SOAR

SOAR Customers,

We are pleased to announce that the new version of the SOAR Roster feature is available on your unit website !

New Roster Feature

For full details on the capabilities of the Roster release see our new Feature Guide for the Unit Roster at www.soarol.com/guides/UnitRoster.pdf. This contains all the details you want !

This release removes a lot of restrictions that the old Roster feature had

• No limit on number of Scouts or Adults in a Family
• Scouts belong to a primary Den/Patrol
• Adults can now belong to the Den/Patrol directly
• Scouts can belong to many Groups (the old “non Den/Patrol” option)
  

SOAR Customers,

As 2014 starts I wanted to personally reach out to each of you, provide you an update on the past year, what you can expect from SOAR in 2014 and beyond, and thank you for your continued use of SOAR services.

Since I started SOAR in 2007 each year has seen signifcant progress forward in new features and capabilities for your SOAR websites. 2013 was unfortunately the first year that did not happen. Here is why:

1. Roster Release - We have been talking about the new Roster release for a long time now and this is still our first priority. The first two attempts at a new architecture for the Roster did not work out as we had planned. That cost us a huge amount of time lost at the end of 2012 and in 2013. The good news is that the current Roster feature in development has improved significantly from those mistakes. Given the Roster feature touches every other feature on your SOAR website, it simply has to be done right when we release it. More on that in a minute…
   

At approximately 1 AM EST on Tuesday February 12, 2013 the data center where the SOAR dedicated servers are hosted lost connectivity to the Internet. The issue was resolved at 4:30 AM EST. They long delay in restoring service was due to the fact the connectivity issue resided external to our service provider and involved a coordinated effort of multiple companies to resolve.

All SOAR websites were still active and performing all background functions, just not accessible on the Internet to customers.

The data center hosts 1,000s of servers and some of the largest websites in the world. It has redundant fiber connections to the Internet through 3rd parties. Somehow maintenance on the fiber affected BOTH connections at the same time. Our provider is looking into why this occurred and will remedy the situation for the future. We have every confidence they will continue to provide the outstanding service like they have for the last 7 years.

The current List View for the calendar contains the Event details on the right and thus creates a very long calendar for printing purposes.

We have renamed this the Detail View for the Calendar and it now has the icon vs. the List View icon of

We have added a new List View replacement that is much more compact and contains a single line for each event, grouped by month, that will be well suited for printing calendars for handout to members.

If you currently have the List View as your default, you site will be moved to the Detail View automatically to keep your same setting.

The Month and Week views of the Calendar now have a control where you can select a specific Month/Year to navigate to.

This will make moving forward/backward in the Calendar easier than using the Previous/Next buttons.

We have added the ability to display the Username of the account that Created or Last Updated an Announcement.

This feature is OFF by default. You can turn it ON at Admin/Control Panel/Features.

Note: This feature will only work for Announcements posted/edited after this release was made
Note: This feature should not be used if you are using Simple Membership because all posts are made from shared accounts.

The default Android browser uses a non-standard method for downloading PDF files.

We have accounted for this and you can now download and view PDF documents from your Android phone.

Registration Date – was being changed when a registration was updated. This has been fixed. The registration date will only change on an update for any individual registration where the Yes/No was changed. All registrations that “did not change” will not change their registration date.

Patrol/Den Assignment – The Event Signup feature caches information to hold historical attendance records should you remove members from your Roster. This caching was getting in the way of things like Patrol/Den changes. We have updated the lookup to check for current information first, then fall back to cached information.

The original design of the Event Signup feature was to retain all registrations, even if just for historical purposes. This would allow you to know that someone had originally said Yes, later changed their mind to No, and who those people were. There was no “delete” feature for individual registrations.

Since the new Event Signup feature was released last year, there have been a number of requests to be able to delete individual registrations.

You can turn the ability for Administrators to delete individual event registrations ON at Admin/Control Panel/Features. The feature is turned off by default. Once turned ON you will find an X icon next to each registration you can use to remove it. It of course includes a confirmation screen for each deletion to prevent accidental mistakes while clicking.

For those that have more advanced knowledge of HTML and are trying to create references within an individual page, we have added an Anchor button to the Rich Text Editor. This will let you create the #anchor tags within your content for reference.