The 18.3 MatrixMaxx release is here! If you have wanted to do free-form activity stamping or more searching/exporting of past committee roles, it’s now live!
Our free Overview Session was held on Thursday Sept 27, 2018, at 11am Eastern time on Zoom. You may access the MatrixMaxx 18.3 Overview Session recording here.
Enhancements available in MatrixMaxx 18.3 include …
The Organization/Company Query Builder has been in place for several years; we have now put the framework of the Individual Query Builder into place. (internal reference Maxx-3253)
Reports -> Individual Search -> Individual Query Builder
This structure allows for more complex querying, which is desired by some of our power staff users. We also needed this more advanced structure to support meaningful searching into the new activity stamps and into committee roles/memberships.
This is only the beginning of Query Builder. We have been saving search suggestions from past years and are working through them now. So look for expansion of this search in future releases.
Please note that Individual List criteria can be made from the existing Advanced Individual Search and also from the new Individual Query Builder. So any list may now combine criteria from either or both of these searches.
Activities Upgrade
Building on the popularity of stamping communications, we are unveiling the ability to stamp activities in this release.
For example, perhaps you give out important awards each year and you want to track this. Or perhaps you want to track CEUs that are being held in an outside system. Currently, the only way to do this is to put in a custom demographics field and add a variety of options each year. The activity stamper offers another way to track this information, that puts it in the activity area with other key interactions. (internal reference MAXX-2447 and Maxx-2448)
Functionality in this initial release includes:
- SiteAdmin ability to add/re-order Types and Categories for use by staff: Admin -> Edit Activity Options
- Ability for staff to manually record a custom activity to an individual or organization, from the Activities section of the record (bulk stamping will be a future release, probably 18.4 in December)
- Ability for staff to search for certain activities: Contacts -> Activities -> Activities Search
- Ability to search for individuals based on certain activities and save activity searches as individual list criteria, using the new Individual query builder function
- The framework for a 3rd party to write an activity via the API (for example, for a 3rd party LMS to write to an individual that they completed their Safety Certificate for 2018)
Important Notes:
- To reduce confusion, the existing ‘Activity’ section of the existing Advanced Individual Search has been renamed as ‘Interactions’ as it searches a variety of key database interactions and data, rather than the explicit ‘Activity’ table
- Imported Data may not report properly: For example, if you are using Individual Query Builder to look for activity stamps of membership deactivations, these stamps will not exist for imported data. Activities are stamped by transactions occurring in the MatrixMaxx AMS; we rarely import activity stamps
Committee Role Search/Export
Many of you have asked for better ways to see, search and export committee history. The first of these enhancements is going live with 18.3. (internal reference P-8347)
New Report: Contacts -> Committees -> Search Committee Roles
and
Individual Query Builder Searching
These new search functions goes directly into the Committee Roles table and the Committee Membership table and allows the user to query for various attributes. In addition, we walk up to the Individual data tables to allow searching, reporting, and exporting of role, committee and individual data.
Important Notes:
- Imported Data may not report properly in this tool, depending on how complete or incomplete the imported data is
- Using these new tools – particularly Query Builder – requires some understanding of the tables powering committees. The Committee ROLE holds the startdate, enddate, and role itself. Each Role creates a Committee Membership, which holds a connection to the committee itself as well as startterm, endterm and leave date. This table structure was created based on a certain concept of appropriately tracking continuous committee membership, even if an edit occurs in the role (for example, if an inaccurate role was entered and then changed), but can be confusing for non-database admins
- Our current date searching does not meet the needs of all use cases in this release. We are aware of this and looking to upgrade the interface for more complex searches in 2019. Examples that the interface can NOT currently support include:
- Search on everyone who was on a committee between two dates, e.g. 7/1/2017 – 6/30/2018
- Search on everyone who was on a committee on a specific date (i.e., 3/15/2017)
- Find all chairman(s) of the board from 2014
- Find anyone who had a chair role on any committee for any length of time in 2014
- In the Role Search …
- Because of the way we track roles, if a committee has multiple users in a role in a given year, you’ll see some duplicates and multiple rows. For example:
- If Jon was the Chair for the first half of the 2016 year, and Barbara was the chair for the second half of the 2016 year, they would both show on a search for people who started on the committee in 2016. So it would look like there were 2 chairs
- If Susan was Vice-chair for the first half of the 2016 year, and chair for the second half of the 2016 year, she would show as both vicechair and chair in that year. i.e., Susan would be have two roles in single year and have 2 rows for this year in the export
- In Individual Query Builder …
- The report/export function on the query builder is based on INDIVIDUAL table and not the Committee Role table, so exporting allows for more extensive field access and yields unique individuals as results, not roles.
- The role report is good for committee management, but not for cross referencing committee information against anything else.
Other Enhancements and Changes
Contacts -> Organizations created on WWW side are now explicitly tagged, tracked, and searchable [reference item maxx 3212]
- In the Advanced Organization Search, there are two new searchable interactions: ‘Organization Created on WWW’ and ‘Organization Not Created on WWW’.
- Note that this will only work for organizations created on the WWW side from this release forward. Previously, this data was not explicitly tracked but could be inferred by reading Change History.
Communications -> Manual Communication entry by staff -> Fixed a display issue where the display order on the drop down box for Staff Names did not match the actual sort order (disconnect between sorting on firstname vs. lastname). Now, both the sort and the display are by firstname, which is generally how staff would address each other [internal reference 117325]
Meetings -> WWW Calendar -> Changed Meeting links from absolute to relative. These older, absolute-generated links were causing issues with full https websites and redirects. [internal reference 117017]
Meetings -> Intranet Registration Search -> Added more available ‘Meeting’ fields to the Export of Registrations [internal reference 117244], in addition to the pre-existing Meeting Type and Meeting Name, including:
- Meeting Type
- Location Name
- Location City
- Location State
- Location Province
- Location Zip
- Location Country
- Categories
- Meeting start date
- Meeting end date
- campaign code, and
- accounting code (the ‘main one’, entered for informational purposes on the first page of the meeting setup. Smaller associations tend to have one code for meetings and like using this for reporting, while larger associations tend to have multiple codes per meeting and find this less useful)
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]
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 dev Demo site
- In speaking with PayPal, we now understand that this upgrade only works for newer versions of PayFlow, and will need adjustments made to the setup in the PayPal Manager
- Next Steps:
- We need to confirm all clients’ versions of PayFlow. You can do this by logging into PayPal manager and taking a screen-shot of the landing page, or we will call you and we’ll walk through the login together (we can not access the PayPal Manager console for most of our clients due to the new question security step)
- We will put out a separate announcement in the next week on this topic, but if you’re already ready to do this, you may submit the screenshot as a Work Request through the Matrix Group’s Client Extranet, or send it to Tanya’s attention via webmaster@matrixgroup.net
Universal Ban of the SemRush Bot (internal reference MAXX-3263)
For any MatrixMaxx clients also hosting their WWW websites with us — meaning your sites proxy through the Maxx servers to achieve a single domain — we have put in a universal ban against any SemRush Bots. We have been seeing increasing issues with these bots exhibiting risky and unprofessional crawl tactics, causing site slowdowns and restarts. If anyone is utilizing one of these bots in a useful and positive way, simple flag to us and we’ll lift the ban from your site.
That’s it!!!
Our free Overview Session was held on Thursday Sept 27, 2018, at 11am Eastern time on Zoom. You may access the MatrixMaxx 18.3 Overview Session recording here.