We've had reports that the "auto-approve' option for Partners was no longer working. While most organizations always review and approve volunteer opportunities and occurrences before publishing them for their partners, some organizations allow trusted partners to publish volunteer opportunities directly when creating them in the partner portal.  The auto-approval setting in the organization record was not functioning as expected - but has now been fixed.  If you check the 'auto-approve' box in the organization record - partners will be able to publish their own opportunities without any review or approval from the opportunity approval manager.  This fix applies to both HOC 2.x and 3.0 instances.

A pesky, required field on the Volunteer Team object has been removed from the system.  There was a field called "Duration" that was required but not used by the system.  (The picklist values were "Persistent" and "One-Time".  Since all teams in HOC are Persistent - we've removed the field from page layouts to make it faster to administratively create or import a team into the system

This is a small part of the overall streamlining of teams for HOC 3.0 users.  (Note:  3.0 customers do not need the field "Visibility", as in HOC 3.0 there are no public teams - so all teams that are created have a visibility of "Private".  The field has been left visible since 2.0 customers may have one or more public teams in their data.

Over the last few months we've been improving the auto-calculation of hours for connections when connection records are administratively edited.  This latest tweak improves the performance of auto-calculation for self-reported connections.

Search 3.0 is being constantly improved resulting in faster, more accurate search results! Changes to search made each month are laying the groundwork for the recommendations engine and other new search functions that will be deployed in subsequent releases.

• Verified Volunteer tracking has been improved to manage the expiration of verifications. Email alerts have been added giving volunteers 30-day and 7-day notifications that their verifications are about to expire and encouraging them to update their verifications.
• Clearing messaging when a volunteer tries to sign up for an opportunity that requires a background check of a certain level:
• Corrected errors where Verified Volunteer pages and fields did not appear as expected on the public site).
• Improved integration with Verified Volunteer site to ensure verification results are fed back into HandOn Connect

Note: Verified Volunteers functionality is currently available for HOC 2.x customers.  It is planned to be added to HOC 3.0 in the near future.