Laura Merris, MSL's Product Manager, has chosen her development highlights from our 16 releases during 2022. Some are from the product roadmap and some are great suggestions from you, our MSL community. How many of these goodies do you use now? We'd love to hear - and see - how you're using these new resources and what they have helped you achieve this year.
Data and Reporting
11 additions and improvements to reports were added in 2022, including our brand new Dashboards:
Dashboards
To better support your reporting, insights and decision making, we're sure that you're going to love the new Dashboards now available in your MSL System. Keep track of engagement with your website, best selling products, groups membership, events and voters all in one Dashboard that you create and manage for your own requirements.
News articles report
To display all information about news articles including view count and average rating.
Ticket holders frequency report
Details the number of events for each ticket holder for events within a date range.
Ticket holder demographics report
Displays the demographics for ticket holders for an event or events, filtered by brand and date range.
Representation & Student Voice
We kicked off the year with a couple of big features, starting with referendum voting in StudentLink and StudentLink+ apps. We followed this big hitter up with the election admin results tab which allows the publication of election winners and results to your website in just one click.
(And if you want to customise the results display, we've given access to the ‘results API’ which includes per-stage count information.)
Other releases throughout the year included:
Bypass candidate approval option
Speed up the nominations process with the option to remove the need for election admins to approve candidates after they have nominated themselves. This facility can be turned on per post.
Sort election posts
A useful tool for elections that have a large number of posts such as your reps or society execs; election posts can now be sorted alphabetically in the elections admin screen for ease of viewing.
Custom voting messages
We introduced the option to show custom abstention confirmation messages and an ‘unused preferences’ confirmation when a voter hasn’t ranked all possible candidates. This makes sure the voting process is as clear as possible.
Student/Member Engagement
Accessibility improvements across the website have been a priority in 2022 and these have included image alt text and updates to the review basket page. More behind-the-scenes type updates have included security and analytics improvements to counter clickjacking, blocking svg embedded scripts and to support Google Analytics 4.
But we've also made loads of improvements that directly enhance the student experience. Here are just a few changes you might have missed:
- Maintain contact with your purchasers - an email is now required before checkout
- Quick access to view a logged-in only event - an automatic redirect will take the user to your log in page.
- Keep a closer eye on event ticket sales with a new view in the events tickets screen which shows number of sold Vs number of in-progress tickets separately.
- Job lists - can now be filtered by employer.
- Making it easier to update/refresh a web page, multiple images can be attached to a page and the PageBanner widget selects which one is to be displayed.
- Retrieve a current user’s memberships quickly with the new API.
- Choose the best order to show committee (or any other type) members on a page using the GroupedMemberlistLwidget.
- Create an attractive display of any organisation's events by setting a per-organisation default template that will be used when an organisation creates an event.
- Optionally hide poll results to voters; customise the message that poll voters see after voting and now set poll times as well as dates.
- Forum categories can be permanently deleted (if not in use)
- 👀✨ Emoji support to make engaging and fun content! 🎁 😎
We also said hello to a number of new widgets including the mailing list button, slider (scrolling banner), SSO login and CurrentUserName widgets.
Editing Experience
We know it can be stressful maintaining a website – so we hope that some of these new things make the editor's life an easier one:
- Spruced up toolbars and filters throughout the admin areas on the website.
- There’s now a handy alphabetical filter on the organisation select page, plus the search bar on that page has an autocomplete.
- Making new content generation much quicker, website editors can now ‘copy events’ and ‘copy pages’.
...and to help manage everything in the Admin Web:
- Giving quicker access to information with fewer clicks, the search function is now located on the landing pages for Groups and People.
- Filtering is available on group and membership lists, plus filtering and paging has been added to the Child Groups page.
- Add icons to your grouping types - style it up...
- Tidy up category lists without needing to create new attributes by renaming attributes.
- Time saver alert! Grouping types can have default attributes that are set automatically when creating new groups.
- Set a default location (that will be pre-selected) for where a group is created when using ‘Create organisation from template’.
- No more waiting for the automatic overnight update: ‘Populate dependent groups’ - available on the Memberships page and the Import Membership List – populates all groups whose requirements involve the group in question.
Advice & Student Support
Case Manager contact form
Making support services even more accessible to students, we've introduced a new widget which displays a contact form on your website. Data captured in that form is posted directly in to your Student Case Manager reducing manual data entry by advice service staff.
Events & Commercial Services
Talking about participation and the student experience inevitably brings us to events and the resources you need to run slick, safe and secure activities.
Web Door Entry
MSL Web Door Entry allows you to redeem tickets and entry group options on any device with a modern web browser. Supports capturing photo ID with the device’s camera and redemption of external tickets.
Opayo card terminals
MSL Web Till now integrates with portable payment terminals to process payments through Opayo. That means fast, efficient transactions at the MSL Web Till to support in-person events, venues and shops.
Stripe transactions
When a user makes a purchase, they will now see a ‘please wait’ message after clicking ‘Pay now’ to avoid any accidental multiple payment attempts.
In addition, we've made the reconciliation of your Stripe transactions easier with a cross-reference between Stripe and MSL. The MSL transaction reference and item details now appear in the Stripe description field in your Stripe reports.
e-ticketing
E-ticketing set up gives access to review and change the layout of your e-tickets, create new tickets and edit the messages that purchasers receive.
The new 'Queue' screen monitors the e-ticket sending queue. And for any that do get lost in the ether, the option to re-send tickets for individual transactions is now available.
Student Opportunities & Skills
A sneak peek into the future...
They didn’t quite make it into 2022, but we’re working now on these great new features for MSL Volunteering & Employability:
- Time saver alert! Option to auto-accept volunteers for an opportunity.
- Set a cap for the number of volunteer applications for an opportunity.
- Send automatic email notifications to volunteers when they are accepted and email reminders for volunteers about upcoming opportunities.
All coming soon in 2023!