Release 2 – March 8, 2023

New Features and Enhancements

CAS Application Enhancements

Liaison’s suite of portals work together to help you collect and manage applications. The CAS application, also referred to as the CAS Applicant Portal, is the system where applicants find and apply to your programs. You receive these applications in WebAdMIT or Liaison Outcomes, where you perform your review processes. The appearance of your program and your requirements are customized in the CAS Configuration Portal, where you establish the program-specific elements that your applicants will interact with. Additionally, your program may use one or more of the following tools and platforms:

  • API: a data integration tool.
  • CAS Analytics by Liaison and Othot: advanced analytics solutions and data reporting tools.
  • CAS Applicant Gateway: a platform for applicants who have already submitted their CAS application to complete and upload additional materials requested by their programs.
  • CAS Liaison Letters: a platform for evaluators to submit their letters of recommendation.
  • Enrollment Marketing and TargetX: customer relationship management (CRM) systems for student lifecycle management.
  • Living Profile: a platform where students can connect their academic pursuits with their career aspirations.
  • SlideRoom: a platform for collecting digital portfolios.
  • Time2Track: a platform for tracking, verifying, and managing experiences.
    Optionally Add Third Gender/Sex Value

This enhancement is for CASs using the standard Gender/Sex question and must be approved by the CAS association or UniCAS client for use in the next cycle. If activated, this enhancement will be available for all participating programs in the next cycle. CAS association and UniCAS clients: contact your Account Manager for more information or to enable this feature.

Disclaimer: on rare occasions, a new feature or enhancement may be moved to a future release or otherwise subject to change.

CASs can choose to add a third custom answer value to the Gender/Sex question, alongside the existing Female and Male answer values; for example, the third custom answer value could be X or X or another gender. This enhancement allows CASs to meet their guidelines and new options from state and federal governments.

Applicant Portal

Applicants can view and select the custom answer value when completing their application.

Admissions by Liaison

The custom gender answer value is displayed in Admissions by Liaison as configured by the CAS and appears on the Biographic Information section of the application form. The custom gender value will be stored in the same Gender or Sex field that currently exists to ensure all user-configured dashboard reports, custom properties, and exports that reference the gender field will continue to work as expected.

Analytics by Liaison

The custom answer value will appear in Analytics by Liaison once an applicant selects the new value.

CAS API

The CAS API Application response now includes a new Gender JSON node under the BiographicInfo node (i.e., persInfo.biogInfo.gend.gender) that captures all the CAS-specific gender/sex options. For more information, review the Application resource in the API technical documentation.

If you currently use the CAS to Slate integration, we recommend you update your data integration and change the sex mapping from the previously-used field (persInfo.biogInfo.prof.gender) to the new CAS- and cycle-aware field (persInfo.biogInfo.gend.gender). While the previous field will remain in the payload, the data populating it is applicant-scoped instead of application-scoped and may not accurately reflect the options available in your CAS. The specific prompt value mappings vary from CAS to CAS; refer to your CAS for the custom gender answer value.

(CAS API description updated on April 3, 2023)

WebAdMIT

The custom answer value displays in WebAdMIT as how the CAS decides the value, and it appears in the Personal Information panel, Biographic Information subpanel on the Applicant Details page. It is also available in the List Manager, Export Manager, and Report Manager (for reports by Gender or Sex – e.g., Ages by Gender or Sex, GPAs by Year by Gender or Sex, etc.).

    Annual Spring 2023 Lookup Updates

This enhancement is automatically available for use by all CASs and participating programs. No action is required on the part of any association, school, or program. Contact your Account Manager for more information.

Disclaimer: on rare occasions, a new feature or enhancement may be moved to a future release or otherwise subject to change.

Many fields in the Applicant Portal contain predefined answer values that applicants can select; for example, the Country and County fields both have predefined answer values. These values are housed in shared "lookup tables." Periodically, we update these tables to include additional response options.

The new lookup table values will be released in two phases: one phase in Release 2 and another phase scheduled for Release 3. The first phase of the new lookup table values are now available in the Applicant Portal.

These lookup table updates impact the following portals, some of which you may use. If you created a "crosswalk" from our portals to your local data in your SIS/CRM, you may need to update this crosswalk for the newly added options. For guidance on optimal implementation of the new values, review the Shared Lookup Table Updates for Spring 2023 page.

    New Integration Help Center

This enhancement is automatically available for use by all CASs and participating programs. No action is required on the part of any association, school, or program. Contact your Account Manager for more information.

The existing Data Integration and Application Programming Interface (API) help centers are now combined into a new Integration Help Center. This help center includes all the great information from the previous help centers and builds on them to include more of Liaison’s product APIs and connectors. These include:

  • Admissions by Liaison API and connector
  • CAS API
  • Enrollment Marketing Platform (EMP) connector
  • SlideRoom API
  • TargetX connector
  • WebAdMIT API and connector

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Configuration Portal Enhancements

Disclaimer: on rare occasions, a new feature or enhancement may be moved to a future release or otherwise subject to change.

    Error Message for Missing Program Details

This enhancement is automatically available for use by all CASs and participating programs. No action is required on the part of any association, school, or program. Contact your Account Manager for more information.

After you configure your program, you must submit it for review. If your program has missing information in required fields on the Program Details page, a new error message appears, alerting you of this. Previously, you could submit your programs for review with missing required data. This enhancement ensures that your program information is complete before it is reviewed and goes live in the application.

WebAdMIT Enhancements

Disclaimer: on rare occasions, a new feature or enhancement may be moved to a future release or otherwise subject to change.

    SFTP Delivery of PDF Manager Files

This enhancement is automatically available for use by all CASs and participating programs. No action is required on the part of any association, school, or program. Contact your Account Manager for more information.

SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) allows you to transfer files from WebAdMIT to your institution's servers, such as a Student Information System (SIS), Slate, TargetX, Enrollment Marketing, or other SFTP servers. With this enhancement, you can now use the SFTP features to schedule and transfer PDF files in bulk through the PDF Manager; these include the full application PDF, transcripts, letters of recommendation, and other applicant-uploaded documents. This enhancement allows you to convert more of your manual file transfer process to an automated one.

This enhancement was inspired by user feedback.

    Improved Transfer Settings Summary Pages

This enhancement is automatically available for use by all CASs and participating programs. No action is required on the part of any association, school, or program. Contact your Account Manager for more information.

The Transfer Settings feature allows you to transfer templates from a previous cycle to a current cycle in WebAdMIT. This allows you to work more efficiently and focus on cycle-to-cycle changes rather than rebuilding all templates each cycle.

During the Transfer Settings process, there are pages that summarize which templates are included in the transfer. With this enhancement, these pages have an improved layout for easier reading, more clarification on what is included in the transfer, and how some of the recent export and PDF enhancements affect the transfer. These enhancements all better prepare you when using the Transfer Settings feature.

    New Last Exported/Printed Date Column for Export Manager and PDF Manager Pages

This enhancement is automatically available for use by all CASs and participating programs. No action is required on the part of any association, school, or program. Contact your Account Manager for more information.

Two new columns are now available on the Export Manager and PDF Manager pages: Set Last Exported Date (for the Export Manager) and Set Last Printed Date (for the PDF Manager). This enhancement allows you to quickly view if the last exported or printed date was set in an export or PDF Manager template, instead of editing the template to view that information. The values will display as Y if these features are activated for a template or N if they are not activated.

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Coming Soon!

Please review the list of upcoming events, including scheduled downtime/maintenance, product updates, and regional training opportunities.

Event

Date

Details

Sandbox Environment Refresh

March 6, 2023

The WebAdMIT Sandbox environment (sandbox.webadmit.org) was refreshed with current (cleansed) production data and program configurations. Any test exports, custom fields, etc., in the current sandbox were overwritten.

Shared Lookup Table Updates for Spring 2023

March 5 and April 2, 2023

Many fields in the Applicant Portal contain predefined answer values that applicants can select; for example, the Country and County fields both have predefined answer values. These values are housed in shared "lookup tables" which are viewable in your CAS's/UniCAS's data dictionary (located under the Help panel in WebAdMIT).

Lookup table change requests should be sent to your Account Manager, who will compile and review these requests before inclusion in the next lookup table update taking place this spring. The deadline to submit change requests was November 1, 2022. New lookup table values will appear in the Applicant Portal on March 5 and April 2, 2023 (subject to change).

You can view the upcoming lookup value changes on the Shared Lookup Table Updates for Spring 2023 page.

Sandbox Environment Refresh

April 3, 2023

The WebAdMIT Sandbox environment (sandbox.webadmit.org) will be refreshed with current (cleansed) production data and program configurations. Any test exports, custom fields, etc., in the current sandbox will be overwritten.