NOTE: Due to changes in industry practices, Discussion lists that are mentioned in this article are no longer available in MatrixMaxx.
Not even a month of quarantine can stop the MatrixMaxx quarterly release! Our 20.1 MatrixMaxx release rolled out the evening of April 21, 2020, launching a bunch of new functionality. Please take a few minutes to review these patch notes, as all notable changes are documented here.
You may also watch the recording of the 20.1 Overview Session on Thursday April 21, 2020 to see some of these enhancements in action.
Meeting Enhancements
Meetings, whether in-person or virtual, are a critical part of our lives. So, we’ve added a variety of new features to support you in your meeting endeavors …
WWW Meeting Registration Notification & Insight (Overview Video Timestamp 6:00)
The ‘MatrixMouse’ has gained another notification, this time for a new Meeting Registration from the WWW side
- As with the Commerce store order notifications, only staff users with access to the Meetings module have the ability to see these notifications. They will be ON by default, with the ability to turn them off. (internal reference MAXX-3444)
- The Insight will provide information on recent registrations for that meeting, and a comparison of how registrations are doing in this meeting compared to the ‘previous’ meeting. (So be sure that you are setting ‘Previous Meeting’ in your meeting setup!)
Upgraded Intranet Meeting View Dashboard (Overview Video Timestamp 8:40)
Each meeting holds an amazing amount of data, and has a variety of reports, but these were buried and not enough staff were aware of them. In this release we have pulled data visualizations from two of the most used reports – Meeting Comparison and Meeting Summary – right to the top, with quick links to the full report for a more useful dashboard experience. (Internal Reference: M-76094)
- Setting the ‘Previous’ meeting is critical to having a complete dashboard, so we’ve given you a quick-link to do it!
- If a meeting has no registrations, these new sections will be hidden (so the top remains tidy!)
- In order to handle load-time on the larger meetings, the new visuals have separate loading mechanisms and make take a few seconds longer to load than the rest of the meeting view page
Badge Builder: Single Badge Printing and QR codes (Overview Video Timestamp 21:55)
Our integrated Badge Builder now has some exciting new functionality, based on YOUR feedback over the past year and in our recent User Survey.
- 1-click single print functionality is now available
- From an individual registration, staff may now click to print this badge using the badge template set for that meeting (Internal Reference MAXX-3291)
- If the meeting default template is not set, a link will allow staff to set this
- Note: This function is currently only available for the registered attendee, not for spouses/guests
- QR codes may now be placed on the badge template
- When building badge templates in MatrixMaxx, you may now add a QR code (Internal Reference MAXX-3365)
- Staff may scan attendee badges upon entry/exit from meeting event sessions to create a note of event attendance in the individual’s registration, and this scan data is also available in the ‘Event Attendance (Scanned from QR)‘ report in the Events section of the Intranet Meeting View page (Internal Reference MAXX-3450)
- Attendees may scan each others badges to create basic contact records on their phones/tablets
- For more details on how the QR codes can be added to the badges and used, see our full support article on Badge Builder QR codes
And .. More Meeting enhancements!
- Meeting Summary Report Changes/Enhancements
- Help text and labeling improvements on the top portion of the report, updated to be clearer in regards to Registrations vs. Attendees (Internal Reference 121525)
- New Version of the Meeting Summary Report: Meeting Summary Report by Submit Date. See new link under original “Summary Report” in Meeting View > Rosters/Exports/Reports > Reports, which allows you to limit the registrations in the summary report to a submitted date range (Internal Reference P-8691)
- WWW MyMeetingMaxx: Turned off the display of the ‘Website’ section on the MyMeetings display if no websites are there, to avoid user confusion (Internal Reference 121911)
Other Enhancements and Changes
Intranet Login Page: Refreshed and Rejuvenated! Enjoy a moment of Purple Zen as you log in. Stay tuned for more images and tips to come. Note: if the login page seems to look a little odd, trying doing a ‘hard refresh’ (shift-reload) on your browser to force the page to reload its elements. (Internal Reference M-80015)
Communications: Delivery Report Upgrade. We have enhanced this report to pull bounce information from certain individual bounces that we receive when messages are sent out using our built-in Mailman list server. If the info is available, you’ll see an ‘i’ next to the email in the report. Note: we are still working on an appropriate way to report domain-level rejections, so these are not yet reflected in the information. So if acme.com decides to reject all of your emails to the 5 staff you have @acme.com in your database, that is not yet being reflected on those 5 bounces. (Internal Reference MAXX-2592 and 2591)
Communications: Search for Individuals Lists has been upgraded to allow searching by ‘who can post’ which allows staff to quickly and easily find discussion lists (i.e., those set to ‘members of the list’ can post) (Internal Reference: MAXX-3439)
Communications: Exclude Criteria for lists have been added to the base generic product. (Internal Reference: 122326)
Commerce: Product Store: New Report/Search of Unsubmitted WWW Orders (Carts in Progress). As part of our efforts to expose ‘in progress’ engagement data, this report shows unsubmitted carts of WWW users, similar to the pre-existing ‘unsubmited registration’ reports the meeting module (Internal Reference MAXX-3443 )
Fundraising: Reports: Pledges: New 1-Time Donor Report, which is paving the way for our forthcoming First-time Donor Report, which will have more advanced logic for determining a ‘first’ donor in particular range of criteria. (Internal Reference P-8684)
Sponsorship: Staff Contact Email Address. Previously, staff could type in ‘Staff Contact’ name for each Sponsorship, for use on the invoices and emails, but the ‘from’ email address remained the default for the module. We have now added a new ‘Staff Contact Email Address’ field that – if filled in – will be the “from address” on emails from this sponsorship. If left blank, MatrixMaxx will use the default email set during implementation of this module. (Internal Reference 120564)
Membership: Reports: New Membership Activation Report for Individual Members. (Not yet available for Organization-based Memberships) Based on ‘activation date’ in the database, we are producing a report that compares membership between a point in time and the same point in the previous year. (Internal Reference: P-8729)
Membership: Corrected an issue with the Membership Application Search by review status, which sometimes made the results not include all ‘pending review’ applications (Internal reference: 122219)
Reports: Individual Query Builder: added new criteria options to search by Organization Demographics (Organizations > Organization Fields) and also by whether or not their Organization is on a particular Organization-based List (Internal reference: 122544 )
Reports: The Disengagement Reports – both Organizations and Individuals – now have exports (Internal reference: 120233)
Reports: Advanced Organization Search: Export from Advanced Organization Search, For the PC (primary contact) and BC (billing contact) fields we now offer Personal Status and IndividualID as field export options (Internal Reference: 122554)
Contacts: Individual View page: Page request history available to SiteAdmins raised to 64 days, keeping history longer for review and troubleshooting purposes ( Internal Reference: MAXX-3442 )
and …
Intranet Dashboard: Updated the Animal Cams available on the MyMatrixMaxx Dashboard widget! Note that you may need to refresh or re-select widgets for them to update their stream source.(Internal Reference MAXX-3311)
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, including
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 our transition is continuing to LEMP [Linux (Ubuntu, version 18.04 LTS, aka Bionic Beaver), NGINX, MySQL, Python].
As part of this upgrade, we are exploring ways to increase email delivery rates for both are transactional emails (e.g., registration confirmations) and list emails sent through our built-in Mailman list server. We are experimenting with two different approaches to doing this, involving DKIM and Amazon SES. Once we have decided the best approach, we will offer this to more of you!
The Matrix Virtual Meeting Platform …
Meetings, whether in-person or virtual, are a critical part of our lives, so in addition to all of the new meeting-related features in this release we are also working to integrate the MatrixMaxx AMS with a stunning new virtual meeting platform that Matrix Group has been working on. A ‘sneak peek’ of this new development will be given during the 20.1 Overview session.