By Mike Margitich, Liaison’s Vice President of Centralized Application Services™ (CAS™) Products
Liaison International is committed to providing our clients with the greatest possible transparency regarding recent Centralized Application Service (CAS™) updates. With that in mind, we’ve compiled this version of our monthly “CAS News and Notes” column to let you know what projects we’ve recently completed. In this edition, you’ll find a summary of our January accomplishments and plans.
Recently Delivered
New “Deep Link” into CAS to pre-filter by school
“Deep link” is a feature that lets a school go into the Configuration Portal, copy a link for its organization and put it on the school’s web site with an “apply now” button. When the applicant arrives at the CAS and creates an account, and is then forwarded to the Add Program page, they will see it prefiltered to that school. This helps applicants directed to a CAS from a specific school to easily add that school’s programs, while still providing the applicant with access to the entire CAS’s marketplace of other programs. This feature is live now and available via Feature Switch.
Ability to work on application without selecting program
This enhancement provides the ability to allow applicants to skip the Add Program screen that shows up after creating an account. It was driven by concerns that requiring applicants to pick a program right after creating an account was potentially inflating the In Progress numbers of some schools, especially those listed at the top of the search. Applicants might have just picked that school to move forward even if they weren’t really interested as a qualified prospect. As a result, we now let CASs turn on a Feature Switch that bypasses that requirement and lets applicants go straight to the application and start working. This is also useful for certain CASs that want to open months before their programs are actually live.
Organization-level question post-submission editing
Some schools use organization-level questions to capture applicant information that may change after their first program submission. For example, if I’m an applicant who applied to the fall term and I want to come back and apply to the spring term at that school, I currently can’t change my answer to the organization-level term question once I’ve submitted. We have introduced an enhancement that lets schools decide which of their question blocks on the organization section will remain editable post-submission. That means I can now apply to the fall term, then change that term if the block is editable and resubmit to the spring program. Schools can decide which of these question blocks will be editable and which lock after the first submission.
Batch actions in Config Portal (Approve/reset)
This is the first in a set of enhancements we’re doing in the Config Portal to make the process of getting through prelaunch easier this year. Approvers no longer have to approve dozens of programs by clicking into them one by one before a CAS goes live — they now have the ability to do that in bulk. In the Config Portal, you can now do a “check all” or “check multiple” across many programs and approve them all in one shot.
Google Tag Manager support in Applicant Portal
This feature is the next step beyond Google Analytics. It allows organizations to put active code into their portal for marketing purposes. Pixels and code snippets enabled via Google Tag Manager in the CAS can now actively tag applicants in order to do things like retarget them later as they browse other sites on the internet.
Post-submission updates allowed for release statements
The CAS release statement tile is now editable post-submission. Previously, if applicants forget to release their data to their advisors and then wanted to go back and release it, they couldn’t change their answers. Because that question block is now editable after submission, applicants can make those changes.
Removed dependency on lining up “Program Code” field for settings transfer
If you are scoping items in WebAdMIT to individual programs at your school and some of your templates only relate to certain programs, that’s called program scoping. When you do a settings transfer, most CASs now allow for what’s called a program-scoped settings transfer. This allows all of those settings to come across into the new cycle and land on their correct programs. Previously this required manual effort to ensure the “Program Code” field – generally used by schools for ERP/CRM integrations — matched correctly from cycle to cycle. With this enhancement, a program in the new cycle now knows which program it came from in the old cycle without the need for any manual data input; the system now automatically link those programs. (While this applies to most CASs, there are still a small handful of exceptions.)
Coming Soon
- Manage configurable fees and documents on same program.
- Manage program show/hide via extended profile/Q4 rules.
- Check Status facelift.
- Guest registration support in Letters by Liaison.
- Upgraded custom question validations for better data.
- 508 compliance upgrade for WebAdMIT.
- 508 compliance upgrade for Letters by Liaison
- Enable password reset emails in Prelaunch WebAdMIT.
- CAS-configurable naming for “Fee Assistance Program” menu item.
- Support for organization-level coupons in two-tier national CASs.
- Support for foreign transcript/evaluation requests separate from domestic transcript requests for programs in Config Portal.
Thanks for keeping up to date regarding the latest improvements to Liaison’s CASs — and please check this space again next month for more news on additional improvements we’re currently working on.