Customer Support - Success Stories (Jan 23rd)

We love to hear great feedback when we do our best to support our users.  Here are a few emails which made us smile over the past few days.

As we were making changes to a custom Assessment Tool for the Office of Career Development at NYU Stern School of Business: "Wow! You are amazing! Thank you so much! We look forward to reviewing the changes." - Allison, and "That is great!  Thanks." - Tammy

"All sorted out now – Thanks for the quick response everyone!" - Aditi from University of Michigan Ross School of Business

As we found out that a school administrator at Fuqua did not have the right account type and could not access private posts on a discussion board: "Thank you for your quick reply.  It does look like that fixed the discussion board issue. Many thanks! " - Ruth from Duke University Fuqua School of Business

As we helped out with the layout of a club Website (https://cua.campusgroups.com/centerstage/about/).  "Thanks so much, it looks fantastic! " - Britt from The Catholic University of America

Thanks for your feedback!

The CG Support Team
http://support.campusgroups.com 

Updates of the week (Jan 20th)

Here are the lastest improvements for this week (all these changes will be pushed to all servers by Friday Jan 27th):

• Events: We added a "Create Event" button straight on the calendar to allow officers to create events in just 2 clicks instead of 4.  Also, the calendar now has 2 views: the Month view and the Agenda view (list of events).

• Emails: You can now open an email by clicking anywhere on the email line not just on the email title.
• Navigation: Click on Groups in the top menu will allow you to see all your groups, not all the groups at school.
• Events: Quick description is not a mandatory field anymore and will contain the name of the event if left empty.
• Website: You can now customize the URL of any given page (not just the name and browser title).

• Navigation: When switch into another group you are an officer of, you will land to the same page you were on (ex: Edit Website page).
• School Admin: As a school administrator, you can now see an event registration page, even if it has not been approved yet.
• Events: To accelerate the loading of Upcoming Events, the list of event topics will be displayed in read-only mode (without the dropdown to edit them).
• RSS feed: Event names will not include the group acronym anymore.

Thanks and have a wonderful week end!

Updates of the week (Jan 13th)

Here are the lastest improvements and a few fixes for this week.

Improvements:

• Events: we adjusted the ICS cache-control header to allow Google Calendar to update calendar feeds more often (last test showed that Google refreshed within a few hours, which is not ideal still). A known issue with Google Calendar prevents external calendar feeds from updating when a change is made to one of the events (updates only occur once a day).
• Performance: we merged several JavaScript files into one.  To reduce requests to the disk, we changed the way we check if a Website favicon is present, and we removed the web page background verification. 
• Performance: we set up a new prototype with a new .NET business layer, and profiling bench
• Performance: club logo and banner URLs are now saved in database to reduce requests to disk.               

Bug fixes:   

• Officers: when an officer is deactivated, if a custom position was entered, it will be displayed next to the name of the officer.
• Profile: officer positions are displayed on Student Profiles even when the officers are no longer active.
• Website: it is now possible to add line breaks in the bio and role on the officer widget.

Have a great week end!

Updates of the week

Here are the lastest improvements and a few fixes for this week.

Improvements:   

• Events: We can now download the list of people who were invited to an event but RSVP’d “no”, or the list of people who were invited to an event but RSVP’d “yes”.
• Performance: We optimized the caching of static files (CSS, JS, images, etc) to accelerate navigation on CG.
• Profile: We now allow you to download your LinkedIn summary into CampusGroups as your profile bio.
• Privacy: "School community users only" privacy setting will not grant access based on the user email address anymore, but on his/her account type.

Bug fixes:   

• Profile: We fixed the import resume from LinkedIn feature.
• Profile: We fixed Facebook Connect under Edit My Profile.
• Photos: When uploading several photos on the school feed and clicking on one of them, the photo slider would not allow you to see the other photos. We fixed that.

Have a great week end!

Claire

CampusGroups Websites

Here at CampusGroups, we have been busy helping student organizations produce unique websites for the their members to stay in the loop of what's new and informed with upcoming events.

These Websites give groups a great opportunity to stay connected with members and are used as a promotional tool for potential new members. We worked closely with the group officers to integrate their school's branding to their Websites, and allowed them to publish attractive and informative content while respecting school's guidelines. 

From Upcoming Events to Photos or Presentation Resources to Discussion Boards, members are able to get everything they need to feel part of their organizations.

Take a look at the photos of some hand picked club Websites to get an idea of what is being produced within the CampusGroups CMS.

Happy New Year from CampusGroups!

Hi everyone!

It is an honor for me to start this new year leading the CampusGroups initiative.  I am very proud of what our team has accomplished in 2011 and I look forward to a new year serving students, school administrators and groups.

Below I would like to reflect back on our achievements for 2011:

• First, we added a number of amazing MBA programs to our list of business schools including: Columbia University, Cornell University (Johnson), George Washington University, University of South California (Marshall), University of Notre Dame (Mendoza), Carnegie Mellon (Tepper).

• We also continued our international expansion with the implementations of CG at ESADE MBA (Spain) and UST MBA (Hong Kong).

• We started to work with a few more undergraduate colleges such as UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and LeMoyne College.  And for the first time, a business school  (UC Berkeley Haas) is going to implement CampusGroups as an Alumni Networking platform.

• This year, we spent quite some time increasing the number of features to make CampusGroups even more powerful and useful for students and administrators. We have started a new blog on which we will be posting weekly updates on the evolution of the platform: campusgroups.  Please don't hesitate to follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well. Thanks!

• The traffic on CampusGroups has grown at most of our schools.  We consider "event registrations" to be a great proxy to the level of usage of the platform.  Here below are 2 graphs with the number of RSVPs at NYU Stern and Kellogg (with a population of about 2000 students each), each color being an acamedic year.
  

In the third graph, we show that at Cardiff University (our largest implementation in the UK) the number of events posted on the calendar grew again this year and topped 662 events in October (it is hard to find any university in the UK with that many student-run events in a month!).

• Our team is growing too! And we are hiring . We have 2 locations, one in New York and one in beautiful Paris.  Here are a few faces you will see on your school feeds and on our blog again this year:

• We also launched our new Website in December, which we will be updating regularily: http://www.campusgroups.com

• While we saw some very exciting growth at CampusGroups, we also had to deal with a few challenges this year, principaly due to increasing traffic and number of features to maintain. I am talking about these challenges and what we did to resolve them in this post. Our priority is to provide an easy-to-use and fast platform for our users, so we are going to concentrate on these objectives more than ever in 2012.

In 2011, we definitely grew and felt a lot of traction from new schools. We were very excited to hear all your feedback on how CampusGroups is answering your needs.  In 2012, we will keep on working on building a great product and resolving issues that bother you the most.  Our goal is to become a leading Enterprise SaaS Community Platform for universities globally.

Thank you and see you all in 2012!

Yorick & CG Team

Improving our platform continuously

This post is about some of the technology challenges we had in 2011.  I wanted to talk about them and make sure everyone knew that our top priority is to keep our users happy.

• Performance: we had more users than ever this year and we also had more features and pages to serve and maintain.  A few critical bugs created a lot of frustrations (individual users crashing a page and subsequently not being able to access the site for 15-30 minutes with the browser being used).  We know how frustrating this must have been. 

  Here are a few things we have done and will continue to do in 2012 to resolve performance issues:

  • First of all, we will not hesitate to invest in more powerful hardware and infrastructure in order to continue improving performance
  • Second, we hired outside consultants to review our architecture and find bottlenecks, instead of only relying on ourselves.  We will also devote more time in improving performance than adding new features, and provide you with stats on the improvements we achieved.
  • And also, we will refactor parts of CampusGroups which we know could be designed better.
• Email delays: a lot of you complained about emails being delivered with delays (up to 10-15h sometimes).  We analysed our emails delays and found that less than 2% of our group emails were delayed more than 1 hour.  However, because even 1% of the group emails represent a lot of individual emails, our goal is to tend to 0% email delays (delays exceeding 1h).

  Here is what we have done and will continue to do to prevent these delays from happening:

  • We improved our email delay alerts and will continue to improve them if necessary
  • The whole Dev & Support team is aware of these issues and will be alerted when they occur, 7/7 & 24/24.
  • We created pages to show you live email delays and past delays as well (coming end of January, we will post the link here).

• Usability: in 2011, thanks to your numerous feedback and suggestions, we understood that students would rather prefer us to focus on the usability of our existing features, instead of focusing on adding more features. 

  Here is what we have started to do and will do in 2012 to answer this need:

  • We have started to identify what CampusGroups features are the most used, how they are used, and how we could make them easier and faster to use
  • We have prepared test scenarios and will use tools to measure whether our changes actually do improve usability
  • We will allow you to post feedback and suggestions on the site

Thanks for your time, as usual please don't hesistate to email us or post questions/suggestions and we will be happy to respond promptly.

All the best,

Yorick & Team

Updates of the week

Here are the last improvements and bug fixes for 2011!

Improvements & new features: 

• Rooms: the Room Reservation module now allows you to book by 15-minute intervals (it used to be 30-minute minimum)
• Website: we improved the Site Maps to allow better indexing by Google
• Photos: photos can now have 2 descriptions, one description entered by the student who uploaded the photo and, when the photo is shared with a group, a description entered by the group officers.

Bug fixes: 

• Photos & docs: we fixed the Upload Photos and Upload Documents popups in the Manage Group area.
• Discussion board: we fixed the Upload Attachment popup.

See you all in 2012 for more system updates!