Unifyed Announces General Availability of Engage v12.17

Thursday – June 27, 2024

Unifyed Engage 12.17

Summary

The following applets have been updated with new enhancements and/or resolved defects:

  • StudentInfo
  • Global Search
  • Messaging Inbox
  • Messaging

New Features

At Unifyed, we define a “New Feature” as a fundamentally new capability added within Engage to provide additional value or solve a new problem.

Flat File Integration

Managing and displaying student information from various systems within your student portal can be a complex task due to multiple versions and technology stacks in use. With our new flat file integration feature, we provide a streamlined and effective method to handle simple data transfers in a highly compatible way to help ensure accuracy and reduce administrative overhead.

Use cases:

  1. Student Information Management: Institutions can easily import and display student information from their SIS systems, providing students and staff with quick access to personal information, academic information, course information, and student schedules.
  2. ERP: Institutions can easily import and display holds, financial account summaries, and scholarship information.

 

The new flat file ingestion feature simplifies the integration of student data, providing a streamlined process for displaying essential information in out-of-the-box or custom-built applets.

Regular updates to records can be automated, ensuring that the latest information is always available without manual intervention.

 

Feature Summary: We are excited to introduce a new feature that allows the ingestion of flat (CSV) files to display data in a variety of Engage applets. This feature can be used to integrate with multiple third-party systems (such as PeopleSoft or Workday) by enabling the following capabilities:

  • SFTP Integration: Allows users to upload CSV files to a secure folder location following standard protocols.
  • Data Ingestion: Automatically ingests data from the uploaded CSV files into a datastore accessible by Engage applets.
  • Incremental Data Updates: Supports incremental dataset updates, ensuring that only new, updated, or deleted records are processed.
  • StudentInfo Applet: A new applet available in the Unifyed App Store that displays personal, contextual information to users including their student ID, full name, gender, date of birth, phone number, and email address.
  • Custom Applet Configuration: New custom applets using the ingested data can be created, managed and displayed publicly within the Unifyed portal. Please reach out to our Customer Success team for more information.

 

Getting Started –

To utilize this new feature:

  1. Administrators need to configure the SFTP settings by whitelisting Engage Server IPs and setting up auto-sync capabilities.
  2. CSV files must be formatted with the appropriate headers (external_id, record_type) and uploaded to the SFTP location.
    • External ID refers to a unique Student ID.
    • Rows within the CSV file must be categorized as an Insert (I), Update (U), or Delete (D).

Student Information applet

Displaying student information from external systems in a user-friendly manner within Engage can be challenging. Our new StudentInfo applet addresses this issue by providing a seamless way to display data imported via the flat file ingestion mechanism.

This feature offers a view-only applet that displays essential student information in a structured and accessible format. It improves the user experience for students and administrators by ensuring accurate and up-to-date information is readily available.

Feature Summary: We are introducing the Student Information applet designed to display data imported from flat files (CSV):

  • Student Information Display: A new applet showing personal information including student ID, full name, gender, date of birth, phone numbers, and email addresses.
  • Public Applet Configuration: The applet can be managed and displayed publicly within the Unifyed portal.
  • Data Source: The applet reads data from the personalinfo.csv file placed in the SFTP location.

Use Cases:

  1. Student Information Access: Easily display student information from ERP systems within the Unifyed portal.
  2. Data Consistency: Ensure students and administrators have access to accurate and up-to-date personal information.
  3. User-Friendly Display: Provide a structured and accessible format for displaying student data

Getting Started:

  • To utilize this feature, administrators need to configure the StudentInfo applet through the Unifyed App Manager.
  • The applet is designed to display data ingested from CSV files named personalinfo.csv
  • Upload data (and ongoing updates to that data) to your unique SFTP folder in order to utilize this applet.

Note –

  • The Academic Information tab of the StudentInfo applet will be enabled in an upcoming release.
  • Additional out-of-the-box applets that utilize information ingested in this manner will be included in upcoming releases to support displaying registered course information, student schedules, student account holds, and financial summary information.

Enhancements

At Unifyed, we classify an Enhancement as an update to an existing feature or capability to make it more advanced or to provide additional value or offer a richer user experience.

Global Search

Over time, we’ve collected feedback from users regarding their desire to see improved search performance and a better overall search user experience within Engage.

In this release, we’ve delivered a number of improvements to make Global Search more intuitive and efficient. Users can now find relevant information quickly and easily, thanks to new improvements including partial search term matching, snippet display, the ability to search across community content and tag-based search support. These enhancements reduce the time spent searching for information and increase user satisfaction.

Feature Summary: We have significantly enhanced the search functionality within Engage to provide a more robust and user-friendly experience. Key enhancements to Global Search in this release include:

  • UI improvements: The search results page now features an improved look and feel, providing a cleaner and more intuitive interface.
  • Better overall performance: Implemented to improve performance and provide snippet text around search results. Partial search term matching has been added as well, allowing users to find results even with incomplete search terms.
    • Example: Searching for “result” will display results for “academic results” and “midterm results”.
  • Highlighting search terms: Searched keywords are highlighted in yellow and bold in the search results, with persistence when navigating to the host pages, allowing users to find what they are looking for much faster.
  • Tag-based search: Enables searching based on tags assigned to pages and articles, improving the relevance of search results.
  • Document inclusion: Documents are now included in search results when the document title partially or fully matches a search term. The search results for documents include the file name, thumbnail, as well as preview, download, and URL copy options.
  • Community content search: Enhances the global search to include content from within Engage Groups, ensuring comprehensive search results across the portal.

 

Getting Started:

To start using the document search functionality:

1. Enable document search feature from the Menu Builder Access Control.

  • Go to Studio > Setting > Navigation and Menu builder > Click on the Navigation item for “Global Search” > Under “Access Features”, click on the button titled “ADD +” and add an entry for “Document”

2. Enable Access through RBAC settings

  • Go to Studio > Setting > Role Based Access Control (RBAC) > Search “Global Search” > Click on “Add More” -> Select Document

Note – To ensure search works similarly while searching from within a Group, Global Search needs to be configured in each Group (steps mentioned above). Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you have any questions.

Resolved Defects

  • An image loading defect that was impacting the way images display when used via inline HTML code in Messaging applet is fixed.
  • Long message titles are now visible in the Messaging Inbox applet.
  • We can now change the sorting by date when no result is found while sorting by Expiry date in the Messaging Inbox applet.

Release Notes

To update an applet:

  • Click on Studio from the Profile dropdown on the top right
  • Click on App Manager from the new navigation bar that appears on the left-hand side
  • Click on Unifyed Appstore
  • Click on Update for all the applets that you wish to update
  • Close the window and click on the Publish action in the top right corner

Accessibility Compliance

Along with the platform, this release is compliant to WCAG 2.1 AA

Supported Browser & Devices

This release is supported on the following devices and browsers:

  • Device
    • Android – Version 10
    • iPad – Version 13.1
    • iOS – Version 12+

 

  • Browser
    • Chrome – 84.0.4147.89+
    • Edge – 84.0.522.48+
    • Firefox – 79.0+
    • Safari – 12.0+

About Unifyed

WHY
Unifyed is here to transform education by improving access to learning, increasing student engagement, and reducing institutional costs.

WHO
Unifyed is a pioneer in higher education software and serves over 750 colleges and universities across seven countries.

WHAT
Unifyed builds beautiful and easy-to-use solutions designed to help partner colleges and universities recruit, engage, educate, retain and graduate 21st century students.

HOW
Unifyed delivers affordable and flexible solutions in partnership with the higher education community that are AI-first, microservices-based, and cloud-native.

Prospective customers can book a demo or email engage@unifyed.com for further information. Existing customers can email their Customer Success Managers or unifyedcs@unifyed.com for further information.