A welcome boon for organizations that have a lot of location records.   Previously, when creating a volunteer opportunity a picklist of existing locations created by the partner were shown, along with an option to 'add location (next step)'.   If you had a lot of locations though, it was difficult to find the location you wanted to use due to the very long picklist.  

In this release, the picklist has been replaced by the same sort of search mechanism used for selecting a contact when you administratively create a connection.  When you click in the Location field when creating a volunteer opportunity, a pop-up appears which allows you to SEARCH through your existing locations and select the one you want.  You can enter the location name, street address, state, or even the special directions and it will find matching location(s).   Or you can use the filters to to find just the locations in a given state, etc. Just select the location you want from the results below to use and the location field will be filled in.

If the location does not already exist, click on the button "Add a Location (Next Step)" and you'll be able to create a new location in the next step of creating a volunteer opportunity as before.

We have had a number of feature requests concerning the Locations object in HandsOn Connect and in this release we begin to implement a number of improvements to Locations.

The largest request has been the ability to give a name to a location.   The 'name' field does exist in Salesforce for a location record, but its never been visible externally. That means even if you created a location named "Riverside Public Library" and given its address,  a volunteer clicking on the "Location" link in their account overview, would only see the address, not the location name.

This has been updated with this release, and now the location name is visible on the location detail page.

This now makes it possible for you to name buildings, or just a common 'label' for a location such as "Troutco Warehouse".

Want to make it possible for your partners to give their location a name (other than the street address)?  Open a zendesk ticket and request to be entered in the Location Name Beta - and we will make this field available to your partners when they create a volunteer opportunity.  

When enabled, if a partner creates an opportunity and adds a location, they will see both the field "Location Name" and "Street Address".  The availability of this field allows the partner to give a location a name (rather than having it automatically filled in with the street address).  

Another customization that is available through this beta, is, if desired, the Special Directions field can be made required.  (We don't recommend this, but it IS now possible to do this if you want every location to have special directions filled in).  

This is the biggie everyone's been waiting for.   Right now, partners can create locations as part of opportunity creation, but if they make a typo, or wish to add special directions to an existing location, they can't.  In this pilot - we're adding the ability for partners to edit their existing locations.  

The tricky part of this has been the fact that since a single location may be used for multiple volunteer opportunities / locations -- a partner may not realize that editing an existing location will change not just their current volunteer opportunity, but all opportunities and occurrences using that location.  So how to warn them?   Here's how things will work for those who opt into this beta:

A new menu item will be available to partners, labeled "Locations"

clicking on it will bring up a searchable, filterable list of all existing locations, and the option to view or edit them.  The interface to search and/or filter is the same as the Volunteer Opportunity page.  

Edit page for locations:

here you can edit the Location Name (which allows partners to take their existing locations and give them a Name instead the street address).

Note the warning at the top of the page.  This alerts the partner that they are going to being changing the location information for more than just one opportunity.  

View Location: presents the location detail page.   If Edit permission is granted, an edit button appears when viewing. Otherwise, you can just VIEW the location.detail.

When a team signs up for a volunteer opportunity, they reach a success page which has a certain amount of system generated content.  In order to make it possible however, for you to customize the content on this page, we've added the ability to edit the non-system-generated content on that success page.

The page can be found in the CMS under Content/Pages and is called "Volunteer Opportunity Confirmation - Team Sign-Up.  You can now edit the default message that appears there.  

In the example above, I've added a link to download a minor waive form for volunteers.  You can change the messaging here however you wish.

Here's how the page will appear along with the system-generated content that you can't edit:

By default, browser tabs are labeled with your site name, a vertical | and then the page title you defined when you created the page.

For those users who wish to override the default title of the page as it appears in browser tabs, its now possible to do so.

In the SEO Settings section of the page, there is a new meta tag "HTML title".

Here, we renamed the title to: "My Custom page Title" and you can the change reflected in the tab in the browser.

Setting this will change the title of the tab and search engines will be aware of the custom title of the page.   If no custom HTML title is entered, the default behavior will be in effect as described above.

The requirements for creating teams in HandsOn Connect has always been this:

When creating a team the field's Team Name, Description, First name and Last name are required. Also required are EITHER a unique email address OR a phone number for each team member UNLESS a value is put in the field Company/Group Affiliation, in which case you do not have to supply an email OR a phone number for the team members.

The rule about bypassing the Email or Phone number requirement by entering a value in Company/Group Affiliation is not specifically called out - by provided a way for organizations that wanted corporate teams to be easily created by entering just first and last name could be explained when it was useful.

This approach provides flexibility to users, so that if they didn't have email addresses for all the team members (as is often the case with family teams with younger children) or corporations who didn't want to disclose personal information about their team members, there was a way to do so and still create a team.

This remains the default settings for creating a team.

Some HandsOn Connect users however, have requested the ability to restrict team creation by always requiring, for example, an email address for each team member, so that all team members could be contacted by someone other than the team captain. So, effective with this release, we are making available a pilot program in which you can request that the default rules be turned off, and the team creation page and its rules can be changed in the following way(s):

1. One or more of the following fields can be hidden from the team creation page if desired:

For The Team Information:

• Team Description
• Company/Group Affiliation

For Team Members

• Email Address
• Phone
• Age
• Team Captain (this would prevent the captain creating the team from making anyone else on the team a team captain)

2. Any or All of the following fields can be made required:

For The Team Information:

• Company/'Group Affiliation

For Team Members

• Email Address
• Phone