We forgot to put the blinders on the design team – again – and so when they emerged from the Coding Pit, they’d gotten an awful lot of new stuff done…
Notification subscriptions
You can now configure VSys One to notify you about all manner of interesting things:
These notifications can be sent by e-mail, SMS/text message, or show as messages within VSys One itself, and can go to explicit subscribers (people who you've indicated should be told about such things) or to automatic subscribers (assignment supervisor, training instructor, interview interviewer).
Of course they’re amazingly flexible and configurable, too. Have your system administrator get a text message when someone locks out their user account. Send your trainers an e-mail about cancelled trainings. Get a reminder that you still really need people for those openings on Saturday. And tell the department head that once again Mike is late for his assignment.
There have always been ways to, for example, have VSys run a report automatically, but it was clunky and VSys couldn't deliver the results for you. You could run the index rebuild tool or backups from the command line, but you really had to know what you were doing. In 2.1, VSys now comes with its own task scheduling tool that lets you define a wide variety of tasks that can be run manually or automatically on a schedule.
Have that report that needs to be delivered to management on the first Monday of every month? Backups every day at 4am? Generate and deliver assignment reminders every morning?
Easy.
Person lookup
What’s the most common thing you do when you first open VSys One? Probably search for a volunteer. Now, right on the main VSys One screen, use the "Search people" tool to type in their last name, DOB, e-mail address, phone number or kiosk PIN and have VSys do the search right then and there. And in the Person lookup tool in general, you can now show custom fields as columns in the search results, along with vastly enhanced and expanded popup hints for people that tell you everything you need to know without ever even opening someone’s profile.
Schedules
And once you've found a person, need to send them a copy of their schedule? Now there are two much quicker and easier ways than ever:
Restrictions are attributes that you define and that you can associate with people. These attributes can then be used to determine eligibility for jobs. (You've always had "skills" to say what volunteers can do, now you have an easy tool to say what they can’t do, and without having to explicitly lock people out of each and every job that they shouldn't be in.)
Since 2.0, VSys One has tracked changes to specific fields like Active status and Date started. That’s now been expanded a lot, and VSys now tracks changes to custom fields, addresses, and the status of job assignments, interviews and trainings. So you can now look at a person and see what they were like in the past and who’s made certain very specific changes, all without having to bring up old reports or use a backup.
Hate trying to find something in a person’s profile? You can now have the panels in the Profile editor sorted alphabetically.
VSys has for a while been able to send e-mails or SMS/text message reminders to your volunteers about upcoming assignments, interviews and trainings. Now? It can automatically send them reminders about certifications (like their TB test) or trainings expiring, too.
Certifications
Based on rules you define, VSys One can now automatically create certifications for someone when you create a new person. And it can link trainings and certifications, too, creating or updating certifications based on completed trainings.
Reporting
Custom column reports were great for showing information and being very easy to use, but they didn't summarize or total anything, so you’d have to make a much more complex custom report. No more: summarize and total to your heart’s content, all in the easiest reporting tool there is.
Need to run the same report on a regular basis? Now completely redesigned, from within a report just click on Save as a shortcut. VSys will make a desktop shortcut with the report exactly as it is on your screen. No need to save the report separately, no worries about someone changing your saved report on you – VSys packages the exact settings you have on-screen right now into one desktop shortcut that you can run anytime you need it without even starting VSys itself.
Bulk tools
Sometimes when you need to do something, you need to do a lot of it. The all-new Bulk Awards Creator and Bulk Certifications Creator can make awards and certifications for one to 1,000,000 people all at once based on your rules. And the regular Bulk Value Updater now has a test mode so you can run it to see what it would do without breaking anything if you don’t get it right!
Little stuff
VSys Live has added a whole host of new features in 2.1.
Feature enabling/disabling by IP address. This lets you, for example, allow volunteers to fill out applications from the Internet at large, but only to sign in and out of their assignments when they’re on campus.
Kiosk logins: allow your volunteers to sign in to VSys Live using their kiosk PIN code rather than their e-mail address; this is great in combination with dynamic feature enabling so they can do this on campus but have to use their e-mail address and password when they sign in from home.
Show job openings on the main VSys Live calendar: for individual job slots, mark them as "critical" so they’ll be visible to people who haven’t even signed in yet. (Of course they need to be approved volunteers and signed in to actually choose those jobs.)
Invitation codes let you hide jobs and/or openings, making them visible only to people who have been given a special invitation code. Use this when the criteria for someone being allowed into a job isn't cut-and-dried, like when you want staff at Microsoft (and their friends) able to sign up for a specific location, but you don’t yet know who those people all are.
Automatically-approved applications: want to let your volunteers sign up for jobs right away? VSys Live now lets you define applications which are automatically approved immediately, so they can sign up immediately without having to wait for you. (If it turns out later that you don’t want that volunteer, you can always reject them and cancel their assignments.)
The kiosk didn't escape scot-free, either: it now has settings to tell it to shut itself down or minimize itself based on inactivity on a location-by-location basis; use this to have the VSys Kiosk share the same hardware as one or more other tools. And you can now restrict the availability of reports to volunteers based on properties of the volunteer or even the length of the assignment they’re checking in for.