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Release Notes: May 2022

The May 2022 release of Alinity was deployed to Test environments on May 12th and Production environments on May 19th. A summary of the changes included in this release appear below.

Alinity is Moving to Microsoft Azure – Almost There!

If you have been following our monthly blog posts, you will have seen our announcements about migrating Alinity to a new hosting platform in 2022. The new platform is Microsoft Azure© and we have been working with it in our development environment for about 9 months now. We are excited about how well it is performing. We still have some work to do so that Alinity takes full advantage of some of the latest technologies Azure offers. We are getting close however and expect to start moving client TEST environments to the new platform in July.

We will continue to upgrade Alinity with bug fixes and new features each month. As you may have already noticed, the volume of changes we make to Alinity in recent releases is less than in previous years because we have been reserving about half our team’s capacity for migration tasks. Still, this month’s release has some great additions and refinements we think you’re going to love.

Change List

Change Type Applies To
VCR Buttons New Feature General
A new search feature has been introduced to improve the efficiency of working with person and organization details. When you navigate from the organization search to an organization’s details or from the person and registration searches to the person details you will now see a set of “VCR buttons” to the left of where the new quick search was added last release. With this you can navigate forward and backward through the results from the prior query. There is also an info button that will show you the criteria of the query that created the list being used. This feature uses a browser’s local storage to operate which is available by default in every browser except the private mode of Safari; browsing regularly with Safari does have storage enabled. Most browsers will not share storage between new tabs so you will be able to run two different queries, on person for example, in two different tabs and be able to navigate through the two result sets independently.
Invoice Template New Feature Invoice
Do you have standard invoice content you use often? There is a new feature that allows you to designate invoices as templates for easy re-use. Loading a template will copy the invoice line items to the new invoice allowing quick creation of common invoices.
Batch Deactivate User Accounts New Feature Person
 A new feature has been introduced to disable old user accounts as a batch. This feature is found on the people search screen. The additional option is available from the batch action drop down menu and will allow you to disable user accounts for all selected members. It is recommended that this action be used with the ‘No recent login’ query to target individuals that have not logged into the system for several years.  This feature allows you to manage your subscription more easily since subscription limits and costs are based, in part, on “active” user profiles which are defined as those that can login.
Lock Email Drafts New Feature Email Administration
A new configuration option is now available allowing you to lock email drafts from being modified or deleted except by the person who created the draft (and system administrators). See the Setup->Other Configuration option and search for “email”.
Election Management New Feature Elections
The election management feature has been replaced with a new set of screens that allow administrators to create and modify elections including updating the choices on the ballot.  Multiple questions on the ballot are now supported. 
Supervisor List Additions Feature Update Registration
The supervisor list on a member’s employment details has been updated to show additional contact info as well as to allow you to navigate directly to the supervisor’s details or to open those in a new tab using the button to the right of their name. Additionally an email can be sent from Alinity to the supervisor when the email address is clicked.
Updates to No Recent Login Filter Feature Update Registration
The no recent login filter has been updated to exclude inactive members and applicants while only including active registrants. A checkbox has been added to include applicants in the search. For new clients looking to find out who hasn’t logged in since their implementation and looking for applicants who haven’t logged in recently.
Expired Registrations Display Feature Update Person – Other Forms
Expired registrations now appear crossed out on the Person – Other Forms search tab.
Reviewer Search Speed Bug Fix General
When searching for a reviewer to add to an Application, Audit, Learning Plan, or Profile Update, the system previously had to perform multiple searches. One search to find the set of matching users, and then a search against each user to see if they were an eligible reviewer. This is now done in one step which can dramatically improve performance for larger result sets.
Mailing Preference Auto Opt-In Bug Fix General
When selecting the auto opt-in option on a mailing preference, the system no longer attempts to assign the preference to all existing records. This process was too slow and lead to preferences being assigned to inactive records. The aut0 opt-in option now only applies to new records you create. A utility will be added in a future release to allow you to assign mailing preferences to existing records. 
Election Results Publish Date Bug Fix General
The system now enforces a business rule to ensure that the publish date and time you enter for an election is AFTER the official close of voting (the “closed” time).
Unexpected Error Date Range Search Bug Fix General
An error that was preventing accurate selection of records within a date range on the Unexpected Error (utility) screen is now corrected. 
Other Form Search Page Speed Bug Fix General
The Other Forms search page has been re-designed to only return users with a form assigned to them. This improves search speed significantly, as well as resolves the issue with pinning records on this page. In order to assign Other Forms to users in bulk, please use the action from the Person search page instead.

Next release

The June 2022 release of Alinity is scheduled for deployment to production sites June 16th.

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