2019 at Symplectic: A Year in Review
2019 was a huge year for Symplectic: we welcomed 3 new members of staff; released 6 versions of Elements; published 71 pages of release notes, and replied to over 2000 support tickets! We look forward to doing it all again next year, but in the meantime, here are a few of our highlights:
Wishing you and your loved ones a very Happy New Year!
Analytics powered by Elements
Easily our biggest product news and update in 2019 happened to come at the end of the year. We are pleased to announce our latest release includes a web-based dashboard designer! You can read about the features of the tool on our dedicated webpage or you can hear straight from our CEO on the importance of this release. The Elements embedded dashboard designer allows you to design your own custom dashboards right from your browser. This powerful tool allows you to choose from a range of configuration options and data visualisations to create dashboards tailored to your organisation’s needs.
Discovery Module
In 2019, we focused on some specific improvements based on feedback from our community. The areas of focus were:
- Improving and extending the Discovery Module’s search experience by allowing results to be filtered by department name, and research area/interests assigned.
- WCAG 2.1 Lev AA Accessibility
- Allowing institutions to exclude certain types of data from being pushed to the Discovery Module e.g. exclude certain Professional Activity types.
Additionally, 6 Discovery Module clients went live in 2019. You can see our gallery here.
A refresh for Symplectic.co.uk
We are excited to announce that our new and refreshed website is now live! In response to feedback from our clients, the product information on the updated site is organised around the impactful solutions we bring to our clients, like public profiles and faculty activity reporting. Our hope is that this new website provides more substantial information on our core functionality while highlighting some of our lesser known capabilities, which will be of interest to our current and prospective clients alike.
With the launch of our new website we have rolled out two new blog series.
- From the CEO (First article launch Dec 2019)
- A day in the life of a Symplectican (First article out in 2020)
Getting it ‘write’ with ORCID
At the start of 2019, we set out to deepen the long standing integration between Elements and ORCID. Driven by community feedback, the team developed and released our first ever write integration with ORCID. This new functionality provides users with the option of sending publications from Elements to their ORCID record.
The Elements write integration ensures:
- Users retain complete control over the publication data sent from their Elements system to ORCID.
- Users can change their minds as to what data is sent to ORCID.
- Administrators can leverage the flexibility of Elements by choosing how to map any custom publications created in Elements to the relevant ORCID item.
- Users automatically receive metadata updates made in the Elements platform to their ORCID record in a timely fashion.
Support for REF2021
In 2019 we continued to work with the community and our REF Steering Group to identify, develop and test functionality that supports institutional REF2021 preparations. Those developments included the following and much more:
- Creation of REF1 Researcher form (supporting both Category A and Category B), enabling the capture of all required data, including the outcome of REF6a staff circumstance requests.
- Creation of REF2 Research Outputs form, enabling the capture of all required data and management of the acceptance and allocation processes.
- Introduction of various management screens and bulk actions, helping REF users to manage Units of Assessment and submission elements with ease.
You can read more about the REF product updates on our Support Site.
Symplectic Team around the world
This year, as we do most years, we ran three user meetings for our clients across the world. In February, we started 2019 at a user meeting at the University of Melbourne. We had nearly 200 clients at that two day event! In July, we hosted our European clients at the University of Liverpool. The two day event offered a mix of REF-related sessions and client run sessions. And finally in October we hosted our North American clients in Chicago at a private venue. The event brought together clients from the full Digital Science portfolio for the first time in the region.
To read more about these events and see what we have coming up please see our events page here.
Stay updated all year long
We have so much more to share with you in 2020! Below is an outline of our current channels, but please stay tuned for more updates like this next year!
- Symplectic Support Site: Our client support team will be available, as always, to ensure your questions and concerns are responded to in a timely manner.
- Symplectic Community Slack Channel: In 2019 we opened our community Slack channel to our global clients. Want access? Put in a request to the support site!
- Blog: On the blog you will find several updates, client news stories and much more! Feel free to set up an RSS feed as well.
- Twitter and Linkedin: Our social channels are a fun and easy way to keep up with our day to day activities!