Release Notes: v1.81.0 Follow

Release Date: September 7, 2020

These release notes roll-up enhancements and improvements that have been trickled out over the past several weeks. It also includes a pre-announcement for a change coming Wednesday, September 9, 2020. 

The primary work of the development team over the past month has been performance and scalability improvements. We have reduced the average load time for the site by 30% and a number of changes to the architecture have made the platform significantly more resilient to usage spikes. This work is ongoing.

Chat in Zoom

This serves as advanced notice that we intend to enable "Chat in Zoom" on Wednesday, September 9th. This change only applies to the Zoom "stand-alone" app interface. Users viewing Zoom webinars, birds of a feather meetings or private, 1:1 meetings "embedded" in Pathable's web interface will continue to see only Pathable's own chat interface as always. 

However, for speakers and attendees using the Zoom app itself, launched from Pathable, they will have access to the separate chat feature that is part of the Zoom app.

We are enabling this in response to client demand for two reasons:

• It enables speaker back-channel conversation. Panelists, moderators and hosts can use Zoom's chat interface to communicate with each other without their conversation being visible to the regular attendees.
• It enables attendee chat in "Birds of a Feather" meetings and in cases where a host has opted to use Zoom's native app instead of embedding within the Pathable interface without forcing attendees to switch back and forth between the Zoom interface and the Pathable interface to watch to the content and converse about it.

We are aware this is an imperfect solution because Zoom's chat and Pathable's chat are not integrated. Messages posted to one will not be visible to those watching the other. Also, Pathable's chat logs are archived and are downloadable post-event by the event administrators. This is not the case with Zoom's chat, which are not made available for post-event download.

Embedded Documents for Poster Sessions

The first step towards richer support for "Poster Session" has been released. If an agenda session is marked as "Poster Session" (either by editing the session and finding the appropriate checkbox on the Advanced tab, or importing the session with the "Poster Session" flag marked "true"), and materials uploaded by the meeting planner or the session speaker / author will be embedded on the meeting page:

Attendees can communicate via chat with author or, if the licenses have been purchased, as a "Birds of a Feather" small group meeting that the attendees can enter during poster session hours.

New Integrations

Pathable has added support for integration with the following registration services:

• Impexium
• iMIS
• NetForum Pro
• Membersuite

Additional Enhancements

• Option to hide the "capacity" setting on virtual meetings
• Updated the way multiple videos are displayed on the virtual meeting page. Also improved the interface when a meeting includes both live and pre-recorded content.
• Fixed bug where the Leads export did not include phone numbers in some cases when it should have.
• Various bug fixes