Happy New Year

[jfenton]

Hello everyone!

Let me start today's update by mentioning the recent Catalog release and encouraging everyone to check out the release notes here. We're excited to be bringing features and enhancements to Catalog. Here's a quick recap:

• User Defined Field data is now broken out into different columns when exported. This makes it much easier to analyze and manipulate. 
• New sections created by Catalog will now inherit the course's user participation setting.
• Listings will no longer disappear from the student dashboard and transcript when the course settings are used that restrict course visibility. 

Let us know what you think of these improvements!

Alright. Now on to updates. First, a quick note about Catalog releases and beta refreshes. We're now going to be doing scheduled beta refreshes in step with Canvas beta refreshes. We will also use these days to do our code deploys. 

Next, we've laid the groundwork to move Catalog over to Instructure's Live Events service. Catalog is currently using a webhooks service to communicate with Canvas. While this has served us well for many years, it's time for an upgrade. Live Events is much better at handling errors and will set us up nicely for more communication between the platforms in the future. This first transition will happen behind the scenes, but you should notice fewer errors with Catalog <-> Canvas communication.

Ok, now on to features that should be out over the next few releases. The project that we're focused on is all about reporting. It includes:

• Bringing Catalog Data to the Canvas Data portal. This is a coordinated effort between the Catalog and Canvas Data teams and work is well underway
• Adding the ability to export the revenue report for individual catalogs
• Adding a date range filter for the revenue report
• Adding a new tab to the analytics page called "Completions". This tab will pull data based on completion date instead of enrollment date, and will also surface all certificates that have been issued for admins to view/download

Beyond the reporting project we've got a lot of exciting things planned for Catalog, including waitlist management, listing duplication, alternate text for listing images, and a shopping cart. So keep an eye on the community page and release notes for updates!

Lastly, the next User's Group call is coming up this Friday (February 1st) at 12:00 MT. This is a great chance to ask questions and share ideas. 

Happy Cataloging!