We recently released a number of new reporting items users have been asking for.

First, a master change log: Account Admins can now go to the new Reporting > Changes tab in Account and create detailed reports of just about any change made to any person—including what kind of action it was, when it was made, and who made it.

Next, one tab over from Changes, you'll find the new Logins report, which lets you get login details—everything from username to IP address—for any timeframe you need.

On the Profile's Activity Feed, you can now see admissions-related changes—status changes, application updates, questions, and more:

And over in Financial, the new Online Payments tab in Financial > Settings gathers together all the settings you need to get your school going with online payments.

There are also a couple new custom financial statement page layouts, which works just like our other custom layouts (transcript, award letter, etc.). There's an overall statement that you can export from a student's financial dashboard, and a term statement that's available on the student's financial term view. Contact Populi Support if you'd like to get going with either of the new layouts.

If you haven't already found them, go check out the new read-only application links! They let you share applications with reviewers—without having to print them out.

From Free Press' Save The Internet site:

On Jan. 14, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order.

And now, the FCC is proposing rules that would kill — rather than protect — Net Neutrality and allow rampant discrimination online.

What is net neutrality anyway? And why should you care? One of my favorite YouTubers, CGP Grey, does a great job explaining not just what net neutrality is, but why we must defend it.

So what difference can we make? The White House has already responded to this petition asking for a restoration of net neutrality, and while this is a good start it doesn't actually get us any closer to the goal of preserving a free and open internet.

Save The Internet has a number of ideas about how we the people can keep the pressure on the FCC to do the right thing. On behalf of Populi, I encourage you to check out the list and take action to defend net neutrality.

On Monday, April 7, security researchers published information about a bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library. OpenSSL powers the encryption used to secure the internet—everything from websites to instant messaging to virtual private networks. The bug, called Heartbleed, could affect about 2/3 of encrypted internet traffic.

As of now, all Populi servers have been patched against this vulnerability, and we have no reason to believe that any of our clients' data was compromised. Due to the critical nature of this issue, we performed the patching during business hours today—rather than after hours as we normally do—so our apologies to anyone who was affected! We’ll continue to monitor the situation and post further updates if necessary.

To the best of our knowledge, Populi has been locked-down against this bug and all data is secure.

Do you remember where you were on June 18th, 2013? The last time we went and upped everyone's free file storage limit?  We remember where we were: that day, we were upping your free file storage limit. This is kind of like that, except we're not even waiting for the summer to . . .

. . . give everyone even more free file storage.

Every plan has already received more for the same—which is for free. It happened and you didn't even notice!

Are you on the so-called small plan? Where you used to get a measly 50 gigs of free storage? Now you get 100 gigs of free storage.

The medium plan? Been wishing you had more than 100 gigs of free file storage? You've been gazing wistfully at the large plan's 200 gigs? Now it's yours. 200 gigs of free storage.

The large plan. You had 200 gigs of free file storage. Pretty good. What would be great? 500 gigs would be great, right? And that's what you get. 500 gigs of free storage.

Our Plan Pricing remains the same. So all those extra gigs-per-month really are free.

Enjoy it. Use it. You'll have even more room to store and deliver your video and audio lectures and materials. Start uploading dumb stuff—like daily videos of your coffee cooling, accompanied by in-depth commentary—just because you can.

This applies to all of our current customers and anyone else who has yet to jump aboard with Populi. That extra file storage is yours to use right now!

The new roster and finalize-by-student are now live! Take a look at the preview we published a few weeks ago, and get all the details in the Knowledge Base.

Here are some other noteworthy items we've released over the past couple months...

Test availability

Tests can now have open-ended test availability dates. Choose from Available from (which gives you the usual date range), Available after or until, and Always available, which keeps the test open for the entire duration of the course. This makes things much simpler for our customers who run open-enrollment courses.

Inquiries

You now have the option, when entering a new Inquiry, whether to email the comment to the student or keep it private. That, and the comment itself is now optional!

Miscellaneous Admissions updates

Active Leads now get the Active Lead system tag. This makes it much simpler to, for example, include them in a Mailing List.

When you accept an application, you can now add the Lead as a new user at the same time.