Technology Updates

As part of our on-going maintenance service we do update CiviCRM to the latest security release on a regular basis but now it's time for a major upgrade. 

CiviCRM 5 has been out there for a while and after completing a lot of tests we strongly believe now is a good time to upgrade all our customers. We have already upgraded a few of our customers to CiviCRM 5.19 and are quite pleased with its functionality and maturity.

As part of our service plan we have planned a major CiviCRM upgrade in the coming weeks. As usual, this upgrade will bring many new features including:

Every few years we consider large scale changes to our infrastructure in order to leverage new offerings or technologies for the benefit of our clients.

For example, a few years ago we transitioned our technology infrastructure from our "classic" provider to Amazon AWS and the scalability and global reach of Amazon enabled us to support the growth of our client base, diversify our offering with dedicated servers, and open additional data centers in Canada and France in order to better serve our local clients from these regions.

Do you send regurlary emails to your contacts to let them know about all of the upcoming events of a particular type (i.e. member only, conference, fundraiser, training, etc.)?

Cividesk has developed an useful extension that allows you to display in an email all the events of a particular type with the start and end dates in a listing format without having to enter each event manually in the listing. Once the extension is installed a token for each event type is made available to include in your email template.

As a Cividesk customer you have access to an array of resources and services included in your Cividesk account plan, but have you ever wondered who you should contact when you have a question, who your current users are, or which extensions are installed on your instance of CiviCRM?

You can now find answers to all of these questions in your Cividesk Account page under the Support menu directly in CiviCRM! The page is updated dynamically and shows the following information:

Over the past few months, Cividesk has made improvements and completed bug fixes in report templates as suggested and sponsored by our customers. Not only do all Cividesk clients benefit from these improvements but so does the entire CiviCRM community. We have already contributed these changes to the CiviCRM Core software as part of our committment as a Sustaining Contributor.

New features include:

Have you ever wanted to make the member price option available in an event registration form only to good standing members (ie. New, Current or Grace status)? This way, only these members can take advantage of a discounted price as one of their exclusive benefits!

Cividesk developed this new feature so the member rate for an event is only displayed when the logged-in user has a good standing membership.

Have you ever wondered if you could add multiple activities for a single participant to an event? Cividesk has added a functionality that will do just that!

Search for a participant following your desired criteria and in the bulk actions you should be able to see the "Add activity" option for your participant. It's that easy!

This functionality has been sponsored by one of our customers and will be contributed back to the CiviCRM Core Team as a part of our giving back to the CiviCRM community.

As part of your Cividesk service, we sometimes have to perform infrastructure upgrades in order to bring your core software up to date with the latest developments and/or for security purposes. 

While most of these upgrades are done behind the scene, sometimes we have a major upgrade to perform and need to inform our customers of precautions and potential side effects. This is the case for the PHP upgrade planned this month (March 2019), so we wanted to take a moment to answer your most critical questions.

Cividesk is proud to be an active contributor to the CiviCRM community since 2011. We contribute to the project every month with new code, code fixes, by hosting events and more.

Most recently, Cividesk added a new functionality which gives CiviCRM users the ability to print a contribution receipt directly from the User Dashboard. Until now, only the invoice could be printed from the Dashboard.