The November 2022 release of Alinity was deployed to Test environments on November 10th and Production environments on November 17th. A summary of the changes included in this release appear below.
Alinity is Moving to Microsoft Azure – Almost There!
If you have been following our monthly blog posts, you will have seen our announcements about migrating Alinity to a new hosting platform. The new platform is Microsoft Azure© and we have been working with it in our development environment for all of 2022. We are excited about how well it is performing and the new features it will allow us to create in Alinity. We have decided to postpone our move to Azure until 2023 in order to allow renewal periods that are currently in progress, to be completed without interruption. Migration to Azure will begin on Test environments in the first quarter of 2023 and then for production systems starting in the second quarter. We will continue to upgrade Alinity with bug fixes and new features each month while the transition is moving forward.
Verification of the shared features of Alinity on each upgrade is taken care of by our development team. These are features appearing primarily in the Administrator Portal area of the system. Our team does not, however, verify the custom configured components on your Member Portal since requirements for these are often unique and cannot be addressed within the monthly upgrade period. Therefore, we recommend that you review and verify all member and public-facing features on your system before each upgrade. Please see our Verification Introduction article for further details and guides for testing.
Change List
This list is incomplete, please check back shortly.
| Change | Type | Applies To |
| Form Correction Button | New Feature | Admin |
| Forms such as renewal, audit and profile update have a new button next to Unlock called Correction. This button will unlock the form as the other button does but will also put the form in edit mode for you to make changes right away. | ||
| Task Queue Subscriber Emails | New Feature | Email Triggers |
| Two new email triggers have been added to the system, “Daily Task Summary” and “New Task Assigned”. Activating these triggers will allow Task Queue Subscribers to receive new task emails and/or the daily summary emails. New tasks are sent to administrators to inform them that a new task has been assigned. The daily summary provides a summary of all open tasks and tasks that have been assigned (Open or closed) within the last 24 hours. Administrators may individually choose to receive the emails trough the Task Queue Subscriber setup. | ||
| Corporate Renewal Dashboard Order | Feature Update | Member Portal |
| The corporate renewal portion of the member portal has been reordered so that it sits closer to the top of the items to help prevent it from showing up scrolled off the bottom of smaller screens. | ||
| Question Explanations on Exams | Feature Update | Jurisprudence |
| The explanations that can optionally be provided to members when a question is finalized have been updated to provide more options. The correct and incorrect explanation have been removed and replaced with a default explanation on the question and a specific explanation on the choice that will be used instead of the default if it is filled in; these fields are optional and your exams have been upgraded so that if you use the existing feature, it will operate the same way as before. You can also set whether or not the explanations should show up immediately, the default is that they show up only when the member has no more attempts for a question to match the original behavior. This new setting will better allow you to create learning exams where the member can be directed to new information as they make choices on questions. | ||
| Reactivate User as Registration Admin | Feature Update | Admin |
| The reactivate option for users can now be used if you have the registration admin permission whereas before you needed to be a full system administrator. A note is now created on the person who was reactivated recording this action for audit purposes. | ||
| Admin Emails on Org Summary | Feature Update | Admin |
| The email list shown on the summary for an org will now display the business email address if it is available in place of the personal email address. | ||
| Termination of Specializations | Feature Update | Registration |
| Whether a member’s specializations should be cancelled, after a change in registration occurs, can now be controlled at the granularity of individual register change mappings. The default behaviour is to cancel specializations when the member is moving to a non-practicing register. If you wish to change this for a specific process please contact the Alinity helpdesk. | ||
| Partial Refunds in a Locked Period | Feature Update | Accounting |
| The restriction preventing use of Partial Refunds against payments in a locked accounting period has been removed. Now when a partial refund is created for a payment in a locked period, the system creates the reversing transactions required in the current period. The state of the GL transactions in the locked period is not modified (prior reporting is stable) and the adjustments will be passed to your GL in the current period. FYI – another update to this feature is being planned that will allow a portion of the refund to be re-classed as an administrative fee in the same operation (thank you to Melanie at CLPNA for this excellent suggestion.) | ||
| Dynamic Selection of Organization Names versus Organization Labels | Feature Update | General |
| Alinity supports both a full-sized “Organization Name” field and a shorter “Organization Label” field. The full organization name can be quite long, and these long fields don’t display nicely on small screens like smart phones. On full sized Mac and PC screens, however, showing the full name makes it easier to distinguish similar organization names from each other. In this release we have implemented a new technique to display the shorter “label” field on smaller screens, and the full sized “name” field on larger screens dynamically. We are using it only for the display of Employment information for now, but if the method is successful, we will look to use it in other areas of Alinity where “name” and “label” fields exist. | ||
| My Forms Saving Multiple Tabs | Bug Fix | Admin |
| When editing the first tab of a form customized by the help desk to have additional tabs it now correctly preserves the customized content on the additional tabs. | ||
| Problem Payment Report | Bug Fix | Accounting |
| For some large databases the Problem Payment report was timing out. This problem is now corrected by having the report work in one-month windows according to a cut-off date you specify. The report is accessed from the Accounting->Payment page from the menu at top right. Resolving problem payments appearing should be your first step in reconciling your Alinity system with your bank and your General Ledger. Problem payments include credit card payments where no result was returned by the processor. These are referred to as “pending payments” and their status must be resolved to proceed with balancing. See this article to see how to Resolve Pending Payments. | ||
| GL Account Detail | Bug Fix | Accounting |
| A bug in the GL Account Detail report was corrected that caused some refunds from not appearing. The missing refunds were included in the total of the report, but not in the content displayed and this problem is now corrected. | ||
| Payment Status Popover | Bug Fix | Accounting |
| The popover next to the payment status on the payment detail screen will show properly when clicked now. | ||
| Payment Details Invoice List | Bug Fix | Accounting |
| In rare scenarios such as when a payment is applied and unapplied from the same invoice more than once you would see multiple entries in the invoice summary. This could lead to confusion since the lines would look the same. Now when more than one entry occurs like this only the most relevant one will be shown to ensure that each invoice is only shown once in the list. | ||
| Browser Verification Resend Code | Bug Fix | All |
| Email messages can take several minutes to arrive depending on the destination and overall system congestion. Many users were clicking the resend button multiple times if they did not receive the email immediately which would then have multiple emails arrive at the same time causing confusion. Now a resend can only happen if the latest email is at least five minutes old otherwise the user is presented with a warning asking them to wait a few minutes longer. | ||
| Email Trigger Sender Override | Bug Fix | All |
| If a specific email sender is specified for an email trigger, that email address will now be respected. The sender specified at the level of the trigger takes priority, but if no override is set there it will check if the linked email template has a specific email sender chosen. | ||
| New Lines in Forms | Bug Fix | All |
| Many forms supported paragraph sized text boxes for entry and allow new lines to be entered. These new lines wouldn’t appear in all read only displays due to the way browsers display whitespace. An update has been made to ensure that these new lines now are shown in browsers. | ||
Next release
The December 2022 release of Alinity is scheduled for deployment to production sites December 15th.
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