Olympus Change Log

5.135.0.0 - 11/11/2024

• Tasks have been improved greatly in this build.
  • We have a more compete task edit UI:
    
  • We now also have a functional, interactive Kanban Board view in addition to a task grid, which is currently used in the overall Task pane:
    
    • Note: It is also possible to switch into a Kanban Board view in the Tasks tabs of various forms. However, it there it only supports viewing and not any kind of interactive editing. (Expect that functionality in the next build).

5.134.0.2 - 11/10/2024

• Leads/Projects
  • The Leads/Projects interfaces now make use of the new Notes feature (see below).
  • The Leads/Projects interfaces now make use of the new Tasks feature (see below).
  • In Leads/Projects, the Notes participate in the notification subscriptions, so users subsribed to changes in a Lead/Project will also get notified when a note associated with a Lead/Project gets added or edited.
  • The Leads/Projects UI now features a Copilot that uses the data from the Lead/Project as well as associated Notes and Tasks:
    
• A new Notes feature has been added to Olympus. This allows adding notes to many different items in Olympus.
  
  • The Notes system keeps a history of changes within a note:
    
  • All notes tabs have the ability to show a note-specific Copilot:
    
    • Note: The Copilot in the Notes tab can sometimes be replaced with a Copilot for the entire window that includes the notes section. To avoid confusion, the CODE Copilot button then only shows up in the main toolbar.
    • Note: While this Copilot is tied strongly to the notes, it is also aware of the overall data edited in the UI (such as article information in the article UI, or event information in the Event UI, and so on…) and it also automatically detects and uses associated Tasks, where applicable.
• Tasks: Leads now support a first implementation of associated Tasks. Just like Notes (or Attachments), Tasks can be associated with many different item types in Olympus (and we are adding more all the time).
• The New Contact interface now allows entering a Source and an Inmate Number:
  

5.133.0.0 - 11/06/2024

• There now is the starting point for Leads and Projects managed in Olympus
  • People now have a Projects tab that shows both leads and projects:
    
  • There now is a project edit form (screen shot above) that can be used to edit both leads and projects.
    • The form has fundamental information about a lead/project and its status.
    • We can assign people to a lead/project and assign them specific roles. (Including an Owner role).
    • The system supports subscribing to notifications in order to get email notifications when anything in the lead/project changes.
    • We can add attachments to a lead/project, which can be used to attach anything from contracts and design documents to whatever other files users want to track.
    • When saving projects/leads, the system keeps a history log of all the changes that have been made.
  • There now is a menu item for Leads that shows a list of all leads.
    
    • Leads can be filtered by owner as well as other people assigned to projects (note that these two filters are applied as an “or” combination). This also makes it easy to see projects you are involved in.
    • We can show only active leads or both active and inactive.
  • There also is an equivalent Projects pane.

5.132.0.0 - 11/02/2024

• Tab pages now generally have the ability to scroll their content if the window is too small to fit everything that's on the page. This is especially useful in places like the event edit form.
• Event signups
  • The signup field shows several additional Columns (LinkedIn handle, Facebook, Twitter/X, Web, Phone, Email, Super-Fan Status, "Where did you hear [about this event]?"). These are especially useful when exporting lists to Excel.
    • The linked-in field also indicates whether the used linked-in handle is specific to this event signup or whether it comes from the names record, and whether the attendee wants the linked-in handle to be hidden, or whether it is to be used for networking (and could therefore potentially be printed on the name tag and other things):
      
  • There have been overall improvements to the signu map display
    • The map now auto-zooms to show all markers withint he map.
    • The map now displays smoothly as signups are selected and unselected, smoothly adding and removing markers and zooming to show them all swiftly.
  • It is now possible to email selected attendees through your default email client (typically Outlook).
  • The signup list view now can show a map of selected signups to the right of the list (in addition to the larger map view):
    
  • The signup list can now also show other social media information of theselected attendees. Supported information includes LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Web, and a “smart” social media feature that picks one of those, if available. (Multiple panes can be active at the same time):
    
  • There now is an option to turn on a “where did you hear about this event?” question during the signup process and also edit associated options the attendee can pick from (plus, there always is an “other” option that is implied and doesn't have to be specified):
    
  • When permanently removing more than one spam signup, Olympus now opens only a single console window to show the complete deletion history, rather than opening one window per deletion (and potentially running the system out of memory that way).

5.131.0.0 - 10/27/2024

• Event signups
  • There was a bug in the signup list that caused the name's title to be shown instead of the badge-specific title. (Note: Those two fieds are often - but not always - the same).
  • The list of signups can now be grouped by additional fields (special assistance needs, dietary needs, super-fan status)
  • More individual fields can now be set for signups (special assistance needs, dietary needs, food allergies, badge information, UTM fields):
    • There is a new form to edit badge information and UTM source fields for individual records (note that name, company name, and title fields can also update the information in the associated person record in addition to the signup-specific information, depending on the chosen option in the bottom/right corner, which can be used to never update person fields, always update them, or only update them if they are empty in the person record):
      
    • Special assistance needs, dietary needs, and food allergies can be edited from the Set... menu as well as the right-click menu (this can be done for multiple selected records at a time):
      
  • Signups can now show whether a signup is a “super fan” by displaying an icon inspired by the superman logo:
    
    • Super-fan status can also be changed from this list through the Set... menu as well as the right-click menu. Note that this sets the flag on the person record as it is not specific to the signup.
  • Grouping by VIP-status and also by Staff-status now puts VIPs and Staff at the top of the list, rather than the bottom.
  • The list of signups now also shows the original source of the name (where the name originally came from) in addition to the source of the specific signup:
    
  • Some menus in the event signup page have been cleaned up a bit (both right-click menus and toolbar menus).

5.130.0.0 - 10/23/2024

• E-Reader support:
  • Added support for EPUB export of individual issues (in the attachments tab for the issue).
  • Fixed the Kindle export, so it correctly exports article images based on the new file attachment mechanism.
    • It also now uses the standard Olympus Console to show progress information.
• Update to Magazine Issue Generate schedule to set the correct dates
• Save and Load All Fields in Email Forms
  • When saving an email form, you can assign a meaningful name and choose a category for easy identification.
    • All data filled in the email form will be saved, ensuring you don't lose any information.
  • When you load an email, all previously saved data will automatically populate the relevant fields.
  • Save Options If you have a loaded email and choose to save it, you will be presented with options:
    • Save as New - Create a new entry with the current data.
    • Update Current - Overwrite the existing entry with the new data.
• You can now filter emails by categories, making it easier to find specific entries.
• Active Status Management: You can set or unset the active status of your emails to archive old ones.

5.128.0.0 - 10/15/2024

• Events

  • The event list now shows icons for events with follow-ups (red flag) and events with missing required header images (blue palette icon):
    
  • Signups
    • The signup tab now remembers the view that was last used (Grid, Map, Histogram, Source-Graph) as well as some sub-parameters (Grid-View and Grid-Grouping) and re-opens with the same configuration the next time the form is opened.
    • Google made a breaking change to their map API, which caused our map to launch empty. This has been fixed.
    • The loading efficiency of the signup map has been improved (delayed loading).
    • The map view now shows considerably more information about the person (if we have it):
      

• The open follow-up item count displayed in the menu now displays “in progress” items correctly as open.

• Events

  • For confirmation emails, sender, sender email, and subject can now be specified on an event-by-event basis. (Defaults are used if these fields are empty).
  • Events can now be flagged to collect LinkedIn information and for attendees to opt-in for networking within an event (which, presumably, will print their LinkedIn information on the badge in some form, probably a QR code). Note: This also needs to be surfaced through the web site, which hasn't happened yet, but should be happening soon.
  • The event signup histogram now shows when email batches were sent in relation to signups. The red bars in the “background” show when batches were sent. The relative width of the gradient-bars give an indication of the relative size of the batches. When the mouse is moved over such an area, a detailed description is displayed:
    

5.127.0.0 - 10/14/2024

• Events
  • The session grid now renders with a bit more detail and makes better use of the available space to show more information.
    
  • Event signups
    • There now is a new “Source” view in the grid display mode, focussing on UTM fields (source, campaign, medium)
    • The map showing signups now shows more information when clicking on a marker/person, and the person name is clickable (to open the person's detail) and so is the email address, if we have one on file (opens the default email app):
      
    • The signup histogram graph now shows a lot more information. (Note: Green days are weekend days).
      
    • There now is a new source chart view, with three different sub-view modes:
      1. By UTM Source
         
      2. By UTM Campaign
         
      3. By UTM Medium
         

5.126.0.0 - 10/11/2024

• Blogs
  • There now is a new Blogers security role. People in that role (as well as admins) have access to the blog posts interface.
  • Only admins have access to setting up entire new blogs.
• Event signups
  • Sort order for event signups, when sorted by follow-up status or follow-up owner, now puts items with no follow-up at the bottom.
• Article editing
  • It is now possible to import Word docuemnts to markdown directly from attached files without having to download the file first.
  • The console showing import progress has been finalized, so there is no odd flickering anymore. Also, the colors for various elements (especially code snippets) are now more readable.
  • The web site now handles AI content better.
  • The web site now shows graphical article headers (when available).

5.125.0.0 - 10/10/2024

• Fixed a problem with editable grids and CTRL-C copy operations. This caused problems in the Bad-Request email fixing UI.
• Article import directly into markdown has been improved.
  • AI now looks for literals in text
  • AI now re-formats code listings and snippet on import for better readability.
  • Images are now imported into file attachments, rather than the older article files collection.
  • During import, more information about the progress and what is being imported is displayed in the console.
    

5.124.0.0 - 10/8/2024

• Event signups can now have an additional status we can flag fow follow-ups: Follow-up in progress. This is so we can differentiate between people that need a follow up, people whom we have started to follow up with, and people whom we completed to follow up with.
• Articles can now be directly imported from Word to Markdown.

5.123.0.0 - 10/7/2024

• Magazine (publications) editing has been improved
  • The system now uses improved back-end infrastruture to manage magazines/publications.
  • Magazines now have additional fields, such as Archived
  • Magazines can now have articles directly attached to them, rather than just to an issue. This is useful for “sequential” publications, that are not shipped in individual issues, but articles are just published chronoligically (such as an email newsletter).
• Improvements to email batch sending
  • Various improvements to the back-end system has been made to make the process both more robust and also faster/more scalable.
  • The list of email batches now shows a column for “bad requests”. These are email sending requests that are rejected by the processor (SendGrid), usually because the email address isn't a valid address. The system now detects bad requests and also flags those emails in the names/comm-info tables as invalid emails and archives them.
  • It is now possible to look at a list of bad requests and fix them either manually, or let an AI fix it. Emails can then either be re-queued for sending, or they are just fixed for future use (this interface also fixes the entries in the names/comm-info tables):
    
  • The list of batches now has the ability to show a “histogram”, which shows how many emails we processed and how long it took to process the entire batch.
    
• Names
  • Names can now be flagged as advertisers.
  • Name search and name import now support the new Is Advertiser flag.
  • The layout of the name edit form has been changed to more easily accomodate all the new flags we now support.
  • The new-name-creation form now supports a variety of flags to make it easy to add a new person to the system with the appropriate flags already set.
    

5.122.0.3 - 10/2/2024

• Improvements to the names system
  • Names can now be flagged as VIPs, Super Fans, and Applicants (not to be confused with people who have applied for jobs… the new thing is a flag, while the other is applications on file)
    
  • The advanced people search now supports searching/filtering on these new flags.
  • Comm-info (phone, email,...) can now be flagged as default and archived (our version of “deleted”).
    
  • Comm info can now be “contacted” directly from the app. Emails will open your email client. Linked-In handles and Twitter handles will open in the web. Phone calls will be dialed if you have a phone app configured in Windows.
    
  • Addresses can now be flagged as default and archived (our version of “deleted”)
  • Name import now supports default flags for VIPs, Super-Fans, and Applicants
• Email processing has been improved.
  • The system is now better at checking for interrupted/stalled email batches.
  • The system is now processing emails in parallel. In theory, that should mean it should handle sending about 5x as much email in the same time. We will have to see if that is how it works out, or whether there are other bottlenecks somewhere else.
  • The menu now shows a bubble indicating how many email batches are being processed and it also detects stalled batches and shows a warning. (This is updated about once a minute).
  • The email batch pane now shows processing batches in green and stalled batches in red.
  • When email batches are being processed, the email batch pane now updates running batch information every few seconds (a little slower if batches are stalled), meaning the pane should always be up-to-date, even without a manual refresh.
• Event signup form Improvements
  • There have been various small improvements to the list of event signups both in display information and usability.
  • Signup map view now shows more detail (expedt more changes in this area, as this concept is very powerful) and the toolbar offers options to change what is displayed and highlighted on the map.
    
  • The map view also supports street view now, so you can "stand right in front of a business' address". (Please do not use this to stalk people!)
    
• All FileService (“file attachments”) related functionality has been re-written to be more eficient both in terms of upload performance and also memory-footprint.
  • For more informaiton on the service itself, see also the File Service documentation
  • Standard Olympus UI related to file attachments is now using that new feature-set (such as lists of attachments, attachment pages in various UIs, attachment property dialog, ...)
  • Attachment properties now show attachments linked to multiple items not just with their GUID-key, but also with a more detailed description of what they are attached to (such as the name of the person or the title of an event they go with).
• Photos for names
  • There now is a standard feature to attach “other photos” to names that are not used as employee/author photos.
  • Autor/employee photo uploading has been modernized. (This is a work in progress. Hold off on uploading staff photos until the next build if at all possible!)
• Improvements to the grid control
  • The grid can now show simple animations for updated cell values.
  • There were some API changes in the grid to make some standard tasks simpler and to respect more of the default settings in grids and columns for custom rendering.

5.121.0.0 - 9/22/2024

• The inquiry pane now supports more divisions, such as Staffing, DevNet, and others.
• Events
  • The event list now shows the number of signups flagged as VIPs (and the percentage of overall signups that are VIPs).
  • Actual attendance numbers are now available in the list of events
  • The follow-up column now shows three numbers: open follow-ups assigned to the user, total open follow-ups, and total follow-ups (open or otherwise). When no open follow-ups remain, only the total number is shown.
  • Admins can manually trigger an update of location information from the event list.
• Event signup list in event form
  • There now is a map-view that shows where the signups came from (when we know).
    
  • There now is a chart mode that shows how many signups per day we took leading up to the event.
    

5.120.0.0 - 9/20/2024

• A grid CTRL-Click oddity has been fixed.
• Number of processing email batches are now shown in a menu bubble.
• Event attendees can now be emailed selectively from the event signup list in the event edit form.

5.119.0.0 - 9/19/2024

• Events can now define who can download slides and samples and whether they are ready for download or not.
• Some outdated VFP Conversion flags have been hidden in the events form, since they are not used anymore.
• Signups in the event edit form can now be flagged for follow-up and assigned to a person for that purpose. Also, the first column renders a red or green follow-up flag, depending on whether follow-up is still needed or has been completed.
• Signups are now flagged as MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional), RD (Microsoft Regional Director), MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional), Speaker (member of the general speaker circle), and UG (user group leader).
• The application menu now shows information about open follow-up items for event signups as well as unhandled customer inquiries. (Note: Each item's tool-tip shows a detailed explanation of what the numbers mean).
  

5.118.0.0 - 9/18/2024

• All grids in Olympus now support incremental search on the sorted column
• Enhancements to the signup list in the event edit form:
  • There now are additional name fields (towards the very right of the list) for the main purpose of supporting sorting on those fields.
  • A rendering bug for staff records has been fixed.
  • The signup grid now has a right-click menu for quicker picking of various status flags.
• A bug in all tab controls has been fixed, where keypresses inside the tab may have incorrectly switched to other tab pages.
• There was a minor bug in drop down button menus with edge-case grouping issues that has now been fixed.

5.117.0.0 - 9/17/2024

• The signup list in the event edit form now shows additional information in the name column:
  • Names that are assigned to a division within CODE are shown in a colored background indicating the assigned division (red = consulting, green = staffing, blue = training, yellow = magazine)
  • Bold names with a VIP flag indicate important attendees.
  • Staff has a Staff flag
  • There are icons to indicate attendance status (check-mark = attended in-person, globe = attended online, circle with X = cancelled, fille circle with X = no-show).
  • Names with notes have a note symbol.
    

5.116.0.0 - 9/16/2024

• The list of event signups in the event form has been improved
  • It is now possible to pick groupings (with counts per group in the group headers) independently of the general grid view.
  • When changing the grid view, the data is now just refreshed in the new column setup, rather than re-loading all the signup data too.
  • The toolbar on that page has been cleaned up, and several items have been moved into a drop-down menu to keep the toolbar usable on smaller screen resolutions.
• Various Copilot features have been updated
  • There were some across-the-app updates to our Copilot features, such as better UI. (This is currently a work in progress).
  • All Copilots feature now are much smarter about detecting the user intent, figuring out what data to search for, and when a search is needed.
  • The Copilot in the names search pane now has access to mroe data (and up-to-date data) and uses newer models for more powerful (yet faster) answers.
  • The Copiloty in the article edit form now has access to more data and is better able to answer questions about the current article. (This is still a work in progress).

5.115.0.0 - 9/4/2024

• The list of signups in events now shows the title of the person.
• This version has a first work-in-progress implementation of marketing series.

5.114.0.0 - 8/20/2024

• There were several fine-tuning improvements to all our grid controls.
  • Auto-column resizing changes:
    • DoubleClick on a column separator now resizes the column to the widest content or header text width, this allowing enough room to show the widest column content OR the widest header text, whichever is greater.
    • Shift + DoubleClick on a column separator now resizes the column to the widest content, and ignores the width of the header text.
    • Ctrl + DoubleClick on a column separator now resizes ALL columns of the grid to their widest content.
    • Ctrl + Shift + DoubleClick on a column separator now resizes ALL columns of the grid to their widest content, and ignores the width of the header text.
  • Expaniding and collapsing of group headers being less finnicky.
  • There were some internal API changes.
• Fixed a layout problem that has crept in (visible in places such as the AI search in the people search form).
• The list of signups in the event edit form has been tuned.
  • The signup grid in the event edit form now features grouped views (and fine-tuned field lists) for Marketing and Attendance view grids.
  • There now is a new Location view, which groups signups by location (online, on-site, undecided).
  • Some refresh inconsistencies have been fixed.
    

5.113.0.0 - 8/17/2024

• In the name import tool, more mapped fields and more default settings are now supported. See also: Importing Names
• Grid enhancements (globally, across the entire app)
  • A bug with click-selection of rows when grids were scrolled left/right, as well as when regions of the grid were collapsed, has been fixed.
  • All our grids now support SHIFT-Click multi-select.
• The session list in the event edit form now color-highlights sessions that have an end time before the start time.

5.112.0.0 - 8/15/2024

• All our grids now support double-clicking the resize marker in the header (the little vertical line that indicates the width of a header and can be dragged to resize the column) to auto-size to the content in the column. (Note: CTRL + Double-Click resizes all columns in the grid).
• A new Name Import feature has been added (accessible through the people search pane and the More... menu item in the toolbar). For more information, see also Importing Names.
  

5.111.0.0 - 8/11/2024

• There were major updates to the event management system
  • The event list now shows more columns to provide information about meal options
  • The event edit form has been somewhat re-arranged to accomodate more settings and group things more logically
    
  • The event edit form now shows additional options, such as picking required fields and toggling food-options on and off for signups.
    
  • It is not not possible anymore to sign up to events through the name edit form for events with an external signup URL.

5.110.0.0 - 7/21/2024

• Updated to the latest CODE Framework AI infrastructure and Gpt-4o models to get the latest AI functionality, and fix some AI scenarios that were unsopported (and often didn't produce results).

5.109.0.0 - 6/28/2024

• Olympus Image Composer now exports images (headers, typically) as JPEG rather than PNG files
• All AI features have been upgraded to the latest CODE Framework infrastructure and GPT-4o as the model of choice.

5.108.0.0. - 6/19/2024

• Added more fields to the email batch processes.
  • Also fixed a bug related to the last update with this.
• Can now choose whether or not to limit event promotions to people not signed up.

5.107.0.0. - 6/16/2024

• Emails to event attendees can now include last name, company name, search name (full name), and title, in addition to first name, which was supported before.
• Event promo emails now exclude people already signed up for the event.

5.106.0.0. - 6/12/2024

• The event system has been enhanced
  • Manual signups used to have a bug with events that can only be attended on-site. This has been fixed.
  • Manual signups now can specify a “source” (where the signup came from, such as a specific email, or a referral, or…)
  • The event panel received some minor visual tweaks for readability
  • The list of signups in the event form now has a column for signup source
  • The list of signups in the event form now shows additional information in the headers (number and percentage of first-time attendees, number and percentage of subscribers, number of on-site attendees)
    

5.105.0.1 - 5/8/2024

• The event edit form now has a new session table display:
  

5.104.0.0 - 5/6/2024

• There now is a Don't Assign Subscriptions flag on names.
  • This can be set in the name edit dialog (launched from within the main name edit form)
  • This flag is respected by the subscription assignment mechanism in the event edit form.
• The event edit form has been improved
  • The event edit form now has fields for proper start and end dates and time for the overall event.
  • Events can now have sessions.
• When editing a person's photo, the underlying file can now be deleted, even while Olympus is still open. (The lock that was kept before is now released immediately after assignment).
• There now is a new option to fix empty state records of US addresses that have a ZIP code assigned.
• When sending emails, style information is now inlined when sending emails (although not in the preview, which should not matter)

5.103.0.0 - 4/29/2024

• Email sending in events now has the ability to delay sending to the next day.

5.102.0.0 - 4/19/2024

• Ad Contracts and Insertions
  • There now is a new Ad Contracts pane to search for ad contracts:
    
  • There now is a new UI to edit ad contracts (including individual insertions). The interface provides not just editing capabilities, but also a lot more guidance for placing ads, sizes, and other factors, by color-coding potential issues and important aspects:
    
  • The Issue edit form now has a tab showing ad insertions:
    
• This version has a very first (and rough) implementation of saved queries.
  • AI queries in the people search pane can now be saved away for later (re)use.
  • There now is a new search view in the people pane that lists all saved queries the current user has access to.
  • Promotional email batches now support these saved queries to send email batches to.
• File preview in the attachments tab pages can now preview XAML and XML files.

5.101.0.0 - 3/14/2024

• The people search pane has received an overhaul and some new AI features:
  • The toolbar has been cleaned up and consolidated, since it got a bit too “full”.
  • THere now is a privacy mode that blacks out sensitive data in the display of names information (available in the names search pane as well as the names edit form) which has been introduced so we can demo our app to large groups of people without privacy concerns.
  • There now is a new “AI Query” mode, that allows running a query (NOT a copilot-style conversation) based on a plain-language prompt. (See also: Editing Names)
    • Currently, data from Names, Address, CommInfo (phone numbers, email addresses, social media,...), Subscriptions, Invoices, Payments, EventSignups, Events, JobApplications, Positions, Articles, Magazines, Issues, and Inquiries tables can be involved in AI queries.
• The events system is undergoing some changes:
  • Events now support a flag for our new State of AI brand.
  • The events pane now supports more filtering options.

5.100.0.0 - 1/31/2024

• The problem with saving articles has been fixed. (This was related to converting different content formats on the fly, which happens behind the scenes, every time an article is saved away.)
  • There were some related changes across all edit forms in Olympus. The Save and Save and Close buttons now become disabled while a save operation is in progress, preventing multiple overlapping save operations at the same time. The UI also shows more information about whether or not the save operation was a success (such as in the status bar and with message boxes).
• In the More... menu in the People pane, there now is a menu item called Fix Common Data Problems, which provides easy access to some of our behind-the-scenes data cleanup features. This is an experimental feature. The UI looks like this:
  

5.99.0.0 - 1/16/2024

• The image generation feature has been fine-tuned to try to create a somewhat better prompt suggestion. (This is def. a work in progress)
• Names can now be flagged as board members (and search can be filtered by that and there also is a column in names lists.)

5.98.0.0 - 12/14/2023

• The AI image generation UI now works better with smaller monitor sizes
• Renewing of individual subscriptions through the subscriptions page/list in the subscriber/name edit form is now supported.
• The list of invoices now makes it more obvious when an invoice is unpaid, by highlighting unpaid invoices in a different color.

5.97.1.0 - 11/29/2023

• AI image generation has been completed (see also Artwork)
  • Microsoft has now given us access to the Dall-E 3 AI API, which fully enables our AI image generator dialog:
    
  • When double-clicking an image in the list in the above UI, a detailed image dialog now opens up, which provides information about the image and allows for saving the image as a file on disk:
    

5.97.0.0 - 11/28/2023

• A major new feature called Olympus Image Composer has been introduced, which enables the user to create art files specific to our needs. It is a small image editor. Among the more interesting features are the ability to incorporate elements that are very specific to our needs (such as build-in logo support). Also, there is a templating engine that can be used to create sets of images based on our data. Furthermmore, Image Composer is integrated with our ability to create AI art, enabling us to very quickly create sets of art assets associated with many of our data elements, such as articles, events, and more. (For more info see Artwork).
  
• The magazine issue interface has received a considerable overhaul.
  • The issue list now has a “View Issue Online” button, which opens a browser to show the issue as it appears online.
  • The standard magazine issue pane now shows more columns, including a thumbnail of the cover image (if applicable). Also note that the issue code column now shows the accent color of the issue (or lack thereof) to quickly identify which issues are lacking the important accent color setting, or have bad accent colors (which may happen when the color is AI-generated on demand):
    
  • There now are two alternative display options that show more detail for each issue (including the abstract). Extended view shows the first line of the abstract, as well as a larger cover thumbnail:
    
    Detailed view shows the entire abstract of the article and an even larger thumbnail:
    
• The article edit form now has access to the “Generate Art” AI feature, which can be used to generate art assets based on the content of the article. (See also: Artwork)
• The Events interface has received a major overhaul
  • The event edit form now has access to the “Generate Art” AI feature, which can be used to generate art assets based on the abstract and description of the event. (See also: Artwork)
  • The event list is now grouped by future and past events.
  • Event branding is now shown in a more readible and intuitive fashion
  • Event codes now show a background color, indicating whether the accent color has been set for the event (and what it is).
  • The event list now has a column indicating whether a YouTube video link has been defined.
  • There now is a column that indicates whether all the required header images are attached to the event.
  • The toolbar now has a quick-access button to preview the selected event(s) in the web browser.
  • Events can now be “private” (in which case they do not show up on the web site unless people know the URL), which can be set in the edit form, and there also is a column in the list for this flag.
  • There are various little bugfixes, such as the ability to flag an event as not needing address information when people sign up. This was there before, but a bug prevented it from working properly. This has now been fixed.
  • The following is an example for the current events pane:
    
• Our Blogs have been enhanced
  • The Generate Art and Generate Abstract AI features are now available in the blog post edit form.
  • The Blogs pane has received some richer formatting as well as a color coded “slug” to indicate whether an accent color has been set for the post. Also, there is a “View Post Online” feature to quickly see the selected blog post in a browser.
    

5.96.0.0 - 9/25/2023

• The list of events now supports filtering:
  
• File attachments have received a bit of an overhaul
  • File attachment tabs can now show previews of various file types (images and text files).
    
  • It is now possible to link to existing file attachments (this allows sharing of files between different entities, such as using the same slide deck for multiple training classes).
    

5.95.0.0 - 9/15/2023

• Events can now be “cloned” from within the event edit form. This makes it easy to create a new event based on an existing event (such as when a training class is held again, or when setting up another State of .NET event).

5.94.0.0 - 7/10/2023

• Updated to new version of CODE Framework client-side service components (this fixes a major resource leak bug).
• Billing history display in invoices is now working again (re-written in C#)
• Payment history now uses services to retrieve data (no more business object dependency)
• Names can now store an inmate number (for prison inmates). This setting is also searchable and it is output for subscription fulfillments.
• Consulting service setup
  • Consulting services can now define headers and abstracts independently. (If no header is defined, the abstract continues to be used as the header).
  • Related services can now be sorted specifically to the service they relate to.

5.93.0.0 - 6/9/2023

• A new Blog feature has been added to Olympus:
  

5.92.0.0 - 6/6/2023

• Events:
  • The Event Edit Form now has a “Show Event Online” button to open a browser and see the event as it appears there.
  • The Event Edit Form had a problem showing the signups when the list of signups was relatively small. (In particular, when the list of signups loaded too fast, it sometimes finished loading before the main event info was loaded, and then it didn't show correctly). This has been fixed.
• There was a problem that kicked in with all our service calls (due to a recent CODE Framework release) which caused errors on saving large data sets (and also caused a lot more network traffic). This has been fixed.
• The service status UI now has additional options to switch each service into a “local” mode (mainly used during development) and also to launch into a Swagger UI (if available).
  

5.91.0.0 - 6/5/2023

• There were changes to the events and signups.
  • It is now possible to remove individual signups (without the deleting the entire person record and associated data).
    • There also was a bug in deleting event signups, which caused signups not to be deleted. This has been fixed.
  • The list of signups (in the event UI) now shows how much attendees paid (if applicable) and also, how many other events the person has attended (thus providing an easy way to see people who attended a lot of our events).
    • The events tab in the person page now also shows how much an attendee paid to attend an event (if applicable).
      
• The Name/Categories Statistics UI is now working again. It is available form within the find-people pane, or by typing its name in the search box in the main menu.
  • It is now more powerful than the previous version, since it can show all the names within a category, using our standard names-display, which also allows to drill into further information:
    

5.90.0.0 - 5/28/2023

• Event signups
  • List of event signups (in the event form) now shows fields such as on-site/online, dietary needs, and special needs correctly.
  • List of attended events (in the person form) now shows fields such as on-site/online, dietary needs, and special needs correctly.
  • There now is a new form that allows signing people up manually for events (launched from within the person form's event page!).
    

5.89.0.0 - 5/25/2023

• Markdown editing has been enhanced
  • Most markdown edit forms now feature an “Insert Attachments” menu that allows inserting attachments that are associated with the same general item (such as event attachments in the event description).
    • The system inserts image attachments as image tags, while other attachments are inserted as trackable download links.
    • Screens including attachment support now include:
      • Long and short bio for people.
      • Notes for people.
      • New issue notifications (all files attached to the issue are available).
      • Article content.
      • Subscription offer promotional text, confirmation email, and renewal confirmation email.
      • Subscription offer referral code promotional text, confirmation email, and renewal confirmation email.
      • Event editing in description, confirmation email, agenda, venue, branding, and signup text.
      • In event promotional email batches and event signup confirmation emails.
      • In service offering description, other information, and special offer description.
      • Open position details.
      • In press releases.
  • Marketing blocks have received an overhaul and are now called Text Blocks, since they are now usful for a more general purpose.
    • Text Blocks now can be categorized by topic to make it easier to keep them organized.
    • The menu to insert text blocks in various interfaces has been improved to support categories.
    • Text blocks are now supported in more places. (The list is generally similar to the screens listed above that support attachments).
  • The “Insert Field” button has been renamed to “Insert Data” button, and is now more generally useful.
    • The menu under this button is now organized by category.
• Fixed a bug for data previewing in new issue notification email editing.
• The list of Positions now shows unavailable/archived/old positions as well.
• The list of related services in the form to edit our service offerings has been overhauled and shows more information now (and also prevents from linking to the same service multiple times).
• The press release editing interface has received further updates.
• The UI scaling problem with the logo generator form on some specific screen configurations has been fixed.
• Technology Categories (used for things like categorizng articles and other things) can now be edited through Olympus.
  • The list of categories now shows much more information.
    
  • A new edit form for categories has been added.
    
  • Categories can now have file attachments.
  • The Technology Categories edit form now shows a list of articles filed in that category.
    

5.88.0.0 - 5/20/2023

• The Copilot in the article edit form has been improved.
• The press release section of the app has been overhauled.

5.87.0.0 - 5/12/2023

• Service descriptions now support embedding individual related services, or a list of all related services.
• The menu has been cleaned up a little bit.

5.86.0.0 - 5/11/2023

• The UI to edit Consulting Services has been overhauled (and also conforms to the latest data structures).
  • The services pane now shows more information
  • The edit form now supports all fields needed for the modern setup.
  • The edit form now supports simplified editing of services (in particular, the insertion of sections as we now routinely use them on our web sites).

5.85.0.0 - 5/6/2023

• The list of events in the events pane has been improved.
  • Webinar/online events now show their location/region/city differently
  • The order of columns has been changed to show the more important columns first
  • Unannounced events are now shown in a dimmed font.
  • Event branding is now shown in the main grid.
• UI rendering details have been enhanced (like drop-down toolbar buttons are now showing a down-arrow).
• A very first (and very rough) version of CODE Copilot has been added the article edit form. (Use at your own risk).
• There now is a CODE Logo Generator that can be used to create standard CODE logos and save them as PNG files:
  

5.84.0.0 - 4/10/2023

• Tech Categories (such as for articles or interests or skills) can now be edited through Olympus.
• Job postings (positions) can now be edited through Olympus.

5.83.0.0 - 3/15/2023

• The names search interface now supports special fields for CODE Staffing
• The name edit dialog now supports special fields for CODE Staffing
• Name merging now supports special fields for CODE Staffing
• Name merging now supports the job skills self-rating assignments
• Service offerings now support a flag for CODE Staffing

5.82.0.0 - 2/12/2023

• Articles now have a field for accent color definition.
• Events now have a field for accent color definition.
• Magazine issues now have a field for accent color definition.
• More work has been done on the accent color dialog to prevent flickering and improve overall rendering performance and usability.
• The customer inquiry pane has been improved. The display shows names and phone numbers. There also are new filter options for various spam settings.

5.81.0.0 - 11/22/2022

• The list of subscription offers now shows a column listing all the associated referral codes.
  • Active and inactive referral codes are shown different
  • The toolbar now features a button to “highlight” a referral code. When this feature is active, the specified referral code is shown in a highlight color, in the list of codes.
• The list of magazines now shows more columns.
• Admins can now access the codemag.com cache control interface through the Olympus main menu.
• Estimating number of emails to be sent has been improved (async and error handling).
• Consulting services have been improved
  • The edit form now is structured somewhat different (with fields supporting markdown using the editor, and others are plain text fields). New fields have been added.
  • More fields are exposed in this form.
  • More fields support markdown.
  • There now is a sophisticated way to edit the accent color for the artwork associated with a consulting service:
    

5.80.0.0 - 10/5/2022

• Some general fine-tuning to some of the layout elements have been made (especiall tab header spacing and automatic control position layouts).
• The “create new contact” dialog now allows to (optionally) specify a default address to be created for the new contact.
• New subscriptions can now be added from the list of subscriptions in the subscriber/name form.
  

5.79.0.0 - 9/18/2022

• The coupon system has been enhanced. (See also: Coupons)
  • The list of coupon batches now shows more information about each batch.
  • The batch generation UI now allows specifying a subscription offer and referral code the coupons can be used for.
  • New batches can now be based on existing batches (which is useful for creating more coupons for the same initiative).
• Render performance for various components (especially tab controls) has been improved.
• The name search pane now shows scrollbars around the search control when needed.
• The name edit form has been optimized to resize for smaller screen sizes.
• The name edit form, now shows a list of all emails sent to the person. (See also: Edit Names)
  

5.78.1.0 - 9/8/2022

• The coupon generation system/interface now allows linking the coupons to a specific subscription offer (which is generally needed to generate working coupons usable for subscriptions).
  • The coupon batch pane now shows what the coupon batch is linked to (typically a subscription offer/referral code).
• Olympus now has a new interface to search for duplicate names. (See also: Finding Duplicate Names)
  
  • This feature is available either through a toolbar button on the search-name pane (contacts pane), or by searching for “duplicate” in the menu.
  • This UI shows a list of potential duplicate names (by matching first and last names). THe list on the left shows that suspect list as well as a count of potential duplicate items.
  • When selecting an on the left, Olympus shows all potential duplicate names (including all the same information we also show in the names search/contacts pane).
    • Names can be opened from this list.
  • Names can be deleted or merged right from this list.

5.77.1.0 - 9/6/2022

• The name search pane now offers the ability to filter by people who have applied to a certain position:
  

5.76.1.0 - 9/4/2022

• The name search pane has been improved.
  
  • The search now returns a maximum of 100 names. However, there now is a Load More button that is available whenever more results are available on the server. This button can be clicked until no more additional records are available on the server.
  • Searches can be restricted to people who have submitted a job application. (Note: Advanced Search needs to be active for this checkbox to be shown in the UI).
  • For people who have submitted job applications, application information is now displayed in a new column in the result grid.
    • People who had any of their job applications rated have the application information displayed in green.
    • People who had any of their job applications flagged as ineligible have the application information displayed in red.
  • It is now possible to limit results by state.
  • Some bugs for certain search combinations have been fixed (especially with ZIP code, street, and city searches).

5.75.0.0 - 9/1/2022

• The entire People/Names/Contacts/Subscribers interface in Olympus has been overhauled.
  • The main names UI has been overhauled completely (See also: Edit Names)
    
    • There have been several paradigm changes in how this UI works/behaves:
      • The UI now loads a lot more data (see below).
      • All data is now loaded through our micro-service infrastructure. Direct connections to the database are not required anymore (meaning: user's IP addresses do not have to be whitelisted anymore to use this part of Olympus).
      • Data is loaded massively parallel, resulting in much faster load time of the UI, even though much more data is being loaded.
      • This UI now acts as a “control center” that shows a lot of consolidated data, rather than a data edit form. Therefore, specific data sub-elements are now edited in separate UIs that are launched from this UI, rather than being edited in-place. This makes it clearer what is being edited. It also fixes the problem with incorrect notifications about edited data (when data has in fact not been modified).
    • There have been numerous changes in the different UI segments of this form. New elements have been added. The most important are:
      • The top section of the UI now shows a read-only representation of the most important information about the person, including a photo (if available), name, position, title, achievements, and more.
        • This data can be edited through the Edit Name button in the main toolbar of the form.
      • Photos (high and low resolution) are now being edited in separate windows through the appropriate buttons in the toolbar.
      • The Email/Phone/CommInfo has been renamed Contact. The contents load completely asynchronously. The overall UI has been made consistent with other pages (number of items show in the title bar, toolbar within the page is consistent with other pages,… this applies to other pages listed below as well).
        • Contact information is being edited/added in a popup window, which immediately saves just the contact information in question.
      • The Addresses page has been made consistent with other pages (async loading, toolbar, editing of items in a popup window).
      • The Categories page has been added to show all assigned categories for the person (this is to be improved later).
      • The Subscriptions page has been made consistent with other pages.
      • The Fulfillment page has been made consistent with other pages.
      • The Owned Issues page has been made consistent with other pages.
      • The Invoices page has been made consistent with other pages. It has also been re-written and the behavior changed somewhat. This page now also features buttons to highlight events and subscriptions associated with the invoice in question (if the associated item is found, that page in the UI is activated, and the item in question selected).
      • The Events page has been added to this UI, showing all the events the person has attended and when. Event detail can be opened from this page.
      • The Articles page has been added, showing all the articles the person has authored.
      • The Bios page replaces the older Author and Employee pages. It shows the long and short bio of the person (if present). Bios can be edited individually in a popup UI.
      • The Accounts page has been made consistent with other pages.
      • The Inquiries page has been added, showing all the inquiries the person has placed with us, through our inquiries UI.
      • The Jobs page has been added, showing all the job applications the person may have submitted.
      • The Note page replaces the older Comment page. The comment can now include richer formatting (markdown). The comment is edited in a separate popup window.
      • The Attachments page is now using the latest file attachment features and shows consistent with other pages.
      • The Downloads page has been added, showing all the files the person may have downloaded from us.
  • The people search pane has a new button to create a new name/contact (See also: Edit Names)
    
• The file attachments system has been improved
  • The file storage system has been improved to prevent orphaned files after deletion.
  • New icons are being used to display the list of file attachments.
    
  • The property dialog for each attachment now shows a trackable download link, which is the link we should give out to external people whenever we want to share a file with them.
    

5.74.0.0 - 7/19/2022

• Added a Survey URL field in the event edit form.
• Fixed a problem saving issue information
  • Also enhanced the issues pane, which now features a Refresh button, and it also auto-refreshes the list contents when an issue is edited in the edit form.
• Loading issue covers for display purposes has been optimized.
  • Issue covers are now displayed in the issues pane (list of “Magazine Issues”)
• There is a whole new “Customer Inquiries” menu item (for more information, see Customer Inquiries:
  

5.73.0.0 - 5/10/2022

• The maximum number of returned and displayed names in person search panes has now been increased to 1,000.
• A new theme called Colorful has been added (inspired by the latest version of MS Office)
  
• Better display of new issue email notification batches in progress.
• The signup page in the events/training form now has a button to see more detailed stats about the people signed up.
• The article search has received a major overhaul (see also: Edit Articles).
  • The list used to display the article results has been standardized and completely overhauled.
    
  • The full-text search now uses the new advanced AI-driven search that is also now used by the CODE web site. The results are displayed in ranked order, with the search-rank being displayed (think of this as a “match percentage”).
  • There now is a feature to search by category
  • There now is a feature to see all articles that do not have the article content defined in markdown format.'
  • The issue edit form now uses the new and standardized article display.
    
  • Note: The new article functionality is a work in progress and there will be more related features added in the next version(s). At that point, the documentation for article maintenance will also be updated.
• A Kindle export problem has been fixed.
• A problem with loading some older panes has been fixed (or at least patched to a reasonable level).

5.71.0.0 - 11/14/2021

• Changed login mechanism back to synchronous to avoid various thread-principal related problems, such as email sending terminating without error/result.

5.70.0.0 - 10/28/2021

• Added additional defensive code around generating email batches to figure out why they sometimes do not get triggered correctly.
• New asynchronous deployment algorithm to improve overall deployment process (“updates”) as well as app startup speed.

5.69.0.0 - 10/20/2021

• Fixed an issue importing articles that have tables with code in cells and no style assigned.
• Fixed an issue with remembered window positions being off-sreen when the system switches from multi-monitor to single-monitor (or similar scenarios). The systme now corrects this by moving windows into the visible area of the screen.

5.68.0.0 - 10/14/2021

• There now is a new menu item called Service Status (which has to be searched for… it's hidden by default), which shows a list of all the services used by Olympus and what their status is.
• Additional fail-safe options added to generating email newsletters in an attempt to get that part of the system more stable.
• In the email batches pane, one can now see the number of total emails go up as the system queues emails. (One has to manually hit refresh to see an updated number). This means that it is not possible to see the process of queuing emails even before the emails start being sent out one-by-one.

5.67.1.0 - 10/2/2021

• Distribution mailings can now be created based on silver-level digital subscriptions. (As a special case, for things like Focus issues).
• When distribution mailings are created for expires subscriptions, they are sorted by most recent expiration first. (This matters when the number of records is limited).
• Startup performance (especially loading the menu under secure conditions) has been improved.

5.66.1.0 - 9/30/2021

• Data import improvements.

5.66.0.0 - 9/8/2021

• The event interface has been overhauled.
• We can now define custom confirmation emails for event attendees.

5.65.0.1 - 8/31/2021

• Subscription offers and referral codes now support file attachments. This is especially useful when one wants to use custom images in emails, which can be served up from the public Azure URL associated with the attachment (which can be seen in the attachment properties).
• Some overall font issues between Windows 10 and Windows 11 have been fixed.
• The email marketing block editing interface has been cleaned up a bit:
  

5.64.0.0 - 8/30/2021

• The offer code and subscription system has been updated to allow for the definition of custom subscription aand renewal confirmation emails on an offer code level, as well as a referral code level. (See also: Confirmation Emails in Subscription Offers)
  

5.63.0.0 - 8/25/2021

• Updated various package references to fix a markdown problem in the article edit form.

5.62.0.0 - 8/24/2021

• The look and feel of the app has been updated a bit to match the style of Windows 11 more closely.

5.61.0.0 - 8/24/2021

• The system now allows to assign user roles (security) through an integrated interface in Olympus. (Only available to people with an appropriate security role themselves).

5.60.0.0 - 8/20/2021

• New email features have been added (See also: Send Emails)
  • The email engine now fully supports marketing messages/blocks both in actual sending emails as well as the email preview in the UI.
  • The email batch pane now allows selecting an email batch and copying the message content to the clipboard by means of a toolbar button.

5.59.0.0 - 8/18/2021

• We have the ability to specify generic marketing messages
• We have the ability to edit email groups (and group assignments) from within Olympus.
• The list of consulting services can now be edited through Olympus.
• Our simple survey import has been fixed for now. (Although we need a more sophisticated version in the future).

5.58.0.0 - 8/11/2021

• Added the ability to import survey results for event attendees.

5.57.0.0 - 7/16/2021

• Events now default to English/US as the default language and culture.
• Retrieval of PDF invoices has been fixed. (This has also been fixed on codemag.com as well).
• Olympus now uses the WebView2 browser control (Chromium-based Edge embedded in Olympus) to display HTML content, such as invoices. This eliminates the old dependency on Internet Explorer. It also removed some rendering issues we had with the old control.
• HTML display in the app has been improved overall to be more memory-friendly by disposing HTML objects better/sooner.
• Async operations have been improved overall to be more fault tolerant.
• The ability to assign presenters/trainers to events has been added back in.
  

5.56.0.0 - 7/14/2021

• All file attachments now support the upload/attachment of very large files. (For large files, an upload progress indicator is displayed while the upload is in progress).
• Magazine editing has been re-enabled in this build. The new feature also allows editing file attachments. (See also: Editing Magazines)
  

5.55.0.0 - 6/22/2021

• We now support name merging again. (See also: Merging Names)
  

5.54.0.0 - 6/18/2021

• The system now has a re-written capability to perform permanent deletes of names and associated information. (See also: Deleting Names)
  
  • The name/subscriber edit form now has a new delete button that uses this feature.
  • The signup delete button in the event edit form now also uses this feature.

5.53.0.0 - 5/27/2021

• The old Kindle export feature has been removed from the menu
• There now is a new “Generate MobiPocket” option on the attachments tab of the issue edit form that can be used to generate MobiPocket files (which is the legacy Kindle format). - See also: Export Content

5.52.0.0 - 5/25/2021

• Creating new subscription offers has been fixed.

5.51.0.0 - 5/2/2021

• Do-Not-Renew flag for subscriptions. (See also Subscription Renewals)
  • The overall system now supports a do-not-renew flag for subscriptions. When that flag is set, subscribers will not be asked to renew their subscriptions
  • The flag shows up in the list of subscriptions in the subscriber edit form.
    • The subscription list in the subscriber edit form has been re-worked to use services rather than business objects. (Note: This is part of an ongoing effort to remove all “old tech” from the name/subscriber edit form. It makes the system faster. It also means that this works from anywhere, rather than just whitelisted locations. And it gets all the latest functionality, such as a display of this flag.)
  • The subscription edit form now has a Renewal tab, which allows managing the do-not-renew flag, as well as other things, such as the assigned renewal series. It also shows a complete list of all renewal steps taken.
    

5.49.0.0 - 4/29/2021

• When creating magazine mailing batches (print subscriptions), the system now does not consider an “effective date” anymore, since that caused all kinds of problems.
• Editing of photos associated with names (a.k.a. “author photos”) has been re-worked
  • The feature to attach author/employee photos in the name edit form has been tweaked to default to PNG files (and to support PNG files in the frist place).
  • Author-photos changed through this UI are now automatically synced to Azure and thus show up on the web site correctly. (Note that it may take several minutes for these photos to show up on the web site, due to performance-related caching of photos).
• The article pane now has a Force-Sync all Article and Author Files button, which forces syncronization of files to Azure for display on the web site and in mobile apps. This can be used to force a refresh of potentially outdated files, such as author photos, images in articles, and the like. (See also: Edit Articles)
• The search for articles by author now works again. (And author names are retrieved async by this pane now, so it should overall be much faster).
• The overall data loading infrasture has been enhanced to catch more overall errors when the user unexpectedly closes forms before data processes complete.

5.48.0.0 - 3/26/2021

• Renewals
  • Renewal steps now have a field to set the minimum interval (in days) from the previous step.
  • The renewal series edit form now shows a column for minimum interval between steps, in the steps list.
  • Renewal processing has been optimized server-side to speed up the process a bit. (It still takes a long time to process).
• Events
  • Events can now define additional branding/text to be displayed with event information and with the signup process. (This is to satisfy partner criteria for Microsoft).
  • Events can now define two opt-ins (getting partner notifications and sharing information with partners) plus associated text (markdown) to be displayed with the opt-in checkboxes.

5.47.0.0 - 3/12/2021

• Changed to the email system. See also: Sending Emails
  • When triggering email batches, the system now asks for confirmation before batches are triggered.
  • The system now tracks who generated batches, and displays so in the email batch pane.
  • The system now keeps better track of when a batch was last updated, so it becomes easier to see if a batch has stalled.
  • Cosmetic tweaks have been made to various lists displaying email batches to optimize readability of the information.
  • The Email Batch Pane now has a Process Interrupted Batches button. It can be used to resume stalled email batches. See also: Sending Emails

5.46.0.0 - 3/8/2021

• Events now have a flag for “CODE Presents” webinars.
• Email batches that are still being processed are now highlighted in a special color in the email batch pane.

5.45.0.0 - 2/18/2021

• The system now has a coupon generation feature. (See also: Coupons)
  • There is a pane showing all coupon batches and their use:
    
  • There now is a dialog that allows triggering coupon generation:
    

5.44.0.0 - 2/17/2021

• The “Magazines and Issues” menu item is now called “Magazine Issues”
• The list of articles in the issue edit form now shows more information for each article:
  
  • All author names are now shown in the author column, for articles with more than one author.
  • It is now more obvious when an article doesn't have an assigned author.
  • The author photo is now displayed (which makes it easier to spot authors with missing photos, or incorrectly assigned authors).
• The “assign authors” and “assign issues” functionality in the article edit form are now fully implemented with the new author search UI (customer search UI).

5.43.0.0 - 2/11/2021

• The Unassigned Subscriptions pane (showing subscriptions that have not been assigned to renewal series) has been brought forward to the latest technology.
  • This UI is now launched from within the Magazine Renewals UI (or by searching for it in the menu).
  • This UI now launches the new subscriber edit form when double-clicking a row in the grid (rather than the outdated one it showed in the old UI).

5.42.0.0 - 2/9/2021

• Buttons are now rendered slightly different. This enables us to provide more feedback about button states, such as disabled buttons (which are now more obvious).
• The renewal series assignment and process dialog now provides more feedback when assignment or processing is running.
• Renewal series assignments now also process subscriptions without addresses and phone numbers.
• Subscription offers now define a “Renewal Grace Period” that defines how expires subscriptions are renewed. (see also: Subscription Offers))
• The renewal series edit form now shows more fields in the steps page (grid).
• The renewal series edit form now maintains selection of steps and rules after a refresh (such as when a step is saved in the steps edit form).
• The sender name in the renewal series step edit form now saves correctly.

5.41.0.0 - 1/28/2021

• Hamburger menu now shows a better message while user rights are evaluated during logon.
• Right-aligned list column headers now render correctly when sorted.
• The renewal series pane now shows number of subscriptions currently assigned to the series.

5.40.0.0 - 1/25/2021

• The list of events now shows the event code and signup numbers.

5.39.0.0 - 1/16/2021

• The customer search has been improved further to provide better performance and async loading.
  • Email, phone numbers, and other comm info are now separate search fields
  • The subscription count column now shows in green when the customer has an active subscription.
• The file attachment properties dialog (see last release) has been enhanced further.
  • The window is now launched non-modal (other windows can be interacted with, while this dialog is open).
  • For log entries where the user who downloaded the file is known, the name details can now be opened directly from this dialog.
• The magazine issue search pane now shows file download stats for each issue (MobiPocket/Kindle and PDF/Web). Note: Collecting of these stats started in early November 2020.

5.38.0.0 - 1/14/2021

• The file attachment property dialog now has an access log table (showing download details) as well as a simple graph showing access log stats.
  
  

5.37.0.0 - 1/10/2021

• The contact/subscriber search has been further improved
  • Several search bugs have been fixed
  • Sorting by clicking column headers has been enabled
  • The resize behavior of the pane has been enhanced to fit the advanced search more easily, yet take advantage of the available screen real-estate better, in large screens.
  • Search now happens asynchronously and in separate steps, allowing additional data (additional columns) to “trickle in” as data is retrieved. This improves the overall search performance. The user can already interact with the list while additional data is loaded.
  • The list now shows photos for people that have a photo on file (also loaded asynchronously)
    

5.36.0.0 - 1/4/2021

• When copying a key from a data edit window to the clipboard (through the status bar), it now only copies the actual data without the word “Key:” in it.
• Navigation behavior of the integrated web browser has been improved. The Back/Forward buttons now become enabled mroe reliably when navigation is possible. (Note: there still seem to be some occasional anomalies, but that seems to be due to the EdgeChromium browser control and probably needs to be fixed with subsequent versions of that Microsoft control).
• Changes to toolbars:
  • Toolbar buttons now have a slightly different look to make it more obvious which buttons are enabled/disabled and to more clearly indicate interactions such as mouse-over or mouse-down. Also, default buttons do not have a colored background anymore (to enable toggle buttons… see below).
  • Toolbar buttons now have more of a square-cornered look.
  • There now is a new toggle-button style (which is used in places such as for selecting the view-mode of the contact list/subscriber search).
• Contact/Subscriber search has been re-worked majorly
  
  • The toolbar has changed and now provides a more logical way to switch between display modes for the list.
  • The toolbar now has toggle buttons to switch between “starts with”, “contains”, and “exact match” search modes.
  • The toolbar now also features an Advanced toggle button that shows advanced search fields when activated.
  • There are now many additional ways to search for people.
  • The search for communication information (such as phone, email, ...) is now “canonicalized”, meaning that phone numbers are now found regardless of their formatting. (So searching for 5555555555 will find a phone number stored as (555) 555-5555 for instance).
  • The result list now shows many additional fields of information.
  • The search is now done multi-threaded, meaning the UI doesn't freeze while the search is ongoing. (Note: The search is now much more complex, and can thus be slower than before, depending on the exact search criteria). It is also much more obvious when a search is in progress and when it completes.
  • The search UI now comes up remembering the settings for display mode, search mode, and whether or not advanced search is visible.
  • The comm-info search field (phone, email, web…) now allows entering multiple search expressions separated by ;.

5.35.0.0 - 12/26/2020

• Tabs in the main screen can now be undocked and floated around the screen (including multiple screens):
  
• There now is a new login dialog (with a new associated security model):
  
  • Olympus uses the same accounts (and therefore the same user name and password) as codemag.com.
    • All such accounts are fundamentally eligible to log in to Olympus. However, these accounts have to be assigned appropriate rights to get into Olympus.
  • The new model uses role-based security. Users who aren't in required roles will not see certain menu items. Therefore, many users will now see fewer menu items than before.
• The app now shows the logged in user name in the status bar.
  • The user name in the status bar can be clicked on to see more detail about the user.

5.34.1.0 - 12/22/2020

• There have been various cosmetic changes throughout the system, replacing previously incorrect icons.
• There now is a separate subscription offer referral code edit form (see also: Subscription Offers).
  

5.34.0.0 - 12/21/2020

• Subscription offer editing is now available in the new version (see also: Subscription Offers).
  
  

5.33.2.0 - 12/17/2020

• The save behavior of new renewal series has been improved.
• Creating new steps and rules in renewal series can now only been done after a new series has been saved the first time.
• Open renewal series panes (lists) now refresh when series are edited and saved.
• The new-item behavior has been improved throughout the app.

5.33.1.0 - 12/14/2020

• The people search pane now makes it more obvious when a query returned no results.
• Improvements to the renewal series step edit form
  • The email and print definition preview can now show offer grids (showing live data from the selected offer and it tries to pick the correct region based on associated rules, where possible).
  • The preview can now show the real advertised offer price.
  • The preview can now show the real advertised offer discount.
  • Advertised discount is now a new field that can be embedded.
  • The default styles have been enhanced to add some styles specific to the content of renewal emails and print-outs.
  • The current issue cover can now be inserted from the drop-down menu.
  • The preview refreshes when a different offer or referral code is picked, or when the action changes (such as from email to print).
  • The renewal series step edit form now allows sending test emails for steps with an email action.
  • The renewal series step edit form now allows generating a test PDF for mail action steps.
  • Mailed (PDF printed) renewal series steps are now processed properly server-side and are thus considered valid and supported step actions.

5.32.0.0 - 11/25/2020

• Renewal series steps and renewal series rules can now be deleted.
• Addresses in the contact edit form can now be merged. (Note that there remain technical challenges and the form should be closed without saving immediately after the merge operation).
• Comm infos (such as phone numbers) in the contact edit form can now be merged. (Note that there remain technical challenges and the form should be closed without saving immediately after the merge operation).

5.31.0.0 - 11/24/2020

• Further cleaned up the menu
• There now is an integrated web browser experience.
• Documentation, change logs, wish-list, as well as web sites such as codemag.com and eps-office.com can now be accessed from within Olympus.
  

5.30.0.0 - 11/23/2020

• The menu has been cleaned up a bit (and search reveals more menu items than are currently there)
• The entire area related to renewals (with renewal series, steps, rules, and the rule debugger) has been replaced. (For more information, see Subscription Renewals)

5.29.0.0 - 11/10/2020

• Invoices are now showing the name in the address block.
• Invoices can be retrieved as PDF through Olympus again.
• The “default button” on panes in the main form works again when hitting enter (such as typing the name on the subscriber search pane, and hitting enter to trigger the search).
• All our grids/lists now support copy & paste for all our selected rows. This works especially well when pasting into apps like Excel. Note that depending on the list, this feature will generate results of different levels of usefulness. For instance, it works very well on the list of events, or on the list of accounts a user has. It does not work so well on the list of file attachments, due to its highly customized formatting.

5.28.0.0 - 11/9/2020

• Our system now keeps track of file downloads. Simple download numbers can now be seen through Olympus in all file attachment grids and all file property dialogs. (This feature has been implemented especially for digital magazine downloads as well as event-attachment downloads). Note that some older files do have their downloads tracked already, but in general, this number is only accurate from 11/9/2020 on.
  • When a file has a download count greater than zero, the download count is shown in the file list:
    
  • The file property dialog launched from the above list now always shows a download count:
    

5.27.0.0 - 11/7/2020

• The main application window now supports opening multiple panes at once in a tabbed form.
  
• Theme switching has been improved and now works without restarting the app.
• Legacy UI components now integrate a little better (although some still have odd colors and some even have trouble accessing data).
• Email markdown editors now do a better job at refreshing the preview immediately after a field is inserted. (Used to require a click on the editor in some scenarios before).
• Added some more defensive code to avoid spaces in user names and other account fields.
• Default styles snippet that can be inserted into emails has been updated.

5.26.0.0 - 11/4/2020

• The preview of the email newsletter UI now shows a preview that is a better approximation of what the email really looks like for people. (Note that results can still vary widely as people use different email clients) .
• The preview of the article markdown edit UI now shows a preview that is a better approximation of what articles on our web site really look like. See also: Article Editing
  • Inline code (in paragraphs) is now rendered in an exaggerated way in the preview of the article edit experience, to make it easier to spot these text segments. See also: Article Editing
• There now is the ability to send email batches to people signed up for a specific event. See also: Sending Emails

5.25.1.0 - 10/13/2020

• The signup export in the event edit form now also exports a column showing the number of active subscriptions the signed up person owns.

5.25.0.1 - 10/12/2020

• Communication information in the contact edit form (especially email) now shows whether it is verified, valid, and if it is invalid, the reason for it being invalid (in the notes column).
• The Email Batches pane now shows batches grouped by month. It also shows the total number of emails sent in each month (which is very useful in knowning when we are over the total number of emails we can send through SendGrid). See also: Sending Emails
• The event edit form has been improved
  • It is now possible to double-click a signup row to open the customer detail.
  • The list of attendees now has a column that shows whether the attendee is an active magazine subscriber (and if so, how many subscriptions are active).
    
  • There now is a new button to trigger assigning subscriptions to people signed up for an event, which launches into the new “assign subscription” feature for event attendees.
    
• The comm-info edit dialog can now edit Verified and Invalid and edit the note associated with comm info (typically used to explain why it is flagged as invalid.)
  

5.24.1.0 - 10/9/2020

• Fixed a display problem with generating schedules for magazine issues.

5.24.0.0 - 10/6/2020

• The contact edit form (“subscriber edit form”) now shows in the comm-info grid whether the information is verified, invalid, and what the reason might be something is flagged as invalid. (All this is especially useful for emails, but can also be used for other types of communication information.)
• The email sending sub-system has been further enhanced (see also: Sending Emails)
  • There now is a toolbar in the interface that now has the “Generate Batch” button, rather than it being a regular button at the bottom.
  • There now is a button that provides an estimate as to how many recipients will be included in a batch. (Which works different for email newsletters, new issue notifications, and event promotions, but is supported in all these scenarios).
  • There now is a button that allows sending a test email (usually to oneself)
  • The interface for sending event promotions has been enhanced to support embedded event fields better (including the preview).
  • Last used email text is now preserved and loaded the next time the same email UI is opened again (separate for newsletters, event promotions, and new issue notifications)

5.23.0.0 - 9/25/2020

• The article edit system has been improved (see also: Edit Articles)
  • The XML to markdown automatic conversion mechanism has been improved to fix many special characters and also recognize certain patterns (RegEx) to create better formatting out of the box.
  • The article edit interface now shows “New” in the Markdown tab when the markdown was just auto-generated. It can also be cleaned out and saved from this UI now in order to force re-generation on the next open of the form. (Note: If the markdown was previously saved away instead of it being auto-generated, it shows “Yes” as before).

5.22.0.0 - 9/23/2020

• The automatic save system when closing windows has been overhauled to fix some threading bugs that caused some fields (especially multi-line text fields) to be cleared out incorrectly before their contents got saved.
• Enhancements to the email sending system.

5.21.0.1 - 8/20/2020

• There now is a new banner editing experience, including a list of banners and a banner edit form.
  
  
  

5.20.0.0 - 8/14/2020

• Events now show a list of signups right in the event UI. Data can be exported to Excel from this interface and individual customer information can be opened from there.
  
• There now is a new Email Batches pane that shows all email batches sent by the system (including email newsletters, event promos, new issue notifications,...). This can be used to monitor the progress of the most recent 100 email batches. This pane also allows for the creation of new email newsletters.
  
• There now is a new email newsletters interface (launched from the above pane). It works much like all our other email sending interfaces. However, this is specific to people signed up for email newsletters. (Note that this UI shows an estimate of the number of people invluded in the email newsletters. This is just an estimates as things like blocked emails, or de-duplicating lists can change the final numbers):
  

5.19.0.0 - 6/18/2020

• Article Markdown editing (and associated display on the web page and other formats) has been improved. See also: Article Editing

5.18.0.0 - 6/9/2020

• The event edit form now has a feature to send promitional emails right from within that interface.
  
  • The event edit form uses a similar email notification UI as the notification batches for magazine issues. This is currently still a work in progress, although it is already workably functional.
• The event management system now allows for the setup of a YouTube email ID, which identifies stored recordings on our YouTube channel, linked to the event.
• The event edit form now allows for the definition of a webinar URL. If that is set, users joining through our new live signup URL (codemag.com/events/live/xxx) will be forwarded to that webinar URL (presumably on YouTube, but it could be elsewhere).
• The event edit form now allows for file attachments. Attachments can be anything. In future versions, some file attachment types will play special roles (like slide downloads for people signed up for the event).

5.17.0.0 - 5/19/2020

• The Issue Edit Form now has a tab that shows Email Notification Batches, which are batches of emails we send to subscribers to let them know a new issue is available. The UI shows the batches, how many emails were included in the batch, how many of those have already been processed (processing large batches runs on the server and may take a long time), how many emails were actually sent vs how many were blocked by our system, and more:
  
• There now is a new interface that allows queueing email notification batches. Usually, we send those to digital subscribers, but print subscribers can be included as well. This interface can be used to create a Markdown-based email, with embedded fields (can be added through a toolbar button). The preview on the right shows an approximation of what the email will look like in differnet email clients (including values for embedded fields). When the generate-button is clicked, the batch of emails is scheduled to be processed in the Cloud and the user can close this UI.
  

5.16.0.1 - 5/11/2020

• The subscriber edit form account tab now has a new Get Temporary Password button. When this button is clicked, a temporary password is copied to the clipboard. One can then go to the codemag.com web site, enter the account username and the temporary password to impersonate the user for a limited amount of time. This is useful for seeing the data on the site the way the user sees it.
  

5.15.0.0 - 5/7/2020

• There now is a first version of a new event management interface
  • List of events:
    
  • The new event edit interface, while still a work in progress, supports the most important features now:
    
    
    
    
    Note that many text fields now support Markdown formatting (as is apparent when a Markdown editing interface is displayed):
    
    
• The article editing interface has been completed further. (It is still a work in progress, but it is much more complete now and can edit most of the information neded to maintain articles). See also: Article Editing
  • The main article information can now be edited properly (and saved correctly) through the main interface.
  • Editing of article content is now mainly done through the new Markdown interface.
    
  • The older XML version is still there, but used by fewer and fewer formats. It should be considered “legacy” at this point and will only be used in the future when the Markdown version is not provided.
  • HTML previews have been removed from the main form. Individual HTML previews for both the Markdown and the XML versions can be launched from those tabs.
  • Authors and issues can be assigned. However, these interfaces are still a work in progress and are lacking features such as removing authors and issues.

5.14.0.1 - 4/14/2020

• This version includes a new (beta) version of our new event editing interface. Rudimentary event editing is now supported, although not all fields are properly handled and saved yet.

5.13.0.0 - 4/13/2020

• The press release edit form now supports full Markdown editing with preview:
  
• The article edit form now features full-featured editors for article Markdown (in preview… not actually used yet!), XML, and HTML. See also: Article Editing
  
  
  

5.12.0.4 - 3/29/2020

• The database has been moved to its final Azure location. This new version is required to work with the new database!

5.12.0.0 - 3/25/2020

• Press release editing has been brought forward and works again.
  • List of press releases:
    
  • Press release editing:
    
  • The actual press release text now supports simplified editing in Markdown as seen in this screen-shot:
    
• All new-style edit forms now show the key of the item being edited in the status bar. The icon next to it allows copying the key to the clipboard:
  

5.11.0.2 - 3/24/2020

• MobiPocket (Kindle) export has been activated again, and is mostly functional.

5.11.0.1 - 3/15/2020

• There now is a new Article Control Center. See also: Article Editing
  
• There now is a new Article Edit Form
  
• The Issue Edit Form has been enhanced
  • Articles can now be edited/launched from the issue edit form by double-clicking an article in the grid.
• The subscription/renewal import form now has a feature that allows creating an empty CSV file that can be used as a starting point to fill in new data. (It is handy because it shows all the available fields).

5.10.0.0 - 3/3/2020

• The subscription edit form now allows picking fulfillment and billing addresses. (Note that the actual editing of addresses is done in the subscriber edit form rather than the subscription edit form):
  
• The subscription edit form now shows a list of all magazine issues included in the subscription. Only released magazine issues are included:
  
• The subsriber edit form now shows a list of all issues owned by the subscriber (across all subscriptions). Only released magazines are included in the list.

5.9.0.1 - 3/2/2020

• The duplicate subscription form now launches the correct name edit form.

5.9.0.0 - 3/1/2020

• Contact Control Center
  • The New Subscriber button does no longer incorrectly launch a subscription edit form.
  • There now is a new Subscription Import/Quick-Entry button (see below).
• Subscriber Edit Form
  • Double-clicking a subscription now opens the subscription edit form (formerly it used to open the subscription overview form).
  • Cancelling subscriptions now works without an error being displayed.
• Subscription Edit Form
  • This form now sorts the display of fulfillment records correctly (with the newest fulfillment first).
• There now is a new Subscription Import Form (launched from the Contact Control Center… see above)
  

5.8.0.0 - 2/11/2020

• A screen resolution problem related to the menu has been fixed.
• The menu now has a search textbox at the top that allows filtering of the menu:
  
• It is now possible to edit subscriptions associated with subscribers (with the exception of address editing, which is currently a work in progress). The subscription edit screen now focusses entirely on editing of existing subscriptions:
  
• The subscription edit form now has become more of a “subscription control center”, showing additional information, such as fulfillment history (which is specific to the subscription in question, in contrast to the fulfillment history shown in the subscriber edit form, which shows all fulfillments across all subscriptions):
  
• ...and invoices (also associated with the current subscription only, contrary to the subscriber edit form, which shows all invoices associated with a person):
  
• ...and the subscription's history (with lots of additional data that wasn't available before, showing a snapshot of the subscription as it was at the time the change happened):
  

5.7.0.0 - 2/3/2020

• The Mailings tab of the issue edit form now allows for the creation of new fulfillment batches.
• There now is a completely re-written fulfillment batch creation UI (and associated back-end logic).
  
• The dates page of the issue edit form has been re-designed to work on smaller monitors.

5.6.0.0 - 1/26/2020

• The issue edit form has been completely replaced with a new one. This new form is much more powerful and acts as a control-center for everything related to an issue. Including articles in an issue, mailings, and more.
• The entire issue editing experience (from the issue list to the issue edit form) is now entirely based on service calls. This means that no VPN access is required to use these features, and no IP addresses have to be white-listed on the datagbase for these features. This also means that this form should work more efficiently in remote-access scenarios.
• The first page of the issue edit form has been changed slightly from the previous version:
  
• The production-dates page of the issue edit form has been changed slightly from the previous version:
  
• The sales-information page of the issue edit form has changed slightly:
  
• There now is a new mailings-page in the issue edit form. It shows all mail batches created for this issue, with information about how many individual packages were sent, and how many total copies (the two numbers could be different if multi-copy subscribers were included in the batch). The headers also show the totals for all batches.
  
• There now is a new articles-page that shows all articles in the issue:
  
• The attachments-page has been modernized and uses our new standardized file-attachments page:
  
• A bug that caused the font within the drop-down calendars throughout the system to appear too large and be cut off, making the days unreadable, has been fixed.

5.5.0.0 - 1/18/2020

• File attachment logic throughout the app has been updated to use the latest file services (with access of files stored on Azure)
• All file attachment grids have been re-worked to work with this new mechanism. The look has also been cleaned up:
  
• The file attachment property dialog has been updated and enhanced (especially the support for categories and for Azure files has been improved):
  
• The file attachment upload dialog has been cleaned up and enhanced (especially the support for categories and for Azure files has been improved):
  

5.4.0.0 - 1/15/2020

• Issue editing is back online at least in a rudimentary fashion.
• A new version of the magazine issue list has been implemented:
  

5.3.0.1 - 12/13/2019

• The app now uses an updated invoice display. (Note: We are aware of the rendering issue at the top-right side of the invoice, but this is an Internet Explorer related issue that won't be fixed for now. We are moving to Chromium anyway, which will display that detail correctly):
  
• The app can now create a PDF version of an invoice by clicking the Get PDF Version button in the invoice display:
  

5.2.1.0 - 12/10/2019

• Fixed a problem related to author information when saving names that weren't authors.

5.2.0.17 - 12/06/2019

• The refresh algorithm in the contact edit form has been improved to refresh the content of different tabs correctly in more different scenarios.
• The application auto-update mechanism has been improved to provide more sophisticated update checking and downloading, as well as showing this change log whenever the application has been updated. (This will come into effect for all updates from here on forward).
• The application now has a new status bar, showing the status, the current application version, and providing a way to switch the color theme:
  

5.1.0.1 - 12/04/2019

• Re-enabled additional address editing options. The new address UI exposes all fields individually (including the state field even for countries that do not have states, so incorrectly filled state information can be cleared out). It also provides a preview of how the address will be formated in the country in question. Plus, if the address is in the US, it can be verified with the USPS right through this interface:
  
• Subscription display is back in, allowing a view of all subscriptione settings at a glance:
  
• Invoice display is back in, showing a preview rendering of an invoice:
  
• Payment history can be displayed from the invoice dialog:
  
• Billing history can be displayed from the invoice dialog. The UI style is still the old style.

5.0.0.0 - 12/01/2019

• First officially deployed new version of the re-written Olympus application.
• Olympus has been given a new (more modern) look. It supports simple color themes. And it has been optimized to support larger screens better. Here is a general screen shot that provides an overall idea:
  
• The former “subscriber edit form” has been re-worked into a new “Contact Control Center” that provides a much richer feature-set for editing contact information with all the related data: