July 2022

Products & Services in Checkout

Our latest feature addition to our new Checkout basket is support for selling Product & Services!

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The Products & Services module allows you to sell more than just courses through your basket! Here are a few of the common types of Products & Services that we have seen built within the accessplanit platform so far:

1. Selling printed certificates alongside courses

2. Selling optional and mandatory exams alongside courses

3. Selling hotel / travel services alongside courses

4. Selling books and learning materials

5. Selling course related equipment such as first aid kits

6. Adding booking fees to course bookings

Products & Services tend to be allocated to Courses so that they are displayed and promoted in the basket whenever your customers are making a booking. However it is also possible for your customers to follow a direct purchase link to buy a Product & Service on it’s own!

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Purchasing a Driving Test Product and Service through the Checkout Basket

Your Products & Services can be set up to require a user name for purchase, for example you may not need to know the name of the person who will receive a First Aid Kit, however you would need to know which delegates want to have a Printed Certificate! You can see in the above example that the booking user can choose how many First Aid Kits that they wish to buy, whereas they instead select the names of the delegates when purchasing the Printed Certificates.

Your Products & Services can also be set up to be mandatory or optional when bought alongside your courses, in the above example both the First Aid Kit and the Printed Certificates are optional.

If you do not yet use the Products & Services module and you are interested in learning more about it, please speak to your CSM and they will be happy to set up a demonstration of the module for you!

WorldPay in Checkout

Our latest payment gateway addition to Checkout is WorldPay.

The integration is for WorldPay’s Corporate Gateway and so if you have a WorldPay corporate gateway account or you are about to get one, once this is enabled it will show up as a new payment option in your Checkout basket!

WorldPay opens in a pop-over window over the top of the Checkout basket, so your customers are not directed anywhere else to complete their payment, it is all done within one page.

Section Menus

Section Menus are a new type of menu which displays at the top of the forms in your platform, they make navigating up and down your forms much quicker and save you a lot of scrolling!

It’s just a simple click to jump to the area of the form that you want to view or edit, and a click on the first option in the Section Menu to jump back up to the top of the page!

Internet Explorer no longer supported

Microsoft has announced that it will stop supporting Internet Explorer 11 on June 15 2022. Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be available, and Microsoft will no longer provide support or patches for it.
Read more from Microsoft here.

What this means for accessplanit users

accessplanit software is a web-based system and requires the use of any modern browser to operate effectively.

Microsoft has deprecated Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) and therefore IE11 is no longer considered a modern browser. As such, from June 2022 users are strongly encouraged to move to a modern browser such as Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple's Safari. From June 2022, accessplanit will no longer be validating updates for compatibility with IE11 and bug fixes will not be actioned where they only apply to IE11.

If any users log into accessplanit while using Internet Explorer, a pop-up will appear to let them know that some functionality may not work for them correctly

What happens next?

If you or your users are currently operating in IE11, we strongly encourage that you move to a modern browser such as Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari to ensure that your accessplanit instance operates effectively.

If you have any questions about Internet Explorer and accessplanit, please get in touch with a member of the team here at accessplanit!

jQuery Update

jQuery is a JavaScript library and it is used as one of the technologies to build your accessplanit platform.

In this latest release we have updated the entire accessplanit platform, including the Learner Portal and the Shopping Baskets, to have the latest version of jQuery.

This updates means that your accessplanit platform benefits from the latest security fixes and performance improvements from the jQuery latest version.

API Feed Improvements

There are two API Feed improvements in this update, both of them support your developers with building high performing integrations!

API Feed Filtering

The first is to introduce filtering into more of the available feeds, we already have support for filtering the Courses and the Delegates feed, however there is now support for filtering the following API Feed endpoints:

• Users

• Accounts

• Invoices

This means that there is much less work to do to grab the data needed for your integration.

Date Updates

The second update is the addition of ‘Date Updated’ as an extra field, for the following API Feed endpoints:

• Users

• Accounts

• Course Dates

• Invoices

As each of these feeds can be filtered, this means that your developers will be able to make requests such as “only show me users that have been updated in the last 24 hours”, or “only show me courses that have been updated in the last hour”.

If you do not yet use the API Feeds module and you are interested in learning more about it, please speak to your CSM and they will be happy to run you though the benefits and uses of the module!

DataGrid Usability Improvements

We have implemented some helpful UX changes into the DataGrids in this release.

First of all we have added some supporting icons to the Filters, Bulk Edit, and Export buttons.

Icons are great for everyone as, as well as looking nice, they help with recall which means that it is quicker to find what you’re looking for on the page. Icons also help provide more context which is great for brand new administrators to your team.

You’ll also notice that we have also updated the icon that is used for changing the columns in your DataGrid from the triple dots to a column icon. We recognised that the current icon is not very informative, so we have changed the icon to make more sense, and to improve this further there will now be text displayed when you hover over the button to let you know what it is for.

Secondly, we have added some headers to the column selector window to explain what the options are for, while experienced users will probably not benefit from this too much as they already know what they do, hopefully they will be a help to any new employees that you bring into your teams.

Finally, we have updated the DataGrid search options to move all of the options that you are currently searching on to the top of the list, this means that you can clearly see what you are already searching for and you do not need to scroll up and down the list to find out this information.

Page Labels

Here at accessplanit we are starting on our journey to make the platform as accessible as possible. We have recently been working on a review of the platform against WCAG’s AA accessibility standard to produce our accessibility statement and roadmap.

One of the interesting, and often overlooked, parts of accessibility is ‘easy read’ which is all about presenting text in an easy to understand, jargon-free format.

We have started on this by renaming many of the platform pages to remove unnecessary text.

For example we have renamed the ‘Resource Unavailability Maintenance’ page to ‘Resource Unavailability’, the word maintenance is not essential, people accessing that page are not necessarily going to the page to maintain unavailability, and that is not how users describe the page.

Similarly, we have renamed the ‘Course Booking Maintenance’ page to ‘Bookings’.

As a final example, the ‘User Maintenance’ > ‘Financial Information Editor’ has been renamed to ‘User’ > ‘Financial Information’

It is not just users that benefit from easy-read that will benefit from this change, it also helps all of us when we’re talking about the platform, directing admins for which page to go to, and just really call the pages what they are.

Visit Basket Button

This is quite a small update! We have added in a new button into the window that pops-up when you add a course, or product and service to your basket so that you can head straight over to your basket.

Pre-populate the Manage Booking Step

If you are already making use of the Manage Booking step at the end of your Checkout basket then this one is for you!

By popular demand we have updated this page to pre-populate with information, if the delegate already has this information stored against them.

If you have not heard of this step before, the Manage Booking step is a feature available in the new Checkout basket where you can capture extra information about the Delegates attending your Courses, once the booking has been taken. This means that you’re not losing out on bookings or revenue because there are too many questions up front in the registration form, or if your booking users just don’t know that information yet!

Following this update, if Roxanna (in the above image) has previously provided us with her mobile number and job title, these will be already filled in when she makes another booking to save her typing them in again, although she can overwrite them with new information if any of this has changed since her last booking.

Shortcuts to manage the items in your Checkout Basket

If you have made the switch to accessplanit’s new Checkout basket there are now shortcuts to remove items from your basket from the administrator view, you can remove one item or all of them from your basket preview at the top of your platform.

These options also include our click-again to delete feature to avoid any accidental deletes!

Performance updates

In this latest update we have several performance improvements to speed up your accessplanit platform for yourselves and your customers!

Performance improvements have been made

1. In the platform DataGrids to speed up their loading time

2. In the new Checkout basket

3. To the frequency that roles are updated

Checkout - Company Name Drop Down Box

In this latest update we have improved the drop-down box which is used to select which Account new users will be added to when they are created as a new Delegate in your Checkout Basket.

The ‘Company Name’ option now has searching available so you no longer need to scroll through a very long list of Accounts to find the right Account for your new user!

Stripe - Administrator Payments Update

Following an update by Stripe for MOTO payments (mail order telephone order payments), we have updated our integration with Stripe.

Payments made by Administrators (on behalf of your customers) using the “Make Payment” option in the Invoices page will be processed as a MOTO payment. This type of payment bypasses the usual 3DS checks, allowing administrators to process payments without the customer having to provide sensitive data over the phone.

If you are having any issues with processing Stripe payments on behalf of your customers through the Make Payment page, please get in touch with Stripe to ensure that you have MOTO payments enabled in your Stripe account.

🤗 If you would like any support with any of the new features or changes please get in touch with our Customer Support Team.

🤔 If you have any ideas of how we can improve the product further, please log these on our Product Portal.

Finally, if you would like to be a part of our product development process, you can join our Product Loop Club! Read more about our Loop Club.