Product Updates, April 2025

Summary

April 2025 brought significant enhancements to Scholarly Software's platform, focusing on workflow efficiency and faculty experience. The workflow engine—central to evaluations, promotions, and leave applications—now features a dedicated Documents tab, improved workload views, and streamlined file handling. Platform-wide, users benefit from more intuitive notifications, faster navigation, and refined data integrations, especially with Ellucian's Banner. Faculty can now better manage their expertise tags and view calculated activity points directly. Scholarly remains committed to empowering institutions to unlock data, automate processes, and improve faculty lives.

What are the latest workflow improvements in Scholarly? * The core workflow engine now includes a Documents tab for easy document management, customizable workload and impact point views, and improved file handling for previews and downloads.
How has navigation and user experience improved? * Dashboard notifications are better grouped, status badge clicks now go directly to workflow steps, and font choices have been standardized for a more professional appearance.
What enhancements were made to faculty data management? * Calculated point values are now visible on faculty activity grids, and faculty can edit the reasons for their expertise tags.
How does Scholarly integrate with institutional systems? * Data synchronization with Ellucian's Banner is now more robust, ensuring smoother integration for institutions using this system.
Where can I learn more about Scholarly’s features? * Visit the Features page or read their Feature Deep Dive: Appointments for detailed insights.

“Unlock the power of your data, automate your workflows, and improve the lives of your faculty.” — Scholarly Software, Inc.

Interested in seeing these improvements in action? Book a demo with Scholarly today.

Apr 28, 2025

April has been a busy and exciting month at Scholarly! We saw major strides in product development and important milestones toward growing our platform capabilities. Let's dive into everything we accomplished in April.

Workflow Improvements

Our core workflow engine saw a lot of upgrades throughout the month of April. The workflow engine drives annual evaluations, promotion and tenure cases, leave application workflows, and more.

We shipped a lot of polish and new functionality throughout April:

New Documents tab: Added a “Documents” tab to faculty evaluation cases, including an "Export All" button to download all documents at once. This exports just the documents the current user can see.
Workload and Impact Point views: Every workflow can have a "Workload" quantitative view, which displays a histogram of workload data based on activity reported in the evaluation. Point calculations can be customized with precise formulas.
File handling improvements: Better file attachment previews, downloads, and management within workflows. More files can be viewed on-platform without needing to be downloaded.
Dashboard CTA grouping: Dashboard notifications for in-process workflows are better grouped, meaning a denser information display for department chairs and deans.
Better assignee handling: Fixed inconsistencies with assignee propagation across evaluations.
Faster navigation: Clicking on a status badge in evaluation cycles now takes users directly to the associated step.
Cleaner font choices: The signature input on workflow forms was rendering as Comic Sans on Windows platforms. We have chosen and implemented a more professional font.

Improvements Around the Platform

Calculated point values for faculty activities are now surfaced on the faculty activity grids.
Our department or unit-select component got an upgrade, making it work better at institutions with nested unit structures.
Faculty members can now edit the reason why a specific expertise tag is attached to their profile.
Improved how we sync data from Ellucian's Banner into the Scholarly platform.

Stay tuned for more updates, and don't forget to check out our recent deep dive on how appointments work at Scholarly: Feature Deep Dive: Appointments.

Enjoy the spring, and see you next month!