Update 14

Update 14 for Vision launches Monday, 3rd August 2020. Services will be down for approximately 4 hours while we complete the update and of course, we'll notify all users when services are back online.

The maintenance window start times are as follows:

Summary

Update 14 brings lots of improvements to Vision.

Firstly, there's our new infrastructure. We're making further investments in our hosting environment at UKFast by adding new hardware and services which will improve system speed, capacity and security.

We've overhauled the older pop-up box still used by some features and took the time to add improvements to those features, including Label Content Settings, Copying Areas, and Demographic Exports.

The newly-named Stare Statistics is a returning feature - it was removed in Update 12 with the improvements to sharing - and gives you detailed information on the views for each area you share.

We've begun work on a new version of System Administration. Our goal is to improve how you manage your system by giving you more insights into how your organisation uses its subscription and improving all of the processes required to manage it.

We've also added Mexico to our list of countries and updated lots of data sets.

You can read more on all of this below.

Infrastructure improvements

We've made significant investments in our hosting environment at UKFast. After all, it's part of what makes Vision as fast and secure as it is.

Our servers are being updated with the latest hardware and lots of it. Most notably, the CPU's are faster, the memory is faster (and there's more of it), and we're going to be using the latest PCIe NVMe enterprise-grade SSDs. All of this helps us serve your data before you've even had time to blink.

We already take the security of your data very seriously, but that doesn't stop us making further improvements. In addition to dedicated firewalls from Cisco and only using HTTPS (which we've done since day one), we're adding active threat monitoring and DDoSX and WAF protection to the list.

We're also moving from daily to hourly backups of Vision's database. We've never had an event leading to a data loss, but it's extra peace of mind for all of our clients.

Label content

Boasting an exciting new look, this feature is also packed full of improvements and is much easier to use.

As well as adding new label content including classification name, area size and dependent layer information (to name a few), you can now add optional value prefixes so that when you have several label values, you don't forget which ones they are!

Copying areas

Also boasting an exciting new look, we improved the feature to give you more information (and options) when copying an area from one layer to another.

What's new?

• You can now copy areas from a territory layer to a hand-drawn layer (even if the hand-drawn layer uses a different base layer). You cannot copy from a hand-drawn layer to a territory layer as we are unable to guarantee an accurate fit.
• We'll tell you if copying this area will have an impact on existing areas in the selected layer.
• You have the option to copy the unique key value. If an area with the unique key value exists, we'll automatically prevent copying and tell you.
• You have the option to copy the classification if the classification is attached to the selected layer. Where it can be copied, we include it by default. Where it cannot, we will tell you.
• You have the option to copy custom field values if the custom fields are attached to the selected layer. Where it can be copied, we include it by default. Where it cannot, we will tell you.

Share statistics

Share Statistics is the new Report Usage which was removed when we improved sharing in Update 12.

Simple, yet effective, Share Statistics tells you the total number of times an area has been viewed via a share link and then breaks that down into total views and date and time last viewed for each user. The latter is only available where you sent the share link directly from Vision.

We heard you, Dan!

System Administration v2

We've begun work on a new and improved management area for system administrators. Our goals are simple:

1. Give you more insights into how your organisation uses your subscription.
2. Improve and streamline the process of administering your system.

We recognise that managing your organisation should be as simple as possible. Our current target for completion is with Update 16 and we'll have more information to share in the near future.

Data updates

The team has been hard at work preparing updates to existing datasets and we've added a new country to our growing list.

Mexico

Mexico is now available to add to your Vision subscription for just £100 / $160 per month.

The dataset includes around 2,500 municipalities and 170 demographics covering population and households from the 2010 census and sourced directly from Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). The results of the 2020 census are not yet available, but you can be assured when they are we'll be updating them for you.

American Community Survey (ACS)

With Update 14, we're updating the ACS data to 2018 5-year estimates (the latest available). It's currently 2014 so there are some big changes and from hereon, given its increase in popularity over the last year, we're committing to annual updates of the data at no extra cost for our customers.

UK Health Sector Locations

The data from CQC, CIS, CIW and HIW are all being updated.

Subscribers will notice some changes to the CIS classifications. The CIS has simplified their classifications (which we think are an improvement) by aggregating all Care Home types into a single 'Care Home Service' classification and doing the same with Support Services.

A table of the changes is included below.

Buzz Education UK School Locations

The School Locations data from Buzz Education is being updated to the latest release.

UK ML Business Counts

The UK Business Counts data from Market Location is being updated to the latest release.

Other improvements and bug fixes

1. We've improved the user account activation process. It's just as secure but removes an issue encountered by less than 1% of new users that caused them to become stuck in the activation process when clicking too many times.
2. We've added area (in sq mi) to the information window for all areas. This displays automatically underneath your demographics when clicking on an area.
3. We've fixed an issue preventing the reordering of layers and labels on most touchscreen devices. We will be making further improvements to the experience in a future update.

Features being removed

When it becomes clear that features aren't being used, we look to remove them. This reduces UI clutter and prevents the software from becoming stale.

1. We've removed the ability to move location records to new layers within the UI. This has been a feature since the release of Vision, but our analysis shows that it's been used once in the last 22 months. This isn't really a surprise because the feature was meant for moving records which changed "type" - which is exactly what classifications should be used for!
2. We've removed tags in Update 14. We initially introduced tags with Update 2 as a way to mark that a record either had something or didn't but they've remained a little-used feature since then. In hindsight, this information would have been better stored as a boolean (yes/no) custom field (which has existing since the release of Vision) and so during the maintenance window, we'll be migrating any existing tags into custom fields and set their values accordingly. This brings the added benefits of being able to use these values to filter records in table view and include them in labels with the changes to label content settings in this update.
3. We're removing temporary redirection for older reporting links to newer shared area links. This was introduced to support clients who used this feature heavily with the release of Update 12. Support for this ended on 1st January 2020.