2016 was a big year for Higher Logic - we had about 30 big product releases and tweaks and over 100 more minor tweaks. Since you’re in our product almost as much as we are, I’m sure you’ve noticed many of the adjustments we made - we hope it made your life easier!
At Super Forum, I did a recap of the top 10 things we released - according to me - the items I’m most proud of. Here’s a quick recap from my keynote, either to jog your memory or catch up if you missed it:
- Faceted Search - We released Faceted Search early this year – to much rejoicing. Following that we spent a bunch of time refining it, tweaking it and working on performance. We are happy with the way it turned out. So much more useful than the old way of doing things
- Several releases of Event Manager - This was a big deal, and we have much more to come - we have a great product now, but we want to continue to refine it. After we released Event Manager, we looked at the data and analyzed how people used it. It turned out that most of the events were simpler than we designed the platform for, so we came up with simple registration, which makes registration very easy for 95% of the cases. That’s just one example of how we tweaked the product to better fit our clients’ needs.
- Community Notifications - We overhauled the User Experience for the Community Notifications screen to make it much easier for your community members to manage their notifications. Right after we released Consolidated digests last year we got a lot of great feedback from the community on it. People loved the new capability, but members struggled with the interface. This new one is much more friendly and shows you what you need to know very clearly.
- Activity Sync - In our first version of Activity Sync, we picked the top 25 activities we thought you’d like to see in your AMS/CRM. In our second version, we expanded the list to 105 items and added more detail to each so that systems other than just the AMS/CRM could use this data. For example, one client has built a custom web service that turns volunteer activities into committee positions!
- Volunteer Manager - This was a very big release for us - announced at Super Forum last year - an entirely new product! And we already have 99 customers using it - if you want to be number 100, let us know! So far, we’ve gotten great feedback and we’ve kept the development team on the product for the entire year to incorporate that feedback into our updates. As it stands now, we’re very happy with how things turned out.
- Tagging - Here, we changed the interface loop to make tagging far easier for the user. And we expanded it to include all of the system content, except discussion threads. I made a big announcement about it later in the keynote. Watch the video if you missed it!
- Nested and Sub-Communities - Organizationally, this new system makes a lot more sense since it’s a good way to organize and find what you’re looking for. The most important reason for this update was for microsites. Now you can home a microsite at a given place on the hierarchy and it appears as if everything below is part of that microsite. So, for example, chapters can have their own committees that appear as communities on their own site. This update isn’t generally available yet, but hang tight and it will be soon.
- Data Privacy and Security - As almost everyone is aware, this is becoming a bigger deal across the world. We’ve been working with lawyers and consultants to make sure your data is safer. We’ve made changes to the impersonation function, privacy defaults and PII access.
- Automation Rules - We’ve had Automation Rules for over a year now, but since this time last year we added about 40-50 criteria - almost all of which were suggestions from our clients! The UX saw some small tweaks as well.
- CMS Interface - Last but not least, we bootstrapped the CMS to make it easier to use and navigate - we hope you like how it looks! The Navigation and Content screens got a complete overhaul as well. More to come on this in 2017.
We’re Powered By Community
I know Higher Logic often evangelizes the power of community, but in true honesty, we wouldn’t have such a great product without the help of our community. Many of these updates were either prompted by customer feedback or helped by customer feedback - so keep it coming in 2017!