Product Updates, August 2025

August at Scholarly was all about collaboration, configurability, and rock‑solid reliability. We shipped a host of updates that make multi‑reviewer workflows smoother, give administrators more control, and strengthen our API for the integrations you run every day. (Missed the July edition? Catch up on recent momentum in our monthly series.)

Collaborative Reviews — Real‑Time Editing & Better Questions

• Live rich‑text editing in review steps so committees can collaborate directly in Scholarly.

• New question types for team reviews, expanding what you can collect and how you can structure responses.

• Quality‑of‑life fixes: collaborative mode surfaces clearer date‑override displays and we added validation for choice‑based questions.

Appointment Data — Custom Fields, Your Way

• Configurable custom fields (text, rich text, date, boolean, integer) for primary and additional appointments.

• Designed to surface in grids, exports, and downstream integrations so appointment data can reflect your institution’s exact model.

Admin Controls — Self‑Serve & Secure by Default

• Self‑serve academic terms: edit and manage term definitions directly in the app.

• Provisioning controls: institution‑level setting to enable/disable automatic user provisioning, plus SSO group‑hierarchy mapping for cleaner access control. Unauthorized users can be guided to the right admins instead of creating accounts automatically.

• Simpler account management: edit primary vs. secondary email addresses right from the user panel.

Public API & Integrations — Faster, Cleaner, More Complete

• Cursor‑based pagination and streamlined routes for improved performance and cleaner integration code.

• New endpoints & events: departments, ranks, primary appointments, and additional appointments; plus webhooks for create/update/delete on core profile data.

• Performance & stability: faster activity‑index responses; better handling of employee‑ID feeds; fewer edge‑case errors during formula evaluation and imports.

• Import tooling: we've improved tooling and integration support for SFTP sources, as well as bulk data ingestion.

Profiles & Activities — Smarter IDs, Better Cloning, Stronger Exports

• Multiple identifiers per profile (e.g., HR IDs and external scholarly IDs), making it easy to store many different IDs that might exist for faculty members at the institution.

• Publication matching: continued rollout of our probabilistic matcher to reconcile works from multiple sources.

• Export fixes: addressed CV edge cases like truncated descriptions and non‑current appointment titles.

Data Quality, Reliability & Performance

• Audit trail: comprehensive change history for key resources with an in‑app review UI.

• Grids & labels: fixed a by with roster searches by ID; appointment grids now label future‑dated appointments as “Future.”

• API hardening: eliminated several error conditions and improved error messages when they do occur. Added capacity to our API to allow for public hosting of university sites.

Analytics & Reporting

• Histogram refinements: rank filters, clearer tooltips (with units), and corrected multipliers for teaching‑load calculations.

That’s a wrap for August. Questions or feedback? Your account team is here to help at support@scholarlysoftware.com. See you next month!