In the wee hours of January 4th, we released the first major Populi update since June 11, 2010. Featuring an overhaul of Populi Academics, brand-new Account Management features, continued refinement to the navigation and interface, and some new API capabilities, the release encompasses a half a year's worth of development time. We released literally hundreds of features, updates, bugfixes, and tweaks which make Populi more flexible and accommodating to the wide variety of schools we count among our customers—including liberal arts colleges, seminaries, nursing schools, and technical colleges.

Academics

We did a near-complete overhaul of Populi Academics, focusing on a new dimension: Programs. Programs enable you to partition your Courses, Degrees, and students into unique courses of study with distinct GPA's. You can have Graduate or Undergraduate-level Programs, and define each using credits or hours. Each Program can have a unique Grade Scale, Pass/Fail Threshold, Full-time Threshold, and Academic Standings (complete with custom system tags); additionally, you can define particular Degrees, Courses, and even Tuition Schedules to apply only to students enrolled in a given Program.

To accommodate Programs, we've re-designed Transcripts, the Degree Audit, Courses, Transfer Credits, and Student Profiles. Populi's built-in reports and reporting tools have been accordingly updated to let you sift through your data in light of the new improvements.

Awards, too, have been completely overhauled—now they're called Honors, and they tie in with Programs, Degrees, Academic Terms, and transcripts in much more useful ways. We've re-tooled Academic Settings, giving Academic Admins the ability to manage Grade Scales, the Retake Policy, and a lot more. We also added a setting for vocational and nursing schools that enables tracking of Clinical Hours—contact us if you'd like us to flip this switch.

Account Management

Populi Account Admins can now manage your school's account details right from Populi. The new Account bar shows up to five tabs, depending on your level of access. Account Settings features everything that General Settings used to include—address, phone number, etc.—but with additional options to allow students and faculty to upload their own ID photos, manage high-level access to SSNs, and even change Populi's header color. Integrations lets you enter credentials for 3rd-party apps like iTunes U and Ebrary. Backups lets you download your core Academic and Financial data in CSV format. Payment Settings lets you manage your Pricing Plan and Payment details. And Invoices/Payments lets you view your invoice history, check your billing details, and make payments (and even pre-payments).

Lots of Other Stuff

As described in some other posts, we've improved the navigation and interface throughout Populi—but most dramatically in Admissions. Our gradual movement towards top-level tabs (as opposed to our past mix of top-level tabs and sidebar navigation) lets us use your computer screen more efficiently—and improves how Populi looks and behaves on devices like the iPad.

Besides the new navigation design in Admissions, you can now print applications and enjoy simpler adding of Prospects in My Prospects. The Term Book List has moved from Academics to Bookstore, and we've tightened up the linkages between course Book Lists and inventory management in Bookstore.

A new text editor (in News, Lessons, Bookstore Settings, and many other areas) gives you lots of ways to easily format text, include pictures, embed links, and so on. And now you can embed videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo right into Course Lessons and News items just by copying and pasting the video URL.

We've improved and clarified the welcome email, set-password screen, and login screen (with a new option to Show Password to help you type it in correctly!). And we've built out the API to expose the data you'll need if you want to integrate Populi with Open Directory.

Keep reading after the jump for a list of things we've trickled out over the past several months...

Minor stuff since June 11, 2010

Many minor releases have intervened since last June; numerous features, large and small, have gone out to you. Here they are, in rough chronological order (oldest to more recent):

• Campus and section now displayed when adding courses on Student tab and when importing courses to a Term
• Fixed an issue where you couldn't grade incomplete students in finalized Pass/Fail courses
• Students can see their overall percentage grade for a Course
• Financial Aid users can select an account to credit when refunding Financial Aid
• Numerous fixes to minor display issues here and there
• Added a new Attendance Report to Academics > By Term
• Students can now have multiple Advisors
• New filter options permit an Aging Report in Financial > Billing > Student Balances
• Added the ability to handle Foreign Currencies and Exchange Rates in Accounting
• Custom receipts
• Payments/Refunds report in Billing
• Numerous improvements (and bugfixes) to Google Calendar integration
• Online Application enhancements including some Javascript to track conversions from external websites (like your Facebook page).
• Fixed up a dozen issues with foreign phone numbers
• Academic Admins may export SSN's via Data Slicer
• Fixed a tabbing issue in the Online Application
• You can now share test questions among different Courses via settings in the Course Catalog
• Numerous improvements to IPEDS reports
• Student Loan Clearinghouse report
• You can now charge Bookstore Tax and Shipping charges to student accounts
• Re-tooling of Payment Plans to make them more understandable and simpler to use
• Staff users can add News Items that are visible to students
• Fixed a really pesky attendance-taking bug in the iPhone app
• Numerous tweaks to online application and component notifications
• Fixed some issues that permitted users to duplicate course abbreviations in Course Catalog
• Improved access to online tests—students can now review tests they've already taken in the Test "History" view