If you are looking at activity records this morning you may notice a cosmetic change to the filter bar. We’ve done this to make it a little more obvious that you can click to change what you see in the table.

It was accompanied by a couple of minor changes to groups. You can now filter activity records by up to 24 months (rather than 12 previously), and you can also specify “up to 5 of…” for multi-select fields.

An update last night sees some improvements to outcomes. We’ve changed the layout of the main ‘activity > add > outcome’ screen slightly to make it clearer. If you are using an established outcomes framework that includes descriptors for individual scores, you’ll see there are now drop downs that give you the meanings of the number scores.

If you have any ‘calculated outcomes’ – where Lamplight works out a sub-total or total score for you – you’ll see in individual profiles you can now view these on their own radar chart (which works best when there are several sub-totals) – but the animation showing change over time may also be helpful.

Also on outcomes, if you show full details in a data view, Yes/No outcomes will be shown as ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ instead of 1 or 0 (though you’ll need to edit and save the data view first for this to take effect).

There’s also a new option in the relationships section of data views: ‘Name and contact details for download’. This gives you the same information as the ‘Name and contact details’ option – the address, phone and email of the related profile. The difference is that it separates it with a | symbol (the one next to Z on regular keyboards), and empty fields are included. This all means that if you use the view and download it, you can use the ‘text to columns’ functionality to split up the data and it’ll all be lined up properly (choose ‘delimited’ and enter the | symbol as the delimiter).

A couple of other tweaks in this update:

• monitoring requirements are displayed on the activity > view > grants table.
• address field names are translated in communication mail merge menus.

A couple of changes have just gone live:

• If you use the “my user” restriction to limit access to profiles, there are new options about which activity records affected operators may see. System administrators can change this in the ‘security’ tab of global settings.
• Groups using relationships will now by default not include the linked profile as the ‘second’ member of the group, but you can include them if needed by editing your group definition. We have also fixed an issue with communication recipients using groups.
• You can now restrict custom activity fields to operators with manager or higher access level.

We’re currently working hard on a completely new and re-written help system – coming soon!