New Features and Releases

New WizeApp: The Private Review Portal

by sarah on March 30, 2012

There is now a private portal app available.   It is available right now in your workspace.

To enable the WizeApp, click on the WizeApp gear in the top right corner of your enterprise workspace. Click on “Show” for Private Review Portal, then click save. You should now see it on your main menu (if you use a high number of WizeApps, it might be under “More” on the right side of the menu).

Once you are in there, you will be able to specify the portal name, URL, start and end dates (and times) the message text on the left, whether assignments are on, whether editing is on, and which folders are displayed on which tabs.

If you would like to change the fields or elements that display or have any unique layout elements, please get in touch and we’ll be able to help.

Also New – Setting a Maximum File Size

You can set the maximum file size for uploaded files. With WizeHive, you can upload very large files. However, we understand that you might not want applicants to uploading massive files. Therefore, we’ve enabled a feature so you can limit the maximum file size on an application using the form builder.

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New Features for Grant and Scholarship Applications

by sarah on March 16, 2012

New Portal Layout

The private reviewer portal (and public judging portal for custom contests) just had a design overall and looks great. Your logo is now front and center at the top and will not bump into our “Powered by” logo. In addition, the tabs have been refreshed and each applications now looks like a card on the screen.

When an application is selected, there is a nice new layout that makes navigiation and review even more pleasant. The previous and next links are now buttons at the top of each review (which can still be turned on or off). In addition, the “Add Review” button is clearer as is the review screen itself.

Assignment Grid Enhancements

One of the most significant improvements is in our assignment grid. First, as you can see below, we’ve made some modifications to make it look really nice. In addition, you can now scroll up and down the grid as well as right and left between users.

Last month, we released a feature on the assignment grid that enables you assign folders to certain judges. As new applications come into that folder, they will automatically be assigned to that judge.

Another new feature in the assignment grid is the “Batch Assign” feature. From this button you can have the system automatically assign applications.

For example, pick the folder, then pick the User of Page/Application. If you pick User, you can specify that each user (Judge) should get x number of applications assigned to them. WizeHive will go through the applications and evenly distribute them out to judges. If you pick Page/Application, the system will assign each Page/Application in that folder x number of times, distributing it evenly among the judges.

Letter of Recommenation Enhancements

We’ve made it more simple to track which applicants are missing letters of recommendation.

First, in the letter of recommendation setup we added a field which indicates the minimum number of recommendations that are needed for an applicant’s application to be “complete.” We also added two fields to the report writer which you can see below, “Recommendations Completed” as well as “# of Recommendations Completed.”

This will let you see at a glance which applicants still have recommendations due and how many they need completed. You can use this information to send them an email through WizeHive.

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We’ve made some big changes to the way forms look

by sarah on February 18, 2012

Many of the updates to WizeHive today are thing you’ll notice, right away. The biggest changes are to the login screen, menus and navigation on our application forms.

First, since thousands of applicants submit applications each day through WizeHive, we thought we’d streamline the layout and update the graphics on the login screen. Here’s what it looks like:

Another change is the look and feel of the window used to manage an application form. We’ve updated links to buttons and formatted the sections.  In addition, we now have an HTML editor for the places in WizeHive you can use HTML text.

Other changes  include:

  • Tab appearance for forms with multiple upload fields:  When you have a form with multiple upload fields, we can now display the file names as tabs in the order in which they were on the form, using the field names showing on the form.
  • Application start and end dates/times:  Our application forms now have the ability to set a start time and end time for an application, in addition to the date.
  • A new assignment screen:  You can not only assign applications to an individual judge to review…but you can assign an entire folder for review – and it will dynamically keep the assignments fresh.  In other words, if you use assignments on a review portal and assign a folder to specific reviewer; they will always see the contents of that folder when they sign into the review portal.
  • When you have a form with multiple upload fields we used to display the file name as tabs when you went to review the form.   That often was meaningless because the file names were meaningless.  Now we display the file names in the order they were on the form and using the field names showing on the form.   So if you have “Resume” as the field name in one place and “Reference” in another; they will be the tabs you see for each candidate.
  • Our application forms now have the ability to not only set the start date and end date for an application – but they can now also have a start time and end time… so applications can be set to turn on or off in advance at any time.
  • For our self service contests we now automatically generate an email to the entrant on your behalf thanking them for their entry.   Inside the self service contest screen you can set the “from” email address information.
  • We also added a checkbox in the self service contest system so you can turn on or off the display of vote counts.
  • And, while we are on the self service contest, you can now easily generate a receipt for the contest once you have paid.

As always, we love hearing feedback on what we’ve launched, drop us a line anytime.

New feature updates: Is it winter yet?

by Mike L on January 27, 2012

We’re just about half way through the winter with only a light dusting of snow. Since we’re not out on the slopes, we’ve had time to make some more updates.   Over the last four weeks, many of these updates were behind the scenes focused on performance, but there are a handful of helpful ones on the front end too.   Here is a review of some of the more significant changes:

When WizeHive is used to deploy an online application, the application requests an email address as a login ID and a password.   By default we confirm the password and if someone forgets the password it’s easy enough to reset it.  But if someone makes a typo entering their user id we have no easy way for our client administer to help them out.  Inevitably, 3 to 5 people out of 2000 applications make a typo while entering their email.    So we now have a setting that allows our login screen to request a confirmation of the email address.   This way, even if someone types in their ID/email once; the system will catch it unless they type it into both fields incorrectly.    While we have this as a setting you can turn on or off, we will highly recommend to our customers to leave it on.

Most customers use our “Actions” app to email groups of people, copy data, move data, and print in bulk.   This release includes a refresh of the look and feel of this page.   As shown in the picture below, the whole screen has received a face lift, including how we list out the field that you can embed/merge into your email:

Next up are some upgrades to our form builder.    In our prior release we added the ability to copy and paste a group of fields multiple times into a form by highlighting them and dragging the group into a new place on the form.   This release, we’ve changed the paste function so it automatically names the new field similar to the old one (that was copied from) but increments a number after it.  So Project Name would become Project Name 2, etc. as fields are pasted in.

We’ve also added an interface to a feature previously only available to implementation people, which is the ability to hide a field from limited users.  If you build a form and want to have judges, board members or anyone else log into a portal to rate and review applications, you can easily hide sensitive data fields like a social security number or financial data when viewed through the portal.

Happy New Year, Happy New Features!

by sarah on December 30, 2011

We’re ready to ring in 2012, but before we put on our party hats, we wanted to share with you what we’ve changed in the last two weeks. We’re pretty proud of all we’ve accomplished this year and look forward to working with everyone next year as well.

Administrator Access

First, a small but useful upgrade that will help everyone is the ability to designate whether an invited user is going to be an administrator right at the time of the invitation process.   This will take what is currently three steps (invite, acceptance, change of status) and change it into one:

Modify WizeApps

Second, when you build a form or WizeApp in WizeHive you typically have to go through 3 steps to modify the app.   You have to click on the gears icon, then scroll through the list, then finally click on the edit feature.    We now have a “Modify App” button on each Custom App which takes you directly to editing the app.

Form Builder Upgrade

Another new and very powerful feature is an upgrade to our form builder.   Sometimes, you need to repeat a group of fields when building a form.  For instance, you may have a group of address fields (address, city, state, zip) that you need to reuse 3 or 4 times.    We now have the ability to let you choose a group of fields and quickly copy them and paste them elsewhere onto the form.

Simply (1) pick the fields (2) they will appear on the right side, then (3) drop the box to the place you went them to go to paste them in.

Letters of Recommendation

Finally, we have also streamlined the process for deploying our letter of recommendation.    With our letters of recommendation you always had the choice of whether the letters were initiated by the students/applicants or by the administrator running the process.   However, this choice was not available as a front end option (we would have to enable it for you).   In addition, information to configure the letter of recommendation process was split into two different places within WizeHive.   Now it is all available from the settings areas of the recommendation app:

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New features: An early holiday gift to you!

by sarah on December 16, 2011

These past few weeks, we’ve been working hard on behind the scenes improvements. While you’ll likely notice a few improvements to your WizeHive experience, most of the changes this update are behind the scenes.    There are a few goodies, though, that we hope you’ll enjoy as an early holiday treat:

  • You may now toggle on many more features when using the HTML field in the form builder.  In addition to font size you now have control over colors and a number of other properties.
  • We have tightened up the line spacing within our task manager so you can see more tasks in the same amount of space.
  • On our self serve contests, when the entry period has ended, the Enter tab will now disappear.
  • On our self serve contests, the “View Entries” tab will switch to “Vote” when appropriate.
  • We have upgraded the look and feel of the facebook and/or wizehive login screen when voting login is turned on

In addition, we’ve refined and wanted to share an option that not too many of our WizeHive users even know exist which is available when you search for information from within WizeHive.

Normally, when you search for anything in a workspace you’ll see the results show up in a listing to the side of the page list, with one line for each match.    Did you know that you can enable a feature that turns on a “See Details” link next to each item, which when clicked will show related field information for each item? It’s true!   When you search on anything, you can show details for the information that is most important to you.

Here’s how:

  • Go to the reports tab for your workspace
  • If you already have a report named *search results, click the edit button
  • If you do not, click Add View, then create a new view and call it: “search results
  • Edit the report to include the fields you’d like to see and save.

Once you save the report and then do a search you will now see a link that says “See Details” next to the search and if you click  on it a box will open showing you more information about that item.

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Feature Updates: We just keep ‘em coming!

by sarah on December 1, 2011

We continue to listen to your feedback and are working hard to continue improving WizeHive.  We are happy to share with you a number of improvements this morning. Here’s a few things you might notice across grants, applications and contests:

  • In our self service contests, you may now change dates and extend the contest even after you have paid.  In the past you could only change them before payment.
  • We have improved the navigation buttons (next/previous) when flipping through a self service contest
  • We have added sign in pages directly to our contest, scholarship and grant pages.
  • We have made an improvement in our letter of recommendations module for grants and scholarships that makes it easier to embed an applicants name in the letter that goes out.
  • We have upgraded the video player which plays back videos uploaded for a contest or other application
  • We have added the ability to include a custom subject line in emails that go out to applicants after they have submitted a grant or scholarship application.

Most importantly this release features a new and proprietary approach to fighting voting fraud in contests.

In our last release (two weeks ago) we enhanced voting security in Facebook by requiring that the voter log in.  We are then able to enforce voting restrictions (once per day, once per contest) based on the logged in user.

In this release we are excited to share that we are extending our improved fraud protection to voting outside of Facebook.   While the details behind our algorithm are private, we can share that the update will allow us to minimize voting fraud (someone voting too many times) without creating too much friction for legitimate voters.   Here is a quick summary for our self service contests:

When someone votes from home or on an individual network, nothing much should change.   The system will allow them to vote the appropriate number of times and then stop them.    However, on systems where multiple people vote from one location (like a school or office) we monitor various characteristics of votes and may display a CAPTCHA or require a login.   The login can either be through Facebook (even if the voting is not taking place in Facebook) or, if they do not have a Facebook account, through a WizeHive voter’s account.    If they create a new WizeHive account, the vote will be collected but held as pending until they verify their email address. This should permit large numbers of people voting from one location while stopping one person from voting too many times.

For custom contests it gets even better because all of these settings are configurable.  We can force a login or CAPTCHA all the time, require vote validate or not, or just let our standard algorithm run it’s course.   We’ve worked hard to make it the most sophisticated set of options on the market!

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Thanksgiving Treats

by Mike L on November 16, 2011

Just in time for Thanksgiving..some treats in the form of an upgrade coming tomorrow morning.

First, we have made two improvements to our page list box. First, you can now open and close all folders from one icon…great when dealing with long lists. Just click in front of the word pages. Second, we now have a page refresh icon just to the right side of the word page – which you can use to refresh the page list if new pages have been created but not reflected in the list.

Next on the goodie list is an upgrade to our interface for managing apps from within a workspace.    In the past when you clicked on the gear icon you then had a few choices… one to add/edit apps and another to reorder them.  In addition, once you got to the add/edit screen you had different screens for each option.  We have merged these together into a new interface where you can not only manage all apps (show/hide them), but you can reorder them by dragging them up and down.    Depending on the type of workspace you have you can also add custom apps like a web form right from this screen.

There are a number of other enhancements that round out this release.  Some are behind the scenes, but here is a quick list of some of the ones that are visible:

  • For our self service contests – the tab to view entries will not appear if no entries are picked for public display.   This way people using it for private contests won’t have this tab appear.
  • For our self service contests – entry dates and voting dates may be set to overlap.
  • We have enhanced voting for facebook contests to require a facebook login to minimize fraudulent voting.
  • For our custom contests we have added the ability to display a captcha on the voting form to minimize fraudulent voting on custom contests.
  • For our custom contests we now have the ability to let you turn on sharing via email in addition to facebook and twitter.
  • On our activity feed applet you can now filter the list by a large number of options to see just the activities you are looking for.

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New Features: Build it yourself contest tools

by sarah on November 4, 2011

We just added two features to our build-it-yourself contest tool that we are pretty proud of. Check them out and let us know what you think:

New feature – Mark Fields as Private

When you run an online contest, you need to collect some private information. Now on WizeHive, you can mark any field private, so you can collect all the data you need, without displaying it publicly.

What to keep in mind – There is a delicate balance between getting good information from the people entering your contest and annoying them. Don’t force people to fill out a long, tedious form just because you can. Grab some information now and follow up on more information later as you build a relationship with each person.

New feature – Overlap submit and voting periods

Also unique to WizeHive, you can now set your contest up to accept entries and votes at the same time. This usually works for quick entry contests that only run for a short period of time. For example, a photo contest for the most impressive Tebowing shot.

What to keep in mind – If someone enters the contest later, they won’t be able to accrue as many votes as someone who entered the contest on the first day. Therefore, this type of contest works best for short contests with a low barrier to entry. If you are offering a large prize, consider separating the two periods to ensure each entry has an equal opportunity to win.

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Upgrade: Page Groups are now Folders

by sarah on October 31, 2011

We are pleased to share a minor but helpful upgrade with you this morning.

In WizeHive we help you manage your data by offering two levels of organization; workspaces and pages.   Workspaces are the top level of organization; where you can create a project, contest or application process and share it with others.   Pages are the items that you are tracking or managing; so an application is a page, a contest entry is a page and a contact is a page.

At one point, we decided to offer a way to group pages together. We called them page groups, as it seemed to make sense.   However, they look and act like folders, so everyone started to wonder why we didn’t just call them folders.  So we did just that! Hopefully, this small change makes WizeHive even more easy to use.

Page groups are now called folders.

Now when you click on the menu icon in page listing, you see features for editing and managing your folders rather than your page groups, as shown below:

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