Friday 18 September 2015

Smartshare Improvements

In response to customer feedback, the Hapara dev team have been working on ways to improve the speed and reliability of Smart Share.


After a period of investigation, we have implemented a number of changes to the way that documents are copied.  Our testing of these changes show a reduced number of errors, which in turn reduces reduces the issues that impact customers.


This reduction includes fewer:
- duplicate documents being created,
- ‘temp’ files being left behind and remaining visible to teachers and learner, and
- Smart Share jobs either taking longer than expected, or resulting in some of the students not receiving their copy of the document.  


Working in partnership with a number of customers, we have trialled the new Smart Share release and have been able to monitor this in production.  We have realized marked improvements.

As a result of these positive results, the new Smart Share version was released to all customers at 2pm NZT Friday 18 Sept / 7pm PDT 17 Sept.

Tuesday 15 September 2015

Improvements to Smart Share

Smart Share has shown a decrease in performance.  Customer feedback and testing confirms the following issues due to failed or delayed processes:
  • Standard practice creates a ‘temp’ file and are produced in Hapara Dashboard folders.  However, they should not be visible to the student or teachers.  Currently, an error is occurring during the sharing process where these files have been left behind and causing duplicate files and confusion.
  • Documents are being duplicated during the sharing process.  These duplicates remain in the learner’s folder.
  • As a teacher initiates a Smart Share request, the process starts as expected.  However, the processing may delay or fail which results in the incomplete job and therefore all or some of the students do not receive their copy of the document.  

Our developers have investigated the root cause of these issues as well as options for quick resolution. As a result of this work, key areas for improvement have been identified and are ready for release. These Smart Smart improvements will be rolled out in a phased approach to ensure consistency and speed.

Phase one of the Smart Share release completed Friday, September 11 to a small group of customers. Upon success, Phase two will begin.

The new Smart Share release should be completed by September 18, with a majority of the customers rolled over prior to that date.  We will update our Support Blog regarding the progress and/or any changes.  We thank you for your patience and time in sending us your feedback, and truly apologize for the impact this makes in the classroom.

Thursday 10 September 2015

Workspace Release Notes - September 10, 2015

What's New in Workspace

  • The embargo on submit feature is now working for customers with split-domain, multi-domain and sub-domain setups. Note that this works differently to the way embargo works for customers on a single domain as the teacher will retain ownership of the document and learners will get appropriate access depending on whether it is work that is started or submitted.
  • Learners are now able to change the language Workspace shows in by clicking on “language” in the top navigation below their name. Workspace is currently available in English and French.
  • A recent change allowed teachers to create Workspaces without classes assigned, this adds an “Unassigned” filter to Workspace so that these can be easily accessed.
  • Clicking on the activity summaries on the home page now takes you to the Activity page of a Workspace.
  • Teachers can now select multiple classes when creating a Workspace.
  • Teachers will now see the following message when publishing a Workspace: "This Workspace has been published to <#> learners. Learners can see this Workspace at mystudentdashboard.com"

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

  • Fixed an error that has been occurring when trying to drag many learners into a group.
  • Teachers with large classes were having difficulty adding learners to groups because of the way scrolling worked on this page, this should now be resolved.
  • The add co-teacher area was showing with a red border before any co-teacher email address had been added - this will now only show if an invalid email address has been added.
  • Fixed an error opening group evidence documents.
  • Made a change so that group evidence appears in each learner’s Workspace folder rather than only in the folder of the first learner to open the document.
  • Added some spacing to the left-hand column to make this neater

Tuesday 1 September 2015

Release Notes - August 31, 2015

Bug Fixes



Loading spreadsheet with apostrophes in their names
If a spreadsheet name contained an apostrophe, the data loader failed to process it. This has been resolved.


Accessing Dashboard after school IDs are changed
If a domain using School Separation changed school IDs between years, then teachers who taught classes in the previous year could not access Dashboard. This has been resolved.


Improvements



Improved document filtering
Dashboard’s document filter has received an overhaul:
  • Clicking the magnifying glass opens the filtering panel, and it stays open. It no longer disappears if you move the mouse away from it.
  • After typing in text, you can filter students’ documents by pressing the enter key or by clicking the magnifying glass.
  • Once a filter is applied, your filter text remains in the box, and a "Reset" button appears.
  • Clicking the reset button un-filters students’ documents, clears the filter text, and closes the filtering panel. The same happens if you do any of the following:
    • Click outside of the filtering panel while its text field is empty.
    • Click the magnifying glass while the text field is empty.


Detecting suspended SAO accounts in data loads
If a school’s school.apps.owner account was suspended, data loads would fail and give a cryptic error message. Now, the error message clearly states the cause of the problem.