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Feedback wanted: Features for 2.6

Welcome to this forum!

Hi everyone,

With the 2.5 release now out we are turning our attention to the 2.6 release and would like some feedback from the community to help guide our direction.

With a number of big new features arriving in 2.5 we are looking to consolidate things a bit in Totara 2.6 and focus our attention on improving the existing functionality more than brand new features (although there will be some I'm sure!). With that in mind I'm trying to produce a shortlist of smaller features/enhancements that keep coming up so we can focus our efforts on fixing things that affect the most people.

You can help by filling in this feedback activity and let us know which features are most important to you:

https://totara.community/mod/feedback/view.php?id=1718

To help us prioritise, please limit your selection to five +2s (things you most want) and ten +1s (things you also want). You will also have the opportunity to mention anything that's not currently on the list.

If you're not sure exactly what any of the features mentioned are please ask in this thread and I can provide some more details.

To avoid duplication can I ask for one response per organisation - so if you have multiple people with community site accounts please can one user respond on behalf of your team.

Note: We will share the aggregated results of this feedback activity within the community (but not any specific information entered into the free text fields).

Thanks!

Simon

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I'm planning on closing this survey in one week so if you haven't yet responded please try to do so before 12th January.

I will then post some analysis of the results.

Simon

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Thanks for everyone who took part in the survey, the results are shown in the table below.

In order to try to make as much progress as possible our approach to prioritising the features was to total up all the "votes", then divide by an estimate of the development time required. That gives us a sorted list in terms of maximum benefit with minimum effort.

Our intention is to make use of any spare development capacity we have to start trying to make these improvements starting from the top of the list. This will be an ongoing process but hopefully with each new major release a will tick off a few more features that people really want. Occasionally we will repeat this process so as to get an updated list to work from.

Bug ID	Feature	+1	+2	Score	Time estimate	Overall weighted score
10914	Ability to turn individual features off via the interface	5	9	23	4	5.75
11568	Ability to edit course completion status/dates via the interface	11	6	23	4	5.75
11222	Printable attendance sheet for face-to-face attendance	12	5	22	4	5.50
7865	Add support for "My staff or any below" in report builder user content restriction	8	6	20	4	5.00
9788	Relative date support in programs and audience rules	12	3	18	4	4.50
11597	Bulk attendance marking in face-to-face	11	3	17	4	4.25
10087	Ability to customise the "Totara menu" via the interface	9	11	31	7.5	4.13
11497	Ability to upload new course/program icons	9	3	15	4	3.75
9736	Improve report builder saved search interface	9	2	13	4	3.25
10057	Ability to upload graphics for certificates	5	3	11	4	2.75
8592	Ability to select position/organisation/manager when self-registering	5	3	11	4	2.75
10239	Provide more email substitution variables in notifications	7	2	11	4	2.75
9783	Add text field for "reason" when manager approves/declines requests	8	1	10	4	2.50
11067	Ability to assign roles to audiences	8	5	18	7.5	2.40
9634	Add settings to support different requirements for displaying deleted/suspended users	9	4	17	7.5	2.27
11494	Add setting to allow duplicate (or no) email addresses	11	3	17	7.5	2.27
10873	Ability to send messages to a specific group of users (via audiences, on enrolment, creation, etc)	8	8	24	15	1.60
11598	Improve program progress bar to account for course progress (not just courseset progress)	8	2	12	7.5	1.60
10434	Improvements and more options in course progress block	10	1	12	7.5	1.60
9537	Add 'include children' option on course category filter in report builder	6	0	6	4	1.50
9532	Support linking of more items (assigning courses/programs/certifications to pos/orgs, competencies to audiences)	6	8	22	15	1.47
9315	Export user and hierarchy reports in a format suitable for importing via Totara sync	4	3	10	7.5	1.33
10483	Ability to log and report on emails sent by the system	8	1	10	7.5	1.33
7839	Dynamic updating of learning plan content	11	3	17	15	1.13
11589	Add support for simple course version management	6	5	16	15	1.07
9431	Support secondary/aspirational positions (including multiple managers)	6	10	26	25	1.04
11210	Separate permission for setting goal status from manage goal item permission	1	0	1	1	1.00
9907	Support re-ordering of courses within a program courseset	5	1	7	7.5	0.93
7152	Replace "Browse list of users" with an embedded report builder report	5	1	7	7.5	0.93
10092	Add support for minimum number of attendees in face-to-face sessions	6	3	12	15	0.80
9725	Fine-grained control over which task/alert emails are received	7	2	11	15	0.73
11185	Support changes to user and role assignments during active appraisals	3	3	9	15	0.60
10432	Improved accessibility / 508 compliance	2	1	4	25	0.16

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I can appreciate that you are trying to get "the most bang for your buck" by weighting options by development time, but I would describe some of the lower items with more development time as "Show Stoppers" which I would hope are being given higher priority for development.

As an example, 11185 Support changes to user and role assignments during active appraisals is, from my organisation's perspective, a very major issue and frankly I've been having problems justifying the fact that it doesn't already do it. From the low number of votes for the feature, I'm guessing not many organisations have actually started using Totara for Appraisals in practice, or there may be workarounds that we've not yet discovered to make it more usable in reality. It is of course possible that we are trying to use the Appraisal functionality before it's actually ready as a feature, but it's a very attractive feature for organisations to have and one that Totara is being sold as having. When discussing our experience of Totara with other organisations looking for a new Learning Management System and Appraisal platform, it would be great to be able to unreservedly recommend it because there is definitely a demand for a high quality system within our industry.

All this said, it is appreciated that you are consulting your user base and identifying the features that they particularly want, and I can definitely appreciate you using 2.6 as an opportunity to fix and enhance existing functionality rather than introducing significant numbers of new features.

Dan

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Hi Dan,

We'd really like to be able to implement all of these but unfortunately we just don't have the resources so prioritising is a necessity. Although I know that feature is really important to your organisation, it would be a bit unfair on the other responders to de-prioritise other features that got many more votes.

Regarding the focus on the quick fixes - I do agree that we shouldn't exclusively prioritise the quick fixes at the expense of more time consuming bugs - however for the first round of fixes I do think we can make the most progress this way and get some of the "low hanging fruit" out of the way.

We will try to redo this survey every so often adding in new common requests and removing completed ones so as you say if people start using appraisals and find they really need this feature is should get a higher priority next time.

In the mean time, we do have a plan for how we will implement this feature and Nathan has started a bit of work on it. We are happy to share our thoughts and what we have so far if you are in a position to do any development or work with a partner to get it implemented sooner.

Simon

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Hi Simon,

Thanks for the reply, always appreciated. I know that features around appraisal have scored relatively low in your survey, and you may well be right that this is a higher priority for my organisation that most. I can only imagine that most organisations have looked at the features and capabilities of the appraisal functionality and are waiting for a few more things to be completed before starting down that road, so it may be a bit of a catch-22 situation, but it is encouraging to hear that there is a plan and work has been started.

Sadly I'm not in a position to do any development work, my PHP is definitely a bit too rusty for that, but if it's likely to be 2.7 before appraisals are a bit more "feature complete" then I suspect we may need to pay someone because things like not being able to reassign an appraisal to a different manger mid-year are going to be an administrative headache with 6,000 employees using the system.

Thanks for your answers, might well be in touch about current plans and timescales.

Dan

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I'm pleased to report that 11 of the top 15 requests have been completed and will be included in the upcoming 2.6 release (due out at the end of April):

10914 Ability to turn individual features off via the interface
7865 Add support for "My staff or any below" in report builder user content restriction
9788 Relative date support in programs and audience rules
11597 Bulk attendance marking in face-to-face
11497 Ability to upload new course/program icons
9736 Improve report builder saved search interface
10057 Ability to upload graphics for certificates
8592 Ability to select position/organisation/manager when self-registering
10239 Provide more email substitution variables in notifications
9783 Add text field for "reason" when manager approves/declines requests
11067 Ability to assign roles to audiences

Simon

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Hi Niek,

We are working on a more detailed explanation of the new features at the moment so there will be some docs available in time for the release.

The way that feature works is an admin can assign one or more roles to an audience via a new tab on the audience management page. The system will then assign every member of that audience the role or roles you selected in the system context. If users are added or removed from the group then the role assignments are kept in sync.

This can be used to give access to certain pieces of functionality by audience. So for example if you wanted all HR managers to have a certain role, instead of having to manually keep the role assignments up to date via "assign system roles" you could create an audience based on some criteria and assign the role to the audience instead.

Hopefully it will make managing roles in Totara more flexible and powerful.

Simon

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Hi Amir,

Weren't you planning to add a new audience access restriction at some point? Did you ever end up implementing that?

Although this new feature could be used to achieve the same thing it would be more efficient to restrict by audience directly since you wouldn't need the role assignments at all. It would also be less for the admin to setup (and all contained within the report) and wouldn't result in permission changes for the audience just to control report access.