Milestone: Mekong was released on 15 July 2023. Significant changes are as follows:
Rota Heatmaps
We have added a new feature to allow organisations to indicate the priority of shifts: High, Medium, or Lower. This can be displayed on the rota so that volunteers can see which shifts will have the greatest impact. For example, a helpline organisation might apply a heatmap based on anticipated call volume.
Administrators can define the heatmap at organisation level, or inherit a heatmap defined at thair parent organisation (for organisations that cooperate as part as a “family”). Heatmaps are defined in a .csv file indicating the priority on a 0 – 100 scale for 15-minute intervals throughout the week, and the rota(s) that the heatmap applies to can be specified.
Comms Attachments
Attachments to Comms emails fast became a popular feature when they were released with the last milestone version of Three Rings earlier this year. Now we’ve given them equal parity with Filestore files by running them through a virus scanner before allowing them to be retreived by the email recipients.
Note that owing to a technical issue, email attachments sent before Milestone: Mekong will no longer be accessible after the release of Milestone: Mekong without being sent again.
Multifactor authentication improvements
We’ve begun to add additional mechanisms for multifactor authentication, available to any volunteer using a self-managed account (configurable from your My Account page). This includes “backup codes”, which are useful in the event that you lose access to your main second-factor.
Four-character role suffixes
By popular request, the upper length of role suffixes has been increased to 4 characters.
Easier to bulk-manage upcoming shifts
The Upcoming Shifts list on a Directory page now features checkboxes, allowing multiple shifts to be selected at once and streamlining their administration.
New properties
We’ve added a handful of new properties, mostly relating to social media platforms. You can enable them for your organisation via Admin > Properties if you like.
Various bugfixes and updates
As usual, a collection of bugfixes and minor enhancements made it into this release too numerous to list in detail. These include:
- The Admin > Rota > Permissions page is now more-logically laid-out and easier to navigate.
- Shift reminders wording has changed to make them less-confusing for people doing “remote”/off-site volunteering
We’re endlessly thankful for people who get in touch to suggest improvements to Three Rings.