2017 Product Changes

A list of all the new features and improvements from 2017

Angela Lim avatar
Written by Angela Lim
Updated over a week ago

In 2017, we introduced 42 new features and improvements to help you do your work more efficiently. Below are the highlights of all the new product upgrades.

Contacts

  • Add program enrollment types when creating contact - agencies with program enrollment types can enroll contacts in their program's categories at the initial contact creation point

  • Contact notes - improved formatting for multiline text fields and notes, notably paragraph breaks for longer text

  • Document names are required - document uploads require that the document has a name

  • Name Suffix field - a name suffix field has been added to a contact's First, Middle and Last Name

Data Imports (for agencies with Imports enabled)

  • Program-Wide Forms - program-wide form results can be imported

  • Relationship data - the ability to import participant and relationship data and create a relationship on a group contact has been added

Form Builder

  • Duplicating a field - clicking 'duplicate' on a field brings the duplicate field directly under your original and adds "(duplicate)" to the title for clarity

  • Any or All options on Likerts - unchecking the 'Required?' setting on a Likert field sets the rule for allowing 'any' question to be answered instead of 'all'- useful when contacts may not have answers to all rows of a Likert

  • Conditional Fields - conditional fields with rules that are set to show "0" will now show 0 instead of "calculated value"

  • Elect a field For top-level display character limit - forms with long field names will now see an improved drop-down menu for 'Elect a Field for Top-Level Display' which truncates the field name

  • Images in Descriptive Text - images can be uploaded in 'Descriptive Text' fields

  • Movable Likert options - rows and columns in likert tables can be moved up or down in the field settings, allowing you to easily rearrange the options in your questions

  • Save Forms from Any Point in the Form Builder - in the Form Builder, the 'Save' button and all form fields will follow you as your form gets longer and longer. No more scrolling to the top to save the form - you can save right where you are working!

Form Results

  • Date format - to ensure consistency across the system, dates must follow MM/DD/YYYY format. Dates entered into a form that are not in this format will produce an error message reminding the user of the format. The form result will not be allowed to save until the date is corrected

  • Duration fields - the requirement that both the hour and minute are needed in a duration field has been removed. H or M can be left blank, and the data will appear successfully in the Report Builder

  • Elect a field for top-level display for program-wide forms - you can now select a field to show on the form results grid for program-wide forms

  • Filter and page-through activities and assessment forms - you can now view and find your contact's activity and assessment forms quicker with our new filtering and pagination feature! Just click on the "Activities" or "Assessments" tab on a contact and you will see new options to filter forms by name, by the staff member who administered the form, by date and by status

Goals (for agencies with Goals enabled)

  • Guided forms progress buttons - the guided forms buttons make it clear to the user what step in the workflow they are taking. The Start button starts the first new form, the Add New button adds a new form after previously completed forms, and Resume opens up an incomplete form

  • Completed goals - new completed form result counts and last completed administered at date was added to the contact goals display

  • Goals dependent on goals and on form completion - a new feature was added to enable goals to be dependent on another goal. Goals can also be set to recur after a set amount of time, based on the date of completion of a different form. This is in addition to goals defined by program enrollments

  • Goal Scoping - ability to specify goals by person or group contacts, program enrollment types, and user types

  • Goals with unavailable dates - goals with unavailable dates are sorted at the bottom of the list of goals

Groups

  • Toggle All participants - a "Toggle All" button has been added to group forms to allow users to select/unselect all group members as participants in the form

  • Create a new contact through a group - if you would like to add a new member to a group or family, but the member doesn't exist yet in VerticalChange, you can now add this member and fill out all of their contact details right from the group or family page

  • Group membership size - we have extended the number of individuals allowed to be added as members of a group

  • Prevent adding individual to a group multiple times - a bug where individuals could be added to the same group more than once through the group's profile was squashed

Permissions (for agencies with Permissions enabled)

  • Edit program-wide forms - we added a new option called "Update Program Form" in permission set options, which controls a user's ability to edit a program-wide forms

  • Toggle All permissions - all permissions in a permission set can now be selected/unselected using the "Toggle All" button

Report Builder

  • Export formatting - included form header and summary data in report exports

  • Performance - improved the speed and performance of report builder filters and the loading time of all fields available to report builder

  • Phone numbers - the formatting for phone numbers has been improved

Security

  • Automatic logout - updates to further protect information on screen when a user is inactive

Support

  • Snapshot Feedback - a new tool was introduced that allows users to send snapshots of their screen directly to the Customer Success team

  • Merging Duplicate Contacts - you can now have your duplicate contacts and their data merged quickly and efficiently by the Customer Success team. Simply submit the information through our Merge Duplicate Request Form

  • New Support Chat - in April, the Customer Success team moved to a new chat system to enable better and more responsive interactions

Tasks

  • Alphabetical list of assignees - the list of staff to assign is now alphabetical

  • Overdue task email notifications - we squashed a bug that was blocking overdue task email notifications from being sent

New Features that Need to be Enabled

The following features are only available to agencies by request. Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you would like to turn on these features for your agency.

  • Advanced calculations - VerticalChange is now using a scripting language called Lua that allows us to write complex calculations into your activity, assessment and contact forms! Lua is our answer to the gaps that our math and conditional fields can't fill when it comes to calculating averages, scores in Likert tables, scores in single-select options and other advanced calculations

  • Optional passwords for contact users - an optional password can be set when inviting contact-level users to join VerticalChange

  • Results Forwarding - you can now carry over results from one form to the next using our new Results Forwarding feature! This feature is great for forms where some fields may not change over a period of time - it allows you to complete your forms faster and forward those unchanging results with just a click of a button!

  • Sealed Records - retroactively seal records within a program enrollment

  • New password policies - an administrator can set policies around passwords such as changing a password every 90 days or preventing the use of the same password more than once


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