Changes to SMS sending 25/03/2019

We’ve just released some changes to sending sms through Lamplight. System administrators will see some new options in global settings:

• Your 24x account details – this is the company that sends the actual text messages. This means you can access your 24x account directly to top up with credits, view reports, etc. You can log in to the 24x control panel at http://24x.com/ . You no longer need to contact us to buy text message credits – get them directly and you’ll see the credits appear instantly in Lamplight.
• An option to make sure that text messages sent can only use 1 credit each. With mail merge options, someone with a long name may mean the text message you thought would be less than 160 characters ends up going over and costing you double. Ticking this option will cut off the message at 160 characters so you can be sure that each message only costs 1 credit each.
• Enable ‘reply to email’ – which lets sms recipients reply to the text message, and the reply is then forwarded to the email address you specify. Please note that each reply costs an extra credit, and recipients will see a different ‘from’ number. If you enable this, when you come to send an sms you have the option of providing an email address – if you do, then that sms will be replyable-to through email. Otherwise, the mobile number you provide will be the reply-to number.

Scheduled text messages

When you come to send your sms messages, you’ll see a new option so that you can specify when to send it – either immediately, or schedule it using the ‘date from’ on the communication record (note system administrators will also need to enable dates and workareas on communication records in global settings)

New system admin page 08/03/2019

We’ve just updated the main system admin page to make it a bit clearer and easier to find what you need. System administrators will see we’ve moved the things you use most on a day-today bases to the top, re-arranged the rest, and added some nice shiny icons!

We have also been making regular updates over the last couple of weeks:

• new lists (groups) with project sharing don’t restrict to profiles ‘owned’ by the project – they will include everyone visible in the project that meet the other criteria.
• you can’t create a relationship between a profile and itself – you couldn’t before, but the profile you’re in now won’t show in the searches.
• a new global config setting to allow mobiles phones using UK, International, or either format.
• resolve an issue with passwords occasionally not working
• Admins can now edit groups locked by others
• minor improvements to table downloads
• ensure case information for empty cases is shown in group data views

Brexit and Lamplight 28/02/2019

We’ve had a few customers asking us for reassurance about Lamplight in the event of whatever flavour of Brexit we end up with.

Your data is held in London, UK – we use the Amazon Web Services London region. So we do not believe that there will be any impact to your use of Lamplight from any changes to the law as a result of Brexit.

Case tab update 6/12/2018 06/12/2018

Over the last few days we have updated the case tab in profiles.  We know this hasn’t been entirely smooth for everyone, and we’re sorry if you’ve experienced any disruption.  A further update this morning has resolved most of the outstanding glitches, and we’ll be continuing to monitor and update over the next days.

The changes we’ve made are very significant at our end, but at this stage there have not been any major changes to what you’ll see.  Having made these changes, we are in a much better position to make further changes that will improve the functionality around cases which you will notice.

The biggest change for now is the way the tab loads.  Previously, all the cases and all the records in all the cases were loaded in one go; with larger numbers of records, this got very slow.  Now, the records for a case are only loaded when you click on a case button on the tab.  This means the servers only have to get the data that you need, and particularly for customers with lots of data, you should notice the speed improvements.

The updates this morning:

• restored workarea colour coding
• restored the ability to add records to a closed case
• restores the ‘show files’ popup
• restores summary text for referrals in the table

System updates 12/10/2018 11/10/2018

We have a pile of small-ish updates that we hope you’ll like.  Here they are, in approximate order of prominence:

• The “search” box when adding profiles to work records is bigger and clearer.  Once you have added profiles to the attendance table, you can now click on their names and view their profile in a new popup window.  (If you don’t see anything then you may need to tell your browser to allow popups).
• You can create duplicate groups and waiting lists.  In groups > view all, click the popup menu over the group you want to duplicate, and you’ll see it there on the menu.
• The ‘delete’ option on popup menus has been moved to near the bottom of the menu, to make it harder to accidentally delete data.
• You can view deleted activity (work, referral etc.) records – there’s a new checkbox in the ‘search’ when viewing all records.  If you open up the popup menu over a deleted record, you can restore it.
• When you edit an address on a profile, it will load the whole tab afterwards (previously you’d ‘lose’ the contact permissions until you clicked on the tab again).
• Case reports now include the number of days, in addition to the number of weekdays, that the case has been opened.
• If you try and change your password to something that doesn’t meet your organisations password rules, you’ll get a better message explaining why not.
• Multi-project systems can upload library items to multiple projects at once – you can choose which projects to add to when you create or edit the item.
• Profiles added via the API have a big notice telling you so when you view the profile, and have an ‘Accept’ button to add the profile into the main list of profiles.
• If you have a date selected in a non-required field, the popup calendar has a ‘clear’ button that will clear out the date entered.
• Communication templates can now include the day of the week of the work record, and the names of staff attending a work record.
• Administrators in multi-project systems can merge duplicate profiles (previously only project admins could)
• There’s a few other places where we’ve amended labels to try and make it clearer what they do (but they still do the same as they did before!)

We are also working on an update to the case tab in profiles, which will make it load faster for profiles with a lot of data, and allow us to add some new features and flexibility on the tab – more soon, we hope!