When will Update 1 arrive?

This update is scheduled for release between 11 pm on Thursday 27th October and 1 am on Friday 28th October UK-time. During this time, the system will be offline.

What's changing?

The removal of projects

The significant change in this release is the removal of projects. We have taken this decision as there were several issues with how we'd implemented them:

• 79% of our users only had a single project. These users will no longer need to select a project, and instead, can enjoy instant access to their data upon login. For those users with more than one project, you'll now instantly see all the layers that were in those projects upon login.
• Sharing layers with users from other organisations required that you purchase a user license for them, or they subscribed to Vision. A key component of Vision was supposed to allow free collaboration with other organisations that require view-only access to a selection of your data. This change allows this to happen.
• Sharing layers through projects also made it possible for other users in the same organisation as the one you shared a layer with to gain access to your data, even if you didn't want that. This change now prevents this and returns full control of who you share your data with to the rightful person, you.

For those of you that enjoy using Projects to section your data, please bear with us as these will be back in a future update, and with a much better implementation that sees them become user not organisation-centric.

Other Improvements

We've made several minor improvements to Vision, including:

• The Report Viewer will now have a default view that matches the areas you are sharing. UK viewers will see the UK; US viewers will see the US, and so forth.
• When you select a Report Template in Vision, the Reports within it are now ordered by name A-Z. Although you could already filter by name, this makes finding a particular report even easier.
• We've improved the layer summary analysis. Now when there is no data for a given section, that section is simply hidden.
• We've improved the speed of loading areas as you move around the map. The largest improvement was to census output areas which in urban areas like London has seen an improvement of more than ten times.

There were also several minor improvements made over the past couple of months which we pushed out as silent updates.

Bug fixes

• No matter how hard we try to find them all before a release, a few minor bugs had crept in. We've found and squashed the following:
• Filtered location layers now correctly filter data within the Report Viewer.
• Classifications within a layer will no longer show in the legend if the user does not have permissions to view classifications. For clarity, the data was correctly hidden from the user, but seeing the classifications in the legend could cause confusion.
• Users without permissions to view demographics now cannot access heat mapping analysis.
• Users who had been shared a layer by another organisation can no longer see notes or the demographic export.

What is next?

We've had a few of you provide feedback on the search. It seems that the major issues are that the result pins aren't shown for long enough / don't stay on and that search results can bring you a little too close to the surface, leaving you needing to zoom out a bit to complete your task. We want you to know that we take this feedback seriously, and are taking some time to consider all approaches to addressing these issues before taking any one route. We'll be looking to implement changes to the search in a future update and when we know what these are we'll let you know.

A big part of the system for us is allowing users to make changes on behalf of their organisation without the need to request this from us. We're in the later planning stages at the moment, and over the next few months, we'll be bringing you the ability to manage your users, layers, classifications, data, demographics, sharing and much more.

We're also in the early stages of planning the integration of Find Your Nearest, our automated enquiry allocation tool. More information to follow in due course.