Below, we have listed the improvements made to CampusGroups during the month of May.

1) Members

We implemented a new "profile extension" type of Form, which will allow groups to collect unique information from their members. Once this information has been collected, it can be shared with other members of the group on the group's Website. The profile extension survey will be presented to all new members when they join the group. It also has an optional expiry date, to push members to update their profiles more frequently. From the Members page of the Website, other members can click on "Advanced" and select additional search parameters.

Under "Members", we used to display school users only, broken down into the various Account Types. However, some of the groups also have non-school users (i.e. registered at other schools on CampusGroups) which did not appear in the list. To allow officers to view these non-school users, we added a "Non-School Members" account type in the Members selector.

2) Events

School administrators can now decide to set the "Allow RSVP" option to Yes or No by default for the entire school.
This month, we continued to improve our Waiting List feature based on user feedback. We now allow group officers to promote students to the Main List for paid events (this option used to only be available for free events). An email notification is sent to the student with a link to a payment page. We also implemented a payment time limit, which gives a newly promoted student a certain amount of time to purchase his/her tickets.
We added more attendees filtering options for officers who manage an event. We now separate attendees who have completed their payment and attendees who have not.
When you create an event, we now display all conflicting events not just 3. This feature has been particularily well received as it prevents you from creating an event at the same time as another major event on campus.

3) Profile

We implemented the Facebook and LinkedIn Connect buttons to allow users to synchronize their CampusGroups account with their favorite social networking accounts. Students can download their LinkedIn resume into CampusGroups (under "My Profile"). We are currently building features to allow students and group officers to post on Facebook and LinkedIn when they post on CampusGroups. Students will be able to post on their Facebook profile, group officers will be able to post on their Facebook groups or pages. Finally, we created a way for group officers to create an event on their Facebook group or page when creating an event in CampusGroups.
We added a more visible "Privacy" link on student profiles. The privacy page allows any user to configure their privacy and notification settings, for their personal profile as well as for all the groups they are a member/officer of.

4) Photos

We used to have a recurring error when users would upload certain types of photos/images. We revamped the photo upload module and fixed this bug. We are about to release a new "Upload Photo" button at all levels on CampusGroups (i.e. Profile, Feed, Events, Forms, Website), which will allow users to upload in fewer clicks and also to select previously uploaded photos seamlessly.

5) Forms

We released the new Forms module to all schools. A lot of improvements have been made to the Forms Builder, to make it easier and faster to add/edit questions. Please feel free to try it and send us feedback!

You can now embed a Form directly on any page of your Website by using the [CONTENT:FORM] widget tag (see "Widgets" section under Website).

6) Feed

We now allow group officers to easily post on their group or school feed when creating an event, creating a form or a survey, composing a newsletters. This new feature has been very well accepted by the students and we are planning on improving it by providing more interactive options within the posted content.
This month we added statistics on top of the school and group feeds. These stats indicate how many people see the feed on a weekly and monthly basis. We also added a link to a chart with a breakdown of the number of views by user type. We are planning on adding stats and charts at all levels during the summer.

7) Navigation / User Interface

We added mouse-over bubbles on top of menus and buttons, to provide more contextual information for users who are new to CampusGroups.
Based on feedback, we added a Home and a My Groups link on top of all Websites, to allow faster navigation between the group Websites and the portal.
We upgraded the look and feel of all widgets on CampusGroups. The new widgets take on the colors of the associated modules.

8) API

We updated our APi and posted changes on the API Documentation page (i.e. [http://[YOUR_SCHOOL_URL]/api). Among other improvements, we added new RSS feeds such as group members, user membership, list of groups. Please check it out if you are interested and let us know if you have any questions on how to use the API.

9) Backend

We improved our Counters system again this month by systematically replacing old counters and resetting counters more accurately.
We implemented a new Caching system to allow faster content loading at all levels.
We improved our Alerts system to warn the whole team faster when any backend job is stopped or delayed.

10) Mobile

We released our new iPhone App (v15), it is available in the App store since May 10th. Among other improvements, we made the App compatible with iPhone 5, we added a "Join Groups" section, and we improved the feed to allow users to post photos and to set privacy settings.
We updated our Room Reservation mobile app as well.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to email us if you have any questions!

The CampusGroups Team