Coming Soon: Planned Feature Updates, Deprecations and Removals

Planned Feature Updates

We will be making the following updates to the system in the future:

• [Now released] Thumbnail updates. We will be refreshing the default set of thumbnails that you can apply to catalogue items. The refreshed images have improved aspect ratios and quality. 
• [Now released/Migration ongoing] Learner portal SSL certificate renewal automation. We will be adding support for automatic SSL certificate renewal to our web-based learner portals. This will remove the need for annual certificate updates. 
• [Now released] Web link address updates. When configuring a web link, currently you have to choose the scheme (http or https), and then add the link in a separate field. We are updating this to enable you to paste the link into a single field, including the scheme, making it easier to copy/paste a link directly from a browser. 
• [Now released] Learner portal theming updates. We are enhancing our platform’s learner portal configuration. In the future (out of scope for these updates) this will enable customers to make basic updates to the design of their learner portals without contacting the support team, and without incurring any costs. These changes require updates to all existing learner portal designs, and in some cases, this may result in minor changes to the styling of your learner portal. For some clients more significant changes will be required, and where this is the case, we will contact you to discuss the changes necessary and agree how your system should be updated. 

Deprecations and Feature Removal

As part of our ongoing development, we routinely review platform features to identify heavily used features which we may enhance, and also those which are not regularly used. To enable us to focus our development on the most popular/useful features, it is sometimes necessary to deprecate features, and ultimately remove them from the product. 

Today we are announcing that the following features are deprecated and will be removed shortly from the product:

• Second level approvals for events. Single level approvals will remain, however the administrator only second level approval will be removed in the near future.
• External/Independent Learning Activities. We launched our CPD feature some time ago, which includes most of the features of External Learning Activities, as well as many more feature beyond the ELA/ILA feature set. This area will not benefit from any future development and will be removed in the future; however, we do not have any plan to remove this feature for current users in the short term. 
• [Now removed/replaced with Hide from mobile apps option] Content Visibility. Content visibility settings enabled you to control if content items appeared in the web-based learner portal, mobile apps running on a phone or mobile apps running on a tablet device. This was historically widely used where different versions of content were produced for different platforms, however responsive modern content has removed the need for this feature. We will therefore be dropping this feature in the near future.
  • One use case still remains for this feature where customers are using the premium content feature which is not supported in the mobile apps. When this feature is removed an equivalent feature will be added to ensure that premium content can be blocked from the mobile apps to prevent unauthorised access to that content.