SOAR

We are also pleased to release our first Feature Guide – a downloadable PDF document that covers a specific subject, in this case Event Registration. You can find it at Admin/Online Help/Feature Guides on your SOAR website. Moving forward it will be our goal to release a Guide with each major feature to assist in understanding the feature and getting the most out of it. We will also probably release guides for some existing features over the next year.

You will now have access to Version 3 of the Event Signup feature – “consolidated registration”. This will be the registration type you should use moving forward.

The consolidated registration

• Lists each member in your Roster separately in the Attendee list – no more wondering which scout or adult is attending in a family
• If you are using Individual Accounts, it will automatically provide you with a list of family members to register
• If you are using Shared Accounts, it will ask you to select a family member first then provide the list of family members
• Members can easily use checkboxes to say if each member will be attending the event
  

We have upgraded the Photo Upload Tools on your SOAR website, which includes the following

• Fixes issues with Internet Explorer 9
• Fixes some of the issues with older versions of Java on member’s computers
• Fixes the photo rotate issue with a handful of digital cameras that incorrectly set the orientation bit

In addition we have Digitally Signed the Photo Upload Tool. This means that you should no longer receive any security warnings when using the tool !

To process of adding a domain name that you own to your SOAR website used to be manual process for SOAR. We would receive the request from Admin/Control Panel/Domain on your SOAR website and then process the requests in batches a couple times a week. In some cases this would delay requests for a few days.

We have added automatic domain management to your SOAR website. You can now go to Admin/Control Panel/Domain to

• See what domains you currently have associated with your SOAR account
• Add new domains that you own
• Remove domains from your SOAR website
• Define which domain is the default domain – that will be shown to your members
  

For Announcements on the Home Page and Announcements/Events in the EBlast (left column) the website automatically create a “teaser” version for display. This teaser is meant to help condense information for easier viewing and consists of the first XXX characters of content. A Read More link is available to members if there is more content than shown. Customers can manually control the Teaser Break to adjust what exactly is displayed publically in the teaser on the home page and what is required to login to view. See Admin/Online Help/Features/Announcements for the Teaser Break section.

We have updated the Rich Text Editor within your websites. In addition to addressing some issues with Internet Explorer 8, we have made the following additions:

• Spell Check ! – After typing in your content you can spell check it by clicking the “ABC“ icon, last on the 2nd row. This will highlight potential spelling errors by underlining them. If you right click on an underlined word you can choose from properly spelled words and other options
• Advanced Bullets – There are now more options for the bullet and numbered lists. Use the down arrow next to those buttons to access the additional options
  

The Internet Explorer 9 release by Microsoft introduced a number of issues across the Internet. There were so many issues, Microsoft added a “compatibility mode” to IE9 which would allow you to revert back to how Internet Explorer 8 displayed website. You could use compatibility mode by clicking on the “broken document” (document icon with a tear through it) icon. Many internet users were never aware of the of the compatibility mode…

• We have fine tuned our Site Themes to avoid the IE9 issues
• We have updated our Rich Text Editor to work with IE9
• We have updated our Photo Upload Tool to work with IE9
  

Cub Scout Packs,

On Monday August 22nd, 2011 we rebuilt one of our Database Servers after a hardware failure. This server is the home for approximately 1/3 of our Cub Scout Pack customers.

Since then the Database Server has experienced periods of connectivity loss, during which customer’s will receive an “Unable to connect to database server” error while accessing their sites. At first these periods coincided with updates we have been doing to the server in preparation for the 9/12/2011 release. It is clear however that the issue is not related to our updates.

The service interruptions have lasted between 10 and 30 minutes and generally occur early in the morning.

This section will contain self contained Feature Guides for various subjects in downloadable (and printable) format.

• Calendar Sync
  Covers how to setup, configure, and manage the Calendar Sync feature of your SOAR website which allows members to subscribe to your unit website calendar and automatically receive updates to your calendar.

• Event Registration
  Covers how to setup, configure, and manage the Event Signup feature of your SOAR website to enable members to register and pay for events online.

We had previously announced that the next update of features would be released on Wednesday September 8th.

We received notice from our service provider that on September 9-10th they will be performing upgrades to the infrastructure in their data center that houses all the SOAR dedicated servers. While this should not affect the SOAR servers, and has not affected them during past upgrades/maintenance, we want to error on the safe side. Should there be an issue, we don’t want it at a peak time for SOAR customers while they are checking out the new features and starting up their new Event Signups.