The June 2022 release of Alinity was deployed to Test environments on June 9th and Production environments on June 16th. 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 |
| Recently Viewed Records | New Feature | Admin |
| On the person search and details screens as well as the organization search and detail screens we have added a new feature that will show the last 10 person or organization records, respectively, that you have viewed. If you have viewed any of these records other than the one you are currently on they will show up in a menu icon with a clock either next to the VCR and quick search buttons, for details screens, or next to the search buttons on the search screens. Clicking on a record from the list will take you directly to that record and clicking on the “new tab” icon to the right will open it in a new tab in your browser and make that tab active; middle-clicking on the new tab icon will open the new tab without switching you directly to it. This list will contain the last ten records you have viewed and will last for 12 hours since the last time you used one of those screens. When you open a record that is in the list that record will be moved to the top of the list so that only the oldest records are replaced when going over ten records. | ||
| Exam Documentation Block | New Feature | Jurisprudence |
| When creating an online exam the questions now support a configuration option to make them into a Textblock. Turning this option on will allow you to add documentation between questions, for instance to create instructions for groups of related questions, in addition to being able to add documentation to the section headers. Textblocks can be used in exam sections that are not configured to display a random number of questions. This is due to the fact that the order of questions and textblocks is not guaranteed when randomizing a section. | ||
| Post-Exam Emails | New Feature | Jurisprudence |
| When configuring an online exam, a new section will be shown in the top header for “Notifications”. This will allow you to choose an email template and automatically email the member that template when one of three scenarios occur: they pass the exam, they fail the exam, they reach the maximum number of failures for the exam. | ||
| Business Email Address Support | New Feature | Admin |
| Business email addresses can be added to organization contact records to record a specific work email. This allows organizations notifying employers on changes in registration status of its employees, to email these notices to work addresses associated with the organization’s domain, rather than the personal email address of the contact. These emails can be viewed by the recipient on the Registrant Portal “My Emails” option but this access ends when they no longer have an active role with the organization. Organization contact records can be edited by finding the contact either on a person’s details or on the contact list for an organization. On the organization details contact list you can select contacts using the checkbox on the left hand side of the record and then open the menu above the checkboxes and select email. When emailing a person this way their business email address will be used if it has been set up on the contact record otherwise it will use their primary personal email address in Alinity. | ||
| Block SysAdmin Access to Private Email Senders | New Feature | |
| System Administrators can no longer unmark a Private Email Sender as being private. This prevents the possibility of a disgruntled admin sending emails from another address that would make the recipients think they came from a different person. If an email sender truly should be unmarked as being private, please have the admin who owns that address update the record. | ||
| Unknown Login Notification | New Feature | |
| To improve overall security, an automatic email is now sent when a user login is detected from an unknown source. Users will now receive a notification when a successful login is completed from a location that the system does not recognize. If no action is taken from the user the new location will be stored as safe for the user. This is disabled by default until an admin enables the “Unknown Login Email Is Enabled” other configuration option; this allows you to edit the email template prior to it being used. | ||
| Search Competence Type Activities | New Feature | Competence |
| Activities on the competence types details screen may sometimes span several table pages in a configuration. This made it difficult to find and edit activities related to a competence type. Admins are now able to search the activities on the competence type details screen using a text search box. | ||
| Corporation Permit Download | New Feature | Corporation |
| A new permit enabled option is available from the edit screen and mirrors the function available for registrant practice registers. Disabling the option will disable the permit download button on the member portal for the specified corporation register. | ||
| GL Transaction Screens | New Feature | GL Transaction |
| New GL transaction search and details screen is now available. Admins are now able to search for GL transactions and review its details. This screen is located under the Accounting menu item. Note that this is an initial release of this feature that will be expanded to incorporate many new functions, queries and reports in future months. One of the highest priority items is the ability to update GL Account codes in existing transactions (but which are not behind the locked date). | ||
| Learning Requirement Overrides | New Feature | Competence |
| Learning Requirements can now be overridden by specifying the same name, but a different starting year. The later year, as long as it is on/past the year of the member’s competence plan, will always take priority over the earlier requirement. | ||
| Audit Period Extension | Feature Update | Audit |
| Audits for both members and corporations now allow you to extend the audit period on an individual basis. Directly on the form in the admin module you are able to add a new audit expiry date for that individual audit. | ||
| Sender on Email Templates | Feature Update | Correspondence |
| When creating or modifying an email template you can now also select the default sender the email should come from. This will default the sender when an admin creates a new email from the template as well as when it is used in an email trigger where a specific sender hasn’t been set on the trigger directly. | ||
| Exam Offering Comments – Online Exams | Feature Update | Jurisprudence |
| Online exams now support setting the comments for offerings. This will allow you to provide specific text for the offering that the member will see before they proceeed to take the exam. | ||
| Deactivating Document Types | Bug Fix | General |
| Document types required by the system, such as for PDFs of Profile Update forms, can no longer be disabled. This prevents an issue where the approval of a form can result in an error since an admin has disabled the document type needed to generate the PDF of the approved form. | ||
| Election Results Report | Bug Fix | Elections |
| The base report for final election results has been updated to account for elections with more than one question being asked. The ballot questions will now be shown to the left of the grouping of ballot choices applicable to that question. | ||
| Email Template Data Source | Bug Fix | |
| Email template in certain situations would not pre select the saved data source on edit. This allowed admins to save without a data source selected creating issues with merge fields. A fix has been implemented in order to ensure the data source is preselected on load of the edit screen. | ||
| Reserved Characters On Task Descriptions | Bug Fix | Admin |
| When attempting to save a task description containing special characters, such as > or <, you would receive an error. This has been updated to handle these characters to ensure they are sent to the server safely and saved with the task now. | ||
| Retain Rejected PDFs | Bug Fix | General |
| Rejected forms that are turned into PDFs are now retained when an admin or member re-applies for the same process. These can be found under the member’s document library. | ||
Next release
The July 2022 release of Alinity is scheduled for deployment to production sites July 21st.
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