We’ve been notified by our hardware provider that there is some upcoming scheduled maintenance which may cause a short interruption in services. We expect this interruption to be more than a few minutes and will occur sometime between 11:00PM and 1:00AM EST on May 31st, 2009.

It  should not affect our availability, but with any network or hardware maintenance there is always the possibility of unforeseen problems. We’ll be on hand during this time to make sure everything runs smoothly.

If you have any questions, please call us at 401-274-1800 or email support@digication.com.

Here at Digication we’ve been excited about giving our users some new features we’ve been working on for the past few months. This past week we added support for the incredibly popular social networking site, Twitter. For those of you who haven’t heard about Twitter, it is a service that lets you tell your friends what you’re doing and see real-time updates of what your friends are doing.

By adding the Twitter module into any page in your e-Portfolio, your visitors will see your latest 5 tweets. Below is a screenshot of what the new Twitter module looks like in your portfolio.

We’re happy to announce that this new module is currently active and should show up in your list of available modules. Be sure to keep an eye out for more module announcements, as we have a few rolling out in the near future.

Greetings! We are pleased to provide you a sneak peek at the new Digication online help system. The Digication online help system will provide you with contextual help whether you’re changing your profile, editing an e-Portfolio or posting information to a course, community, or assessment group.

The preview is a little tricky to get to but if you would like to get a look at what’s to come, go to your current Digication login page and type in ?help=1 after the web address. For instance, if you normally login at http://campus.digication.com go to http://campus.digication.com/?help=1

Click on the Help tab in the upper right hand corner of your browser to view the online help system.

We look forward to hearing your feedback before we make the system live for all our users. To share your feedback please contact us here: http://digication.com/about/contact

It’s been a busy couple of months for us, focusing largely on our Admissions and Assessment packages. Unfortunately this means we haven’t spent as much time as we usually do looking at customer suggestions.

What happens to your suggestions? Everything that comes in – whether it’s something we overhear at a conference, a feature requested by a user, or difficulty using an area of our application that’s noticed by support – all this goes into our Product Calendar database. It then goes through a couple steps. First it’s looked at to make sure it’s technically possible and to assign a time/cost. Then we talk to an informal group of customers to see what they think (and we’re always looking for more people to be part of this group!). Finally we sit down once a month and review all the suggestions as a group, take into account the customer feedback, and either decide to shelve it for the time being, or assign it a development window.

I’m happy to say that both Admissions and Assessment have been very well received and we’re ready to go back to our regular routine of a constant stream of enhancements based on your thoughts and suggestions. I hope to make better use of this blog moving forward – posting instructions and notifications on changes of every size – and hopefully giving previews of upcoming features for feedback.

Please keep the suggestions coming, we can always be reached at support@digication.com.

We’ve always had a simple contact form inside our e-Portfolios that allow viewers to email you without having to give out an email address. Recently we received a few complaints about spam coming in through these forms, so we added a CAPTCHA to the process.

You can read more about how a CAPTCHA works and how it can prevent spam at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha.