September didn’t just welcome students back to campus—it also brought solid product improvements at Scholarly. This month saw continued investment in our Workflows and API offerings, enabling even more sophisticated workflows on the platform. "Workflows" can be anything from an annual evaluation or tenure process to a leave application.

Here’s everything that shipped in September and is now available to all customers. (You can read past product updates on our blog.)

Workflow Updates

• Introduced auto-advancing steps. Steps in a workflow can now automatically advance when a date passes.

• Improved handling of concurrent steps. Not every workflow is simply from Point A to Point B, and there are often detours on the way to completion. Concurrent steps allow multiple steps to be completed at the same time, allowing for faster workflow completion.

• New designs with better information density. We heard a lot of feedback about our workflow pages, and are rolling out new designs with better information density. These new pages work especially well with complex, highly-concurrent workflows.

• New add faculty members modal. Adding faculty members to workflows got an overhaul, and you can now filter by different properties to add faculty members in bulk. Example: "Add all tenure-track assistant professors to this workflow."

• Lots of miscellaneous bug and performance fixes.

API Updates

• Added cursor-based pagination to the API, which ensures consistent performance as clients iterate deep into lists of data.

• Added endpoints and webhooks for reading the status of different aspects of Workflows. A customer requested this functionality to sync merit scores from their annual workflow with their payroll system.

• Added endpoints for managing addresses (which are detailed below).

• Began surfacing more data for profiles, including what Scholarly calls "Employee IDs". These are unique identifiers that faculty members have in different systems, and faculty members can have more than one!

• Added filtering to many API endpoints, which makes it possible to filter down a larger set of data to something matching a filter. Example: "Give me all faculty members with the Employee ID 1234."

Better Addresses

• Faculty profiles can now have zero or more addresses, instead of just "Home" and "Office".

• These addresses are effective-dated, which makes tracking upcoming address changes possible on platform.

• Addresses support both US and international addresses, making it particularly useful for visiting professors from outside the US.

Performance and Security

• Improved faculty activity performance

• Improved the performance and error-resilience of our nightly Banner synchronization.

• Authored a few bug fixes for our NIH synchronization code.

• Improved the performance of our Digital Measures-compatible APIs

• Fix a bug with matching ORCID publications

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