The 19.1 MatrixMaxx release is here with a brighter, whiter, refreshed Intranet interface and a brand new Notifications and Insights feature!
Our free Overview Session has passed but you can view the recording here!
Enhancements available in MatrixMaxx 19.1 include …
Refreshed Intranet Design
[starting at timestamp 1:00 on Overview Recording]
As much as we have loved our MatrixMaxx Intranet interface over the last few years, we wanted to lighten it up a bit. Big thanks to all of our users who took the time to fill our our Survey back in February. We took responses on the survey seriously, and our changes reflect your thoughts and comments.
Highlights include:
- A compressed banner/header
- Lighter backgrounds, better contrast on accordions, search results, reports
- Restyled Dashboard (and, just for fun, new animal cams!)
IMPORTANT: This release includes updates to the scripting used on the MatrixMaxx pages. Scripting is often cached by the browsers and only periodically refreshed. If a page is not formatting properly, or elements are missing or not behaving properly following this release, please do a ‘hard refresh’ on the page prior to contacting Matrix to report an issue. (Using a keyboard, a browser can be forced to pull all elements of a page, again, by holding down the SHIFT key and clicking the browser refresh button.)
[Internal Reference: P8493]
New! Notifications and Insights [Alpha version]
[starting at timestamp 18:30 on Overview Recording]
Inspired by current trends in AI and Deep Learning, and troubled that staff are being increasingly overwhelmed by email notifications, we have introduced the framework of a new feature in the MatrixMaxx dashboard: Notifications and Insights.
In the upper right of the Dashboard, there is small blank area just waiting to tell you something. When an appropriate ‘trigger’ occurs, an icon will flash into view, notifying you that this is something interesting to see or review. Clicking on ‘MatrixMouse‘ (our alpha test icon) will allow you to browse through basic notifications and link to more advanced insights (the ‘i’ symbol) based on this notification.
This Alpha version is our proof of concept and only includes one module/trigger: New WWW profile creation. This is something that everyone is interested in, and allows you to give it a test drive while it’s still in production.
We want and need your feedback on this new concept. Does it seem useful? How would you like to see it expanded? What sort of Insights would be interesting to you? We certainly have ideas, like expanding the feature to cover all modules and allowing users to manually pick/choose their preferences (including switching out MatrixMouse for a custom avatar linked to your profile).
[Internal Reference: M76047]
PDF-on-demand now has bulk mailing!
[starting at timestamp 34:30 on Overview Recording]
Back in the MatrixMaxx 17.3 release, we first offered the PDF-on-demand upgrade for invoices. (The 17.3 overview session shows the dynamic PDF invoices in action.) Now, anyone with this PDF upgrade and organization-based memberships will have access to the new Bulk expansion, which allows staff to generate both emails and PDF invoices in bulk. For example, a search for all organization membership dues invoices with a balance produces 45 results, which can then be bulk-mailed a ‘balance due’ email, with a PDF of their invoice attached.
In addition, admin staff may create additional email templates for use by this bulk function. For example, in addition to the generic ‘balance due’ email, the association may decide to create special template(s) for older invoices. (e.g., a template for over 90 days)
[Internal Reference: P-8430]
Available: Renewals Pre-generator
For associations who pregenerate annual membership renewals (typically for the purposes of printing them in bulk), you may now work with Matrix to implement an interface for you to do this yourselves. This upgrade adds a new ‘Pregenerate Membership Applications‘ feature in the Members module menu, and may include any or all of your membership types.
Cost: TBD depending on the number of membership types involved and whether or not pregeneration scripts already exist for them. Also, we highly recommend that clients who purchase the Pre-generator consider a package purchase of the Bulk Emailer + PDF-on-demand functionality at the same time. This allows us to hook these 3 pieces together seamlessly, which leads to some very attractive economies of scale.
[Internal Reference: P8434]
Available: Enforcement of Unique Email address per record
More and more associations are interested in integrating with marketing automation tools and systems. However, these newer systems – based on the concept of email as a unique individual identifier – often don’t play well with older legacy systems that allowed multiple users to have the same email and relied on a unique database key.
We now have the ability to change your MatrixMaxx implementation to force and validate a unique email per record. This is definitely not something that all of our clients want/need, but this will be a useful tool for some.
Cost: TBD depending existing data and implementation setup. Estimated at $1750-$3000
[Internal Reference: J-Maxx-3282]
Other Enhancements and Changes
Contacts: Individuals: We have connected a nickname database to our individual name dup-checking (on intranet and www) and searching, allowing certain common nicknames/names to be found, even if they are not in the database. For example: William Smith is only in the database as William, but if someone types the name ‘bill’ he’ll now come up as an option. (Internal Reference P12877)
Committees: Upgraded committee export with ‘field picker’ allowing staff to be able to select fields (Internal Reference 119415)
Members: Member Record Searching: Member record search results now include a link to see all existing membership applications/renewals for that member. (Internal Reference M75948)
Communications: Surveys: Ability for staff to delete surveys. (Internal Reference Maxx-3279)
Meetings: Add fee code & total paid to search results of Search Registrations (Internal Reference 119576)
Meetings: New canned, 1-click WWW roster, available for linking, ‘‘WWW Roster of all Reviewed Attendees regardless of Payment (Public), including State column” (Internal Reference Maxx-3321)
Commerce Billing: Tweaks made to the invoice description display to not duplicate item names even if there are in fact duplicate line items on the invoice. (Internal Reference 118732 )
Commerce Store: Tweaked Copy Product function so that the slug (pretty URL) of the original product is not copied exactly. Instead, a slightly different/unique slug is generated, so if the staff user makes no changes to it, it will be unique. (Internal Reference 119174)
Reporting: Ability to search by organization existence (e.g., find everyone with no company) and save exports from individual query builder (Internal Reference 119415 and Maxx-3316)
Advocacy. Congressional Committee Data is now pulling from a new source, and data is updated. (Internal Reference M75099)
Security, Privacy and Integrations
In addition to the upgrades noticeable in the interface, there are other things that have been changed ‘under the hood’ or are in the process of changing:
PayPal: PayFlow change to Transparent Redirect [internal reference MAXX-3210]
As mentioned last year, PayPal Payments Pro and Payflow Pro merchants/users who want PCI compliance while maintaining full control over designing and hosting checkout pages on their website can now use Transparent Redirect. Transparent Redirect posts payment details silently to the Gateway server, so this sensitive information never goes through the merchant’s website. Meaning our MatrixMaxx payment page — and thus your website, assuming you don’t have other systems taking credit cards — are fully PCI-compliant as PayPal is PCI-compliant. The MatrixMaxx team has the initial version of this code working on our DEMO site, and are now assessing the level of effort for this upgrade, based on version/age of PayFlow account and setup.
Server Upgrades en masse to Ubuntu18 and NGINX
The MatrixMaxx AMS has functioned on a LAMP [Linux (Ubuntu, currently 14.04 LTS, aka Trusty Tahr), Apache, MySQL, Python] stack for years, but now we are beginning our transition to LEMP [Linux (Ubuntu, version 18.04 LTS, aka Bionic Beaver), NGINX, MySQL, Python]. Our newest clients are already running LEMP, and we’ll be transitioning our DEV envionment in the next month or so, followed by production upgrades in the summer 2019.
