Thursday April 18 Updates

1) Login:

• We have changed our Login widget and implemented  greater school branding.
  Here are two examples:

• After logging out, you are now redirected to the login page.

2) Feed:

• When posting on a feed, you developed  a more user friendly "Custom" popup  to allow you to select targeted groups of people, and to confirm your selection.  
   

• When you post on a group feed, we give you the option to send Email Notifications (it's unchecked by default). Email notifications are disabled on the school feed.
• We reset the group feed notifications to "On" for all existing members and it will be set to "On" for all new members by default.  This notification can be easily turned off by going to Account > Notifications.  We also allow the recipients of the notification to turn it off in a simple click on a link at the bottom of the email.

3) Events:

• We added a "Select a Date"  dropdown on top of your list of events, to allow you to quickly visualize  the events for a given date in the future.
  

• When you create an event, we added a validation to prevent you from mistakenly creating an event with an end time inferior to the start time.
• The "Edit" link present on the calendar for each event used to be available for School Administrators only. It is now available for all officers of the group which is hosting the event.
• We re-implemented the event feedback rating. The average rating for your past events are now displayed on your list of events (for Officer only).
• Group officers can now add their own Form/Survey link to the "Feedback Request" email sent to event attendees (24 hours after the event took place).
• We now allow students to post event feedback in just one click on the email notification link (no need to log on).
• We added a customizable "Item Type" (i.e. Event Ticket, Merchandising, etc) for all Registration Options when you create your events.
• We fixed the event "Drafts" view, we are now displaying the latest drafts on top, we don't sort by date anymore.
• We created a feature which invites event organizers to take a post-event assessment survey (this feature will be released by April 15th)
• We added the "Officer Notes" field to the Excel Attendance List download

4) Emails:

• We added a "More" button at the bottom of the "Sent emails" page to allow you to see more than just the past 50 sent emails.

5) Members:

• We improved the layout and logic of the Add Members and Add Officers popups.
• We added a Members Extension feature, which allows group officers to extend the default profile of their members: group officers can now create a simple Form and invite their members to provide additional information.  This provided information will then be displayed on the profile of the member for other group members to see.

6) Money:

• We improved the Refund Request notifications to officers and school administrators in charge.  You can now decide who will receive the notifications under "Officers > Notifications".
• We added a Transaction Type and a Payment Method to all transactions in CampusGroups. These 2 fields have also been added to the Transaction Download. These fields can be customized for each school but have default values:  
  • Transaction Types are: Event Ticket Sales, Membership Fees, Refund, Expense Reimbursment, etc.
  • Payment Methods are: Online Gateway, Check, Cash, etc

7) Rooms:

• We released our Room Reservation Mobile App (this is only available to schools who have implemented the Room Reservations module).
• We will soon release an improved design (April 15th). And this Web App will be available in 1 click from pour iPhone App (no login required):

• We added a new widget on the School Feed page, for users to see and manage their  room reservations.
• Officers can now cancel a room reservation created by another officer of the same group.

8) Discussion board:

• We added a button which allows a club officer to set the "Follow Discussion Board" setting to "No" for all members, in just 1 click.
• We added a "Follow" checkbox for each Section and Category on the discussion board.

9) Budgeting tool:

• We made improvements to the Budgeting Tool by adding Sub-Totals and Grand-Totals per Fund Source, Budget Item Type and also per Event.
• We also adding Allocations and Revenues on top of each budget for club officers to see.
• We improved the overall layout as well.

10) Notifications and Privacy Settings:

• We improved the messaging system between a user who submitted a form and the officer in charge of managing the form.
• We improved the Account > Notifications/Privacy page by adding more privacy settings for groups and individual users (coming up March 29th)

11) UI changes:

• We unified the little red notification counters to alert you when something is new.
• We also implemented color coded buttons on all forms in the system.

12) School administration:

• We improved our Events Upload conflicts resolution page (this is only available to School Administrators for the time being). You can now re-upload the same events and they will be edited as long as you add your own "Event Id" in the Excel file.  You will also be able to delete events the same way.
• The Events Upload script will allow you to edit room reservations as well.
• We implemented a way for you to only allow "Same Day" events (this configuration can be used by all schools):

• On the Groups page, you can now hide the "All" tab and choose which type of group should be listed by default.

13) Mobile:

• We added a new intro page for users who browse CampusGroups from an iPhone or an iPad:

14) Bug fixes:

• We fixed the mailing list creation (the name was not always saved properly)
• We fixed the room reservation cancellation popup (it was not closing properly)
• We fixed the waiting list promotion button
• We fixed a time difference issue for schools outside of the US
• We now display 12:00am instead of 0:00am system wide
• We added formatting for money amounts: $1,232.00, instead of $1232

Did you know?

• The CampusGrous iPhone App can be downloaded for free.  The next release will be pushed by April 15th and it will include:
  • A new school feed with the ability to post photos.
  • Improvements around the UI and navigation.

What's keeping us busy?

• We are working on merging the Dashboard and Settings tabs into one unified "Dashboard" tab.
• We are creating an improved and more unified design for all widgets in the system.
• We are working on a chat feature, between two users or within a group of users. This feature will also be available on our iPhone App.
• We are working on a new left menu and feed post box.
• We will soon start posting more relevant automated news on the feed.

Thanks for reading! 

The CG Team

Friday March 1 Updates

1) Events:

• The "Event Reminder" feature has been improved (under section 7 of the event form). You can now preview your reminder message and include mail merge fields.
• We released the Waiting List feature and added a dedicated field in the attendees listing download.
• You can now add a link to a form/survey in the Feedback Request emails which get sent a day after the event.
• The new Donation feature can now be disabled by schools who do not allow donations. Please feel free to contact us for more details.
• For a paid events, the RSVP confirmation email is not sent right away. It will be sent once the payment gateway has confirmed the success of the transaction to CampusGroups.
• We have improved the Event Details page: we now display the pending registrations (people who have started to register but have not completed their registrations yet).
• We changed some of the confirmation messages to make sure people would complete their registration

2) Rooms:  

• We created a Room Reservation Web App that will be accessible in one click from the iPhone App or on Android and Windows Phone browsers. This will be released on March 15.
• The header of the Rooms grid now remains visible even as you scroll down the grid.
• When you mouse over a Room Reservation which is attached to an event, the event details will be displayed.
• We improved our Room Reservations Conflicts page (this is only available to School Administrators).

3) Admin:

• We added a sub-categorization for all Group Types in order to differentiate student-run and admin-run groups.
• We added the ability to create "Admin Only" officer positions available for admin groups only. This will allow some of the back-end tools (i.e. Budgeting Tool, Refunds, etc) to be restricted to certain users only.

School administrators can now add new users to the system from the Control panel as described here: 
http://support.campusgroups.com/customer/portal/articles/992796-adding-new-users-quickly

4) General:

• When you manage a group, we now display the "Recently Visited" pages on the Dashboard to help admins/officers get back to where they often go in just a click.
• We added a CampusGroups Features Feedback group and we will start adding "Feedback" links next to features to allow our users to post comments, feedback, suggestions or report potential bugs.

5) Budgeting Tool:

• We made improvements to the Budgeting Tool by adding Sub-Totals and Grand-Totals per Fund Source, Budget Item Type and also per Event.

6) API:

• We implemented a test URL for the event's RSS feed. Please feel free to contact us for more details.

Friday February 8 Updates

1) Events:

• We introduced the possibility of collecting donations when creating registration options.
• We added a notification telling you, as you create or edit an event, when the event conflicts with another one on the calendar.
• We included a Member Lookup box to make it easier to add attendees.
• The "Event Topic" field on the "Edit Event" page is now displayed only when the school has added "Event Topic" tags.
• Bug fix: if you create a custom reminder message, it will now appear in the event reminder email instead.

2) Members:

• When a club requires people to sign a waiver, officers can now filter members to only display the members who signed or didn't sign the waiver.
• To improve the page loading time, when managing group members, you now have to use the "Assign Tag" button to assign a tag.

3) Profile:

• All action buttons are now blue. Back button was updated to match CG's identity.

• After clicking on the "Make this my profile photo" or "Make this my cover photo" buttons, the button becomes inactive and a loading message shows up.
• Bug fix: clicking the "Make this my profile photo" button now properly selects the photo currently displayed.

4) Tags:

• You can now filter events, emails, members by selecting a Tag.
• Tagged elements can now be viewed in the "Tags" section.
• We improved the dropdown to filter the elements by Tag.
• We improved the "Edit Tags" design.

5) People:

• You can now see "What's new in your favorites" thanks to red counters on the People page.

• Two different views - grid or list - are now available to display people. You can set your favorites in the "list" mode while your Class is in grid mode, and vice versa.
• People's names are now displayed on top of the photos of the grid view.
• We created a more explicit "Favorite" button, to favorite People with the popup for instance.
• We redesigned the popup so that it adjusts to the content and clicking on someone now redirects directly to his/her Profile.

6) Forms & Surveys:

• On the My Forms page we changed the Send a Message link into a "Message" button to make it easier to use.
• Answers are now displayed in the "Recent Activity" page, just for officers who are authorized to manage the survey.

7) Navigation and UI:

• The UI of the "Favorites" section was improved.
• We improved our Single Sign-On by fixing the redirection.
• We created cglink.me shortened links for the: Group Pages, Join Group Pages and Group Websites.
• We are currently working on keeping the topbar fixed at the top of the page while scrolling.

8) API:

• We added two new RSS feeds: list of groups and list of members for a group. Please contact us for more information.

Featured Schools: London Business School best club award

We thought we would share this great example of report built by the Student Association at London Business School, using data extracts from CampusGroups.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Fall 2012 best club award at London Business School

Today, let us share this excellent report built by the Student Association at London Business School. Using data extracts from CampusGroups, the SA officers established "Who is the best club" at school. Great analysis!

See full report 

And the winner is, the Energy Club!

Customer Support - Success Stories (Jan 29th)

It's always a pleasure to hear great feedback from our users.  Here are a few examples:

• "Congratulation! Everyone on your team provides outstanding support and it’s been great working with you." - Cindy, Carnegie Mellon Tepper, after a follow up on a new Budgeting Tool feature developed in collaboration with the school.
• "Thank you for getting this to me so quickly. I really appreciate it." - Emily, NYU Stern Undergraduate College, after providing a custom report on room reservations stats for an internal meeting.
• Thanks again!  We are all very excited about rolling out this new platform." - James, HEC Paris, after setting up on-site pre rollout tutorials.
• "Great, many thanks for the conversation with Yorick and the quick follow-up." - Erin, Duke Fuqua, after providing phone support to a school administrator.
• "Looks great, thanks." - Samir, London Business School, after providing school administrators with a custom report on support stats.
• "That worked. Thank you!" - Jerry, SMU Cox, after helping a school administrator who could not log in.
• "Thank you so much! This is really great!! We really like the brand new website!" - Wonki, NYU Stern, after redesigning brand new Stern Private Equity Club website.

Friday January 25 Updates

1) Events:

• We improved the Registration Options layout to make the number of sold tickets more visible.
• Officers can now add people as attendees and/or mark them as attended.
• To  add new attendees to an event, you can now upload a list of users by  listing their email addresses in a text box. In order to prevent manual  creation of transactions you will have to pick a Registration Option but  will not be able to pick a "Paid" Registration Option. We are working  on a new way to enter Credits/Debits manually.

In section 6 of the Event form, under "Where should this event be  displayed?", the "Logged on users only" option is now working properly.  Users need to be logged on to see these events on the school-wide  calendar.

The Sales End and Invite Only features have been reviewed and two small bug have been fixed.

A bug with the Waiting List feature has been fixed (options won't appear as "Sold Out").

2) My Favorites:

• Favorite emails, forms and selected payments can now be retrieved from the left menu under "My Favorites".

This section's design was adapted to match he rest of the My Profile pages.

3) Officers:

• We added a new "Add an officer" button to make it faster to add a new officer under "Settings".

4) Emails:

• When sending a new email, we added the ability to select "All  Current Members" or "All Non-Members" via two "Select All" checkboxes.

5) Website:

• We  re-implemented the Photos widget for your Website.  It is now  displaying a list of thumbnails based on the Photo Tag you specify in  the CONTENT tag, e.g. [CONTENT:PHOTO={tags:12345}].  You can find this  CONTENT tag under Settings > Tags by clicking on the small triangle  on a Photo Tag.
• Some of the Website widgets were not loading properly and required multiple page refresh (F5). This was fixed.
• We fixed alignment and widget widths.

6) Feed:

• We fixed the design issue of the "Delete" icon on long comments.
• We added a "Read More" link to long posts. 
• The design of the School Feed was improved slightly this week again.

7) Media:

• We improved the navigation between "Photos" and "Docs" in the "Media" part.

8) Groups:

• We added a "Message" button to the My Groups page.
• Under Group settings the "Payment by check" option, which was not being used, was removed.

9) Tags: 

• Member tags have been fixed.

10) Discussion Board:

• We fixed a bug with the discussion board, which was displaying posts school-wide on some of the group pages.

11) Navigation and UI:

• New white buttons have replaced all of our gray buttons across the entire site.
• We changed the confirmation messages to make them easier to read with larger and nicer icons. 
• We moved icons to sprites to speed up page loading.

12) Webservices:

• Logging: we now log all the SQL requests done via the CreateUpdateUser API.

Friday January 18 Updates

1) Events:

• We added a Google Map and improved the display of the  address in the "Where & When" box on all event registration pages.

• We also added a Like and Comment link on all event registration pages,  and included a "Print Receipt" and "Print Ticket" button on the "My  Payments" page. Printable tickets include a standard QR code and ticket  number. 

• We  moved the Event Description box higher in the "Create an Event" form and  made it mandatory. We also moved the "Custom Profile Fields" under  Registration Options. 
• You can now download your list of members with the  events they rsvp'ed to.
• We fixed the "Download" button in  the "Event" part next to the "Duplicate" button and fixed a bug in the  event approval notification. 
• We created shortened URL links for events, forms and documents (ex: http://cglink.me/r127995). These links will help you cut and paste shorter links into your  emails. 

• Coming up:   
  • The Waiting List feature will be reactivated on Friday Jan 25th for all schools.
  • We will push an improved attendance listings.

2) People Page:

• The "Loading more people" message is now easier to read, it doesn't move when you scroll the page. 
• We added a mouse-over popup on the People page with counters (i.e. Number of groups, RSVPs, posts and photos) and bio.
• Bug fix: the Javascript loading People pictures does not run anymore when the user leaves the page.
• Once the popup has loaded data for one person, we cache this data so  that the popup quickly displays data on second visit. Also, the Bio in  the popup is now truncated to 85 characters instead of 110 in order to  fit on two lines.

3) Forms:           

• Users can now access member profiles from the survey/form answers page.
• We added a new My Form page, with all submitted forms and the ability to edit Form submissions (when it is allowed). 
• We have developed 90% of the new Form builder, soon to be released  (see attached preview). Among other new capabilities, the builder will  include improved Pages and Logic functions.

4) Groups:           

• When non-admin users wish to create a new group, they are  now asked to contact a School Administrator. 
• In the Control Panel  school administrators can now prevent a group from being displayed on the  "Groups" page by checking the "Hide" checkbox. Unlike with the  "Published" option, events of the group will be displayed on the  "Calendar" page. You will find this new feature on the Groups Listing on  the Control Panel for your school.
• School Administrators now have the ability to  classify groups by tag.
• You can now set a default Group Type to  be displayed upon landing on the "Groups" page (click on the "Groups"  menu on top). Otherwise, all groups will be displayed by default under  "All".

5) Media:           

• You can now switch between Photos and Docs using a  radio-button instead of a dropdown. 
• We fixed some small bugs  on the photo slider.
• When the user selects the area of a picture  to crop, the final cropped image matches precisely the user's selection  (this used to not be the case).
• We improved the confirmation  messages around image cropping. When you crop an image, a "Cropping  image, please wait..." message shows up. This used to create confusions.

6) Feed:

• We made general design improvements, fixed  the alignment of boxes in the feed, reduced the size of the avatars next  to the comment boxes and added a comment box by default on each post. 
• We are now working on a feed design update for which we will soon have mock ups.

7) Profile:

• We improved the design of the My Inbox, My Groups, My Events and My Payments pages. 
• We moved the Resume box to the bottom of the Profile page in preparation for new Resume popup. 
• We have been working on a new, clean My Profile page. Mock ups will soon be available.

8) Navigation:

• We fixed the width of the Manage menu, as well as irregular padding and margin between buttons.
• We continued to add more "Red" counters in many of the links in the  left menu and in the iPhone App. These counters let you know when  something is new since the last time you visited a page/section. 
• The left menu as been improved, the code has been simplified and there  is a slideUp/slideDown effect instead of a fade effect when displaying  sub-menus.
• We made the Switch Group dropdown larger and easier to select a group. 
• We have been working on a new left navigation design for which mock ups will soon be available.

9) Website:

• We fixed an issue on Websites whereby the content of some widgets would not be displayed and required to refresh the page. 
• Updates to the "Topbar", "Header" and "Sidebar" are saved properly.
• We fixed a display issue, that was preventing the side column of a website to be positioned properly.

10) Tags: 

• We fixed the display of the Student Documents on the "My Tags" page.

11) General:

• We added Audit Tracking on "Delete" actions. 
• We  improved our White Labeling and domain name configuration process. It is  now easier and faster to replace the CampusGroups.com domain with your  own domain.

12) Security:

• We have added security on more than 30 public facing Webpages. 

13) API:

• We have added business phone number to the createUpdateUser() Web service.  

Happy New Year!