web Hooks
Web hooks are light weight events OpenWater can send out to your system to let it know when something is done. For example every time an application is judged, perhaps you want your analytics dashboard to become aware. With web hooks your developers can now integrate OpenWater with tools like Zapier or Microsoft Flow. No code needed.
I’ll provide a video on this after the holidays.
There are a scattering of other updates that various audiences may benefit from:
The user profile now supports “Nested” / Branch Logic fields
Long Running Reports now have a “Email Me When this is Done”
For customer not using Single Sign On that have to comply with security audits, we support a multi-factor based login to protect admin accounts (or all user accounts)
GDPR Data Delete Requests can now be handled without OpenWater support
Stay tuned for next month, December will include several more long requested updates. Keep the feature requests coming, I hope you can see the features may take days, months or even years, but every voice does get prioritized.
The larger November update will come around Thanksgiving weekend. I recorded a quick video with my phone (the quality is a bit muffled), nonetheless I was excited to share this quick update.
In summary, as organizations work with Hybrid Conferences they need a way to have a single point of chat / discussion. The QR code of the mobile app chat can be embedded within the OpenWater gallery. Attendees who are joining from home can scan the website and continue along with their mobile device for the discussion.
In the example we are using the OpenWater branded events app; this would be replaced with your organization's branded app.
We will continue our efforts integrating more features between the two systems -- this one is now ready to go.
The big update for the month is our data importers are now live. Data import is one of the most painful tasks out there, often because source data is just not clean. Our previous importers would tell you all-or nothing that your data is not in the correct format. Our previous importers also were only about getting historical data into the platform.
Our new importers have set out to solve the following goals:
Make it easy to spot check data entry issues and fix them
Support for Google Sheets for import (so that you + the openwater support team can look at and confirm data is clean)
Import Complete data or Import Incomplete Data and let users continue along
Bulk Import Large Files (e.g. for events filmed in person that need to be uploaded to our content gallery)
The importers replace our old importers and are available to admins with the "Import" permission.
The importers allow you to choose all of the fields for the submission form; or to unselect fields that are not required
From there you can choose to Insert New, Update Existing, or do a mix of both. You can also choose if you want to update the submitter / user data in the process (based on a user's email).
When processing an import, the system will detect errors and allow you to clean up to 50 rows. If you have more than 50 invalid rows, we suggest going back to the source data and cleaning it up.
The following importers now exist
Import Applicants / Submitters
Import Judges / Reviewers
Import Applications
Import Judge Assignments in Bulk (CSV file of judge email + application they should be assigned to)
Import of Sessions
Import of Session Assignments (Sessions assigned to abstracts)
Import of Categories
Along with the importers, we have also improved our export feature to export data in a manner that can be imported by another customer.
This has been a long time coming, and we are excited to see how the use of imports, exports and the like add to the utility of our platform.
We have been working on a lot of small improvements that have been rolled out during August and over labor day in September. This time around a lot of the work was done on the infrastructure side and the average user may not have noticed.
Infrastructure
We improved our reporting engine speed by around 3x. Most people won't notice because 90% of our customers had their reports run in under a minute. However customers who had 10,000+ submissions and are doing large exports will notice 10-15 minutes turn into 3-5 minutes.
We improved our underlying servers in our data center. Another area where most people may not notice, the impact was a mere 0.2 seconds improvement in our average page time load. Not so note worthy other than that we are watching over the little things.
Improvements to our APIs: Developers can now update table fields via javascript API; and via our REST api they can pull out more information around our grants / funding module.
Consistency in our UX. We noticed some times the "Back" button was on the left, other times it was on the right. We have gone page by page to make this slight improvement. We understand for long time users this may cause a minor confusion as you may have been used to the button being in the wrong place. In our UX studies we determined the fix was worth it.
Invoices now have a Partially Paid status in addition to Paid vs Unpaid
Time Savers
In our WYSIWYG editors when you switch into source view we now show you syntax highlighting to help avoid common mistakes like a missing tag.
When you clone a category that has sub categories, we now let you in-line edit all of the subcategories in one go
New Functionality
We added a new concept to our separator fields so that you can pull Read Only values from the form data collected. For now this only works for pulling prior round data in a subsequent round. For example Round 1 let's say you collect an essay, in round 2 you can display the previous round's essay in a read only view. To make use of this, use the "Insert Variable" option that appears in separator fields beyond the first round of a program.
OpenWater Mobile is a fully integrated mobile app with the schedule data. (Premium Feature)
Full Text Searching Our gallery search has been updated to search amongst all fields. Previously search phrases that spanned multiple fields would not show complete results. For example searching Doe, John vs John Doe would miss results the user intended to find
Closed-Captions pulled in automatically A few weeks ago I mentioned you can now add captions to videos in OpenWater. With this update we now improve this to automatically pulling the captions from zoom and adding them to the video. This will take effect only for new conferences booked after July 25.
Application and Review
Lock Program Much like Microsoft Excel let's you lock and unlock a sheet from casual mistakes; we now let you as an admin lock a program and unlock it. This lock is helpful when a program has third party customizations / scripts and you want extra care prior to unlocking it.
Handle Bars Updates Our scripting engine: HandleBars has productivity features added. Now you can select all table field rows in one go and see previews of any application rendering
This update also had some behind the scenes infrastructure changes which will allow us to make major announcements during August around our importers.
Nearly a year ago we rolled out our virtual conference offering; with that offering we had to solve the access problem -- how could people who will only log into this system 1-2 times remember their password?
We created a concept called "Virtual Badge Service" that could link to a google sheet of email addresses or your association management system. This service would then send people a link to access the system.
With this June update, we now have this Virtual Badge Service as a first class concept and are making it available for all user types including the occasional admin or judge.
Allow people to sign in only with their email
Check your AMS / CRM to confirm a user is allowed to access the portal
