By Mike Margitich, Liaison’s Vice President of Centralized Application Services (CAS™) Products
Liaison International is committed to providing our clients with the greatest possible transparency regarding recent (and planned) Centralized Application Service (CAS™) updates. With that in mind, we’ve compiled this version of our monthly “CAS News and Notes” column to let you know what projects we’ve recently completed and what’s next on our priority list. In this edition, you’ll find a summary of our May accomplishments and expectations.
Ability to Blend Organization-Level and Program-Level Questions
A number of schools have already started using this feature, which allows them to ask school-level and program-level questions simultaneously in the Configuration Portal. The first benefit of this is to simplify program setup, especially for larger schools, as these school-level questions need only to be entered once. The second benefit is to simplify integrations with SIS/CRM systems, as these school-level questions now only have to be exported once instead of as copies repeated on each program.
Added Program Name to PDF Header on Page 1
All PDFs will have, in addition to the school that the applicant has applied to, the program name on the top right corner of the PDF header. (If the program names are too long, they’ll be truncated with an ellipsis.) This should make the document more readable; reviewers won’t need to scroll down several pages to see immediately which program the applicant is applying to.
Drag and Drop Prerequisites in Configuration Portal
This provides the ability to rearrange prerequisites in the Configuration Portal. The order of prerequisites that you set here (and that applicants will experience) will be preserved when CASs promote from prelaunch to production.
Configuration Portal User Experience Improvements
We added some user experience (UX) improvements designed to help users navigate the Configuration Portal better. Most notable among these enhancements is a much wider program table. Program names are easily readable, and you can navigate through a long list of program names a lot more clearly. We also revamped the navigation features so you can now close the navigation bars on the left to give yourself even more screen space. And, on the top of the screen, we replaced icons with actual words, such as “Branding” and “Editor.”
As a result, every screen in Configuration can now be set up to take advantage of the additional room you have. For example, any questions or question rules you are building should now open up a lot more as well as be a lot more readable and usable.
Rich Email Templating Upgrades
Our partners have wanted to make the automated emails coming out of the Applicant Portal feel more modern and engaging, so we made an investment in a commercial email building tool and implanted that tool directly into the Applicant Portal. The tool is a commercial-grade rich email formatter and editor, like the types of tools you may have seen in our EMP product. CASs can now build rich, responsive emails by using images, banners, social links, etc. This is optional; CASs can still use and configure these automated emails the way we always have. But if you have the desire to upgrade, this will help modernize the communications applicants get from a CAS and will let each association and each school convey their brand more effectively.
Coming Soon
In addition, we have several releases scheduled for the upcoming months. These include:
- The ability to manage multiple deadlines/fees on the same program (Target: Summer)
- Special transcript instructions for program-level CASs (Target: Summer)
- Improved transcript request workflows (Target: late Summer)
- The ability to manage program eligibility via extended profile or program-level rules (Target: Fall)
Thanks for keeping up to date regarding the latest improvements to Liaison’s CASs — and please check this space again next month for more news on additional improvements we’re currently working on.