Category: Technical Updates Page 2 of 7

All information on new features and technical updates to TeamKinetic can be found here. We aim to update the system regularly based on user feedback and the latest technological developments in the sector.

The New TeamKinetic App

By Alex Evans

On 31st January 2024

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

After a long period of development, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the new TeamKinetic App! The app is free for all, and our Enterprise users have the option to adopt their own white-labeled version.

The Power of TeamKinetic at Your Fingertips

The new TeamKinetic app brings the power of our desktop platform to your pocket.

Our new app is more user-friendly and modern with a redesigned and intuitive interface. We’ve ensured that the user experience is consistent across Android and iOS devices, so no matter what platform your users prefer, they’ll enjoy a seamless and unified experience.

With the new app, your volunteers will now have access to features such as expenses, roles, the ability to apply for opportunities, document uploads/downloads, and profile management.

The base TeamKinetic app will be free for all users, including all the material and support required for everyone to use and share with their volunteers.

However, if you’re an Enterprise user, you can access the exciting new ability to have your app white-labeled.

White-labeling

All enterprise users can have a branded version of the TeamKinetic app tailored to their organisation’s unique identity.

Your logo, brand colours, and unique app store name will be used, creating a seamless extension of your brand. Customisation will not include functional elements; all apps offer the same features.

White-labeled applications will also allow volunteers to register directly within the app, streamlining the onboarding process.

The yearly cost for a white-labeled application is £800 per year and can be added directly onto your existing yearly fee. All white-labeling will be done on a first-come-first-served basis as we have to roll these out gradually.

How to download the TeamKinetic App

You can download our app for free on iOS and Android now. Just search ‘Volunteer with TeamKinetic’ or click the links below.

If you are an enterprise user wanting to discuss adopting a white-labeled app, please fill in this form.

We can’t wait for you to explore the enhanced capabilities of our new app.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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Have you enjoyed using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on Capterra, we’d really appreciate it! We’ll even send you a little thank you.

TeamKinetic 2.4.1 Minor Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 25th October 2023

In News & Views, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

The latest minor release is out in the wild now. Here are the big things to watch out for in the new TeamKinetic update.

Tempo Time Credit Integration

This is super exciting and we will be covering this in some other posts and communications.

If you join the Tempo Time Credit scheme, your volunteers will be able to exchange hours they log in TeamKinetic for real-world rewards in their local area. It’s a fantastic way to reward and recognise your volunteers.

The process is fully integrated and volunteers can register and exchange hours from right within the TeamKinetic app. You can find out more on the Tempo website.

Please fill out this form if you’re interested: https://forms.gle/ryvW7cs3yGJGNnV26

TeamKinetic update: screenshot showing Tempo Time Credits integration

First Advantage Digital Check Integration

Another first for volunteer management software. We have integrated the First Advantage digital and criminal check service right into the TeamKinetic app.

As an admin, all you need to do is select the volunteer whose identity you want to check or perform a criminal check on and hit a single button! The volunteer will be contacted to download an identity check app to their phone, proceed to verify their identity, and then the criminal check will be performed and the results fed straight back into TeamKinetic. We expect most checks to be completed within 48 hours.

It’s also possible to perform in-person identity checks and just use the service to complete the criminal check if you are satisfied with the documents presented.

If you’re interested in integrating your identity and criminal checks directly into your volunteer programme, please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/ryvW7cs3yGJGNnV26

TeamKinetic update: image showing the integrated criminal check process

Gender and Birth Sex

We have now successfully decoupled our gender and birth sex questions. Previously we collected the birth sex answer as part of the gender question and you might have noticed that Female/Male was always appended to your own gender list.

We used this answer to define a birth sex of female or male so that if opportunity creators restricted an opportunity by sex we could correctly identify those volunteers that matched.

We’ve been monitoring the usage of the sex-restricted opportunities and it has been going down and down so we decided it was the right time to break this a little so we can get our gender/sex position correct.

You’ll see two new options in the Super Admin Settings > Options menu under the registration section that you can use to switch on/off the Birth Sex and Gender questions. If enabled the questions will be asked at registration and also within the volunteers profile.

If your organisation has no sex-restricted opportunities then the birth sex question will be switched off. We have also retained the female/male responses in your gender lists, but they are now editable, and if you wish you could remove them and use cisgender or whatever your organisation prefers.

Screenshot showing changes to the sex/gender questions in the registration form

Disability and Support Questions

We have also split up this section into two optional registration questions so you can choose to ask if a volunteer considers themselves disabled and/or if they have any extra support issues. We know that for some organisations it is not appropriate to ask or record if a volunteer is disabled but it’s still useful to know about any support issues you can help with.

These options can be found in the REGISTRATION section of the Super Admin Settings > Options menu.

Along with the now optional sex and gender questions you can now have a really minimal registration page which we would always advocate if you don’t need the extra data.

Screenshot showing the volunteer registration form without any gender/sex questions

Auto Deletion of Volunteers

We recognise that storing old data can be an issue, both for GDPR and reporting. It has always been possible to delete volunteers based on a filter like login activity but it was manual. We have added a new feature where you can switch on auto deletion and enter the period of inactivity after which to remove the volunteers.

Matching volunteers will be marked for deletion if they have not logged in within the period you specify, which is 12 months by default. Then after 48 hours, they will be removed and their hours saved in the usual way for deleted volunteers.

Recording No-Shows

For some of our customers, no-shows can be a real issue and while it has been possible to check volunteers in via the day schedule report page, and for volunteers to self-report as a no-show, we’ve not supported an admin method to record the no-show.

You can now do this for single or multiple sessions in the past from the Log Hours section of the opportunity management page. This data is being recorded and once we have some more to work with we will be reporting this data back via the reporting pages and volunteer management page.

Screenshot showing how users can record a no-show volunteer within TeamKinetic now

Volunteer Status

In the past we have had three possible statuses for a volunteer; newly registered with no access, access granted, and access revoked. We have extended this to include a retired status, a revoked due to safeguarding issues, and an under-review status. These status changes have also been added to the webhook actions so your connected applications can be notified when a volunteer’s status changes.

Screenshot showing the different volunteer access options

More Automated Notifications

We’ve added a few more email notifications to try and streamline the pre and post-session operation.

If you utilise the custom opp joining email to let your volunteers know more details about the opportunity once they have joined, then we will resend that email the day before a volunteer’s next session, just to remind them!

We have also added an editable post-opportunity period setting so that you can control how long after a volunteer’s last session on an opportunity they receive the post-opp reminder email (or you can switch it off entirely). If the opportunity has a post-opp survey or document this will be appended to the email.

Screenshot showing the TeamKinetic settings for Email Notifications

The eagle-eyed amongst you will also notice in that screenshot that you can now also choose to include or exclude events in the weekly email newsletter that is sent every Friday.

There is of course, as always, the usual bug fixes and small changes that we hope make your day-to-day interaction with TeamKinetic better and better.

Many thanks to all our customers who open support tickets and new feature requests that helped shape this TeamKinetic update…keep them coming in!

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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Have you enjoyed using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on G2, we’d really appreciate it!

TeamKinetic 2.3.1 Minor Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 6th June 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Following on from 2.3.0 which was a pretty large minor release we have some new updates for you which came about from support tickets and chats about the latest version

Easier Volunteer Reporting

We get asked pretty regularly what ACTIVE means and how to find out how many active volunteers there are or other criteria about active volunteers. Active volunteers are those that have joined a session OR logged hours on a flexible opp between the dates selected.

To this end, we have split the basic reporting available for volunteers into an ACTIVE and a REGISTERED tab. So any figures you are looking at in the active section will represent volunteers that have joined a session OR logged hours on a flexible opp between the dates selected. The registered section will show the data for volunteers that have registered between the dates selected.

More Volunteer Search Filters

To help with discovering your active volunteers we have also added new filters called ACTIVE/INACTIVE to the volunteer search pages so you can search for activity or lack of it between dates.

If you need to find out how many volunteers have a pending application or have been waiting for a long time for their opp application to be processed you can use the new Application Status and Date Last Applied filters.

Block Access to Volunteer Uploads

Providers were able to always view the documents and qualifications that volunteers uploaded if the volunteer was linked to the provider. There is now a new super admin option where you can switch this off so that only administrators can view these documents.

Opportunity Promotion for Providers

Providers are now able to send the opportunity promotion email straight to all their linked volunteers via a checkbox in addition to being able to add emails manually.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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TeamKinetic 2.3.0 Minor Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 12th April 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

For a minor release, this one is quite major! There are no breaking changes or anything huge but some great improvements.

Match ALL or ANY on the Volunteer Search Page

On the volunteer search page, you can now select ALL or ANY as the matching criteria. This means you could search for volunteers that are a member of any of a set of groups, or that live in any of a set of postcodes for instance.

Not Checked Option When Filtering

When filtering on custom questions that are checkboxes you can now filter by these boxes not being checked. Previously as nothing is stored when a box is unchecked this was not possible.

Volunteer Action Log

A great new feature that allows admins to check what has been happening with a particular volunteer. Currently, it displays what opps they have viewed, when they have logged hours, joined sessions, and so on. We’ll be extended this with more logged actions in future releases

Create a PDF of Opportunities

Find the opportunities you want to include in the PDF, click their checkboxes and you can now print a nicely formatted PDF with an opportunity on each page.

You get a few options of what to include in the printout and a handy QR code is included so volunteers can find the opp quickly on your website.

Multiple LinkWide Group Membership

For those of you that are in a LinkWide sharing group (get in touch if this sounds like something you would be interested in), you can now join multiple groups, each with its own sharing ruleset.

Editing Existing Resources

You can now edit your existing resources…no need to delete and recreate which is a real-time saver. Additionally, you can also edit the order in which the resources appear.

Select Specific Map Location When Creating Opps

We’ve added back in the ability to move the map marker when creating opps with the new opp creation screens, jsut as you could when editing an opportunity.

Email All Providers from Opp Selection

Previous to this release, when you select a number of opportunities from the opp search page it was only possible to email all the volunteers on those opps. You can now also email all the providers who created those opps. This is great for chasing up providers who have outstanding volunteer applications for their opps for instance.

Improved Email Logging

The storage of the plain text version of sent emails has been improved so you won’t see all the HTML stuff when looking at a volunteer or provider email log anymore.

Better Upload Image Support

We can now support all modern web image formats including WEBP when you are uploading images anywhere in the app.

Over 50 smaller fixes and improvements have also been added which I hope will make you even more productive day to day.

As always, we are ready to take your feedback and questions in all the normal channels.

Major Service Loss January 30th 2023: Response and Recommendations

By Rolf Herbert

On 31st January 2023

In Security and GDPR, Technical Updates

What Happened?

Web servers and other public servers are always under attack. Our systems deflect and mitigate thousands of unauthorised attempts to gain access every day, both direct login attempts and denial of service attacks where volumes of junk traffic are thrown at servers.

It is impossible to both have an accessible service and an inaccessible service and we are always trying to tread that line and this time we failed to get it right.

We experienced intermittent connection issues across the weekend but some access was still available.

All connection and service was lost during the early hours of Monday morning when the full attack was started.

An attempted ‘ransomware attack’ on the main server encrypted some files before it was stopped by our anti-malware processes. This was an automated scripted bot attack. There was no unauthorised access to customer data or backup data which is separately encrypted and stored. There was no evidence of any data exfiltration (access to data stores, virtual servers, external storage, no increase in bandwidth consumption, and no FTP/SFTP access).

To be clear, no data was viewed, accessed, or removed during this attack.

As we had complete backups from shortly before the attack started it was deemed that the most secure response would be to wipe the main server and so negate any potential additional issues with lingering malware or potential trojans/backdoor attacks.

As per our standard operating procedures in such an event, the servers hard drives and RAID arrays were wiped and reinitialised and the process of reinstalling the base operating system started.

Although the initial steps of installation were successful we experienced additional issues when the new operating system would not load. The server was troubleshooted for potential issues/changes that were preventing the new operating system from loading.

Working with our hosting providers, we established that the attack had also led to a hardware fault with the RAID controller. This additional issue meant our existing server hardware was no longer viable and a new server provision was initiated.

The new server was brought online and the server operating system was installed. This initially failed due to the unavailability of Microsoft’s license approval servers.

By Monday evening at 19:30, the new server was responsive and the restoration process could begin.

Our established processes did kick in but we lost approximately 12 hours of user data when rolling back. However, this episode has provided a valuable learning experience and we have started a more in depth review of our response, looking at our successes and failures and how this might any future response.

We have been proud of our performance to date when it comes to cyber security, with this being our first ever full day outage in our twelve year history, but, as always, there are lessons we can learn and things we can do better.

Below is the details timeline of events, actions taken, and lessons learned.

Timeline

07:00 Initial investigations of the affected server begin

08:00 Attack was identified and its severity assessed

08:30 Total loss of our main server was suspected

09:00 Decision was made to wipe main server and restore to earlier backups.

10:30 The affected server was wiped and the new raid array of hard drives initialised

10:50 Raid completed and new OS installation was started

11:50 New OS installation fails to start correctly

12:00 Second attempt to install new OS

12:40 Second attempt also fails

13:00 Troubleshooting starts on the hardware to try to get Windows to boot

14:30 New server is provisioned

15:40 New server built and brought online

15:40 New OS installation started on new hardware

16:15 New OS installation unsuccessful due to licesne server unavailability from Microsoft

18:00 New OS configuration complete

18:30 Required software and utility installation

19:30 Begin to restore backups

20:20 Backups restored

20:45 Applications start to be restored and access gained

22:30 All services responding normally

Review of the Disaster Recovery Procedure

Our full recovery plans can be viewed on our website;

https://teamkinetic.co.uk/policies/Contingency%20and%20Continuity%20Planning%20Policy

https://teamkinetic.co.uk/policies/Data%20Asset%20Protection%20and%20Resilience

In summary, we failed to meet our recovery time objective (RTO) of 2 hours because of the continued knock-on effects of hardware issues. The actual recovery process from downloading, extracting and installing the most recent backups was close to 2 hours once the hardware and operating system platform was stable.

Incidence Reporting, Communication, and Support

Once the outage was affecting our customers we started to send out regular updates to keep customers informed.

These were sent via email as all internal messaging systems were affected. We also posted on our Facebook page and volunteer manager groups with the current status.

We had multiple members of staff available all day on the phone to take calls and requests for support and believe we did a satisfactory job of keeping people up to date.

This was a major and long-lasting outage and all our affected customers are entitled to a month’s service credit that is redeemable at the next invoicing period. We know this doesn’t make up for lost time and the frustration of not having access to your applications.

What Did We Learn?

Our notification system for monitoring server health failed and was not able to cope with the specific complexity of this attack. We had a situation where our network accessible servers and systems were alive but not working correctly.

Our response times during the weekend exacerbated the monitoring issues.

Our hypervisor server is our most critical single point of failure.

It takes longer to download and extract backups now than it did as they are considerably larger and so our RTO needs to be updated.

Our transactional database backups (which fill in the gaps between full backups) need to be available from off-site backups to further limit the data loss in total failure events like this.

Our hardware provider was too slow to respond and made mistakes in provisioning that were made worse by lower staff numbers over the weekend, changes in shifts, and lack of communication between those shifts.

Almost 70% of the time to restoration of services was spent waiting for our hardware providers to execute their responsibilities.

Our customers are incredibly understanding and supportive, thank you!

Mitigations and Improvements

Add in more sensitive monitoring and also include positive monitoring that tells us that things are OK not just negative monitoring.

Mandate two factor authentication for UAC as well as login.

Switch to a new hardware provider with better response times and procedures for dealing with issues.

Recalculate our RTO bearing in mind the increase in size of our systems.

Move transactional data logs to temp off-site storage at regular intervals within a 24 hour period. Retain these logs transactions for 48 hours.

Provision a duplicate server for quicker server reinstatment. If we get a total failure/loss of the mainserver we can rollback to the most recent backup within the RTO period.

Look at a double daily complete backup of virtual servers. Would need to test the impact of backups on serve performance during regular accessing hours (right now the backup is performed at our quietest time). This would half our potential data loss in the case of complete failure.

Follow up

An attack of this type can cause anxiety for our users, and it is important to us here at TeamKinetic, that you feel confident in our response to this incident and trust that we have taken away the important lessons from this experience.

If you would like to speak to a member of the team, we would be only too happy to spend some time answering your questions. Feel free to use this link to arrange a call with the team.

You can also subscribe to service status updates here.

TeamKinetic 2.2.1 Minor Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 12th December 2022

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Just a small release with some bug fixes but still a couple of new features for added value!

Bulk Actions on Sessions

Great time saver here for those that deal with many sessions on an opportunity. Similarly to when you are using the volunteer or opp search, you can check individual, or all sessions, and perform some actions on them.

Currently, you can email all the volunteers on that session, update the session’s time and duration, download the volunteer details for everyone on the selected sessions, and delete the selected sessions. There is also the potential to add further actions if anyone has any great ideas.

Admin Chat Rooms

We hope you’ll get on board and make use of this new feature where you’ll be able to ask advice and give advice to your fellow volunteer coordinators.

We’ve currently got three fixed rooms and you can add new posts and reply in much the same way as you do now for the opportunity chat rooms. You can also subscribe to each room and get email alerts when new posts are added.

You’ll find the chat rooms in the Help and Support menu. We are quite excited about this and hope you can use it to good effect.

As always, we are ready to take your feedback and questions in all the normal channels.

TeamKinetic – 2.20 Major Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 26th August 2022

In TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Pretty much on time, we are now entering the beta release phase for our next major release, bumping the version number up to 2.2.

So what’s coming in this release, read on to find out.

New Opportunity Creation System

We’ve been aware for a while of just how long and intimidating the opportunity creation forms were, especially for new users. There was also the issue of the ‘Quick’ opportunity type mixing together an opportunity that was quick to enter, with an opportunity that was only being used to advertise an opportunity for providers that have their own volunteer management systems.

So we have created a new system for creating opportunities that splits everything into smaller chunks, offers people an easier way to add new images, less complex location entry, and is a lot simpler to use.

For those providers that are managing their own volunteers, there is a very clear option selection card that explains what will happen. These types of opportunities will also have a much simplified management page that lets the provider know how many people have viewed the opp, clicked the more info buttons, and who those volunteers are if we know.

Better Sharing Options

If you share your opportunities via LinkWide or into the national Scottish system MILO, then you’ll notice some improvements.

Firstly you can now belong to multiple LinkWide groups, and have individual sharing settings for each group; so you can share into one group but only accept shares from another group for instance.

If you are sharing to MILO you can now add existing opportunities to MILO, previously you could only share at the point of opp creation. When an opp is shared you’ll also see all the details you need to find it in MILO

New Date Custom Question Type

We’ve added date as a custom question type for volunteers and providers, and updated the custom question search filters to match.

This opens the door for some very useful reporting and recording methods for volunteer or provider details that are not covered by our regular registration or profile details. By recording dates against volunteers and providers, you can use the filters to find out which people have dates that have expired or that are due soon by using the equals, before, after, and between date filters.

You can imagine the potential for recording and managing things like yearly training, qualifications, driving licenses and insurance etc.

Schedule Bulk Emails

Create an email and schedule it to be sent at specific times. This is a super useful addition and is great for running campaigns or for sending emails over the weekend when you don’t want to be working!

Reporting Improvements

We’ve added applicants for opportunities to the reporting page so you can see at a glance how many applicants are in each status.

We’ve audited all the reports and aligned provider, admin and summary reports so you see the same numbers everywhere!

We’ve added a new download report which has all volunteer opportunity data that can be aggregated by opportunity or session, including custom fields.

The day schedule report is now available for providers as well, of course, limited to just their opportunities.

The mapping features have been added for providers so they can locate all their opportunities and volunteers.

You can now filter and search providers based on their custom fields and also filter volunteers on their qualification names and lapse dates.

Any downloads from the volunteer or provider search page now include their custom field responses.

Opportunity Custom Badges in Search Page

If you’ve added custom badges to opportunities (and if not, why not!), your volunteers will now be able to see those badges in the search page and also filter on those badges.

Useful Hints and Tips

You’ll see when you log in that a small hints and tips area appears at the top of the page giving you some quick info about a feature. We’ll be adding to these tips continually as new features come online and you can choose to switch them off completely or hide them for 30 days if they are starting to bore you!

We hope this will introduce our customers to new features or techniques they might not be aware of.

Manage Your Account

We’ve added a new icon to the top right which allows you to manage your account, it also tells you who you are logged in as if you have multiple accounts.

From here you can also switch the hints and tips back on if you have changed your mind! There are a few other settings to help personalise your experience and we’ll be adding more, so suggestions are welcome.

New Automated Emails

We’ll now remind providers when their opportunities are close to finishing, along with a link to update the opportunity.

Volunteers will get a message wishing them all the best on their birthdays and thanking them for volunteering.

We have also added a reminder email for volunteers to log their hours for past opportunities and complete post-opp surveys and uploads if they are required.

Volunteer Inbox

A brand new message inbox for volunteers that shows all the emails and messages they have received and lets them reply directly to the sender. This should help volunteer questions about specific opportunities get through to the provider rather than using the general purpose contact us page.

Talking of the general purpose Get in Touch page; if the volunteer is logged in it will redirect them to the new inbox area above and they can select from the TO field either the organisation or any of the providers they are currently engaged with. This will reduce those misdirected messages even more.

Dashboard Improvements

We’ve added a panel for ‘Things happening today’ that shows sessions and meetings and things like that that are happening today.

Panels that are empty or not needed. For instance, if you auto-approve providers, are now hidden.

More and more tables throughout the app are now sortable in place using the icons at the top of the columns, with no page refresh required.

Improvements to Max Slot Numbers for Sessions

You can now alter the global maximum slot number per session from the sessions tab, rather than having to go to the restrictions tab.

For flexible opportunities it looks like this;

And for sessional opps, there is a little button to reveal the options, it could be quite a destructive process so we want to make sure, and it looks like this;

There are also over 120 smaller bug fixes and improvements in this release many as a direct result of support tickets and feature requests so keep them coming.

Steve also went through the new release in a few online sessions. If you missed them, you can catch up by clicking here.

Thanks everyone.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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TeamKinetic – 2.1.1 Interim Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 14th February 2022

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Only a month since the last interim release and here we are again!

As you can tell from the version number bump this is a mostly minor release but there are a few goodies in there.

Email Failure Reports

Our Enterprise level customers can now see a report of the last month’s email failures. This includes hard bounces, where the email was returned for some reason and could not be delivered, rejects where the email address does not exist, and spam responses where the user has reported the email as spam.

In the case of rejects and hard bounces, the volunteer or provider email is marked as INVALID and in the case of spam reports they are marked as DO NOT SEND EMAILS. In both cases the email address will no longer be sent any bulk group, or weekly emails.

We are working on including the email content and subect so that you know which email raised the error and failed.

Event Area Updated

The event area has now been updated to match the look and functionality of the volunteer and opportunity search and manage pages. It looks a lot easier on the eye and for those of you that run a lot of events, you can now easily search them.

Storage Improvements

We’ve mow moved nearly all of the image and document storage to Amazon’s S3 which should improve load and caching times for images like the opportunity images, event images, downloadable documents etc.

There will not be any visible changes and it should be totally transparent to our customers.

Club Functionality Integrated

For those enterprise customers that use ClubKinetic, this has all been integrated into the main top menu bar under the, obvious heading, clubs!

The pages have also been updated to match the layout and functionality of the main areas.

New Qualifications Search Filter

For those customers that use volunteer qualifications you can now filter your volunteers on their uploaded qualifications.

Refreshed and Update News Area

For the administrators the news area has been refreshed and now looks and acts the same as the main areas of the application.

More Sortable Tables

We’ve added some simple sorting to tables that are not paged through many records, for instance the open opportunities table on the admin dashboard. Just click the column header to sort and each time you click the sort direction will be reversed.

There are also the normal smaller bug fixes and visual immprovements throughout the application. Many thanks to everyone that opens support tickets with ideas or lets us know if something isn’t working properly.

You’ll already be on the new release by the time you read this, so enjoy and get in touch if you have any comments.

Thanks, TeamKinetic

TeamKinetic – 2.10 Interim Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 19th January 2022

In TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Hot on the heels of 2.09 from December we have another interim release for you. This one focuses on improvements to the expenses functionality after feedback and suggestions from our fantastic users. As always though, there is plenty of stuff to talk about.

Volunteer Expenses Improvements

Volunteers now have a few more options; they can update their bank details at anytime, delete unprocessed expense claims, and quickly view any current claims. Additionally if the claim has not yet been processed the volunteer can also update any of the details. We’ve also adjusted the layout so it looks better on small and mobile screens.

Administrator Expense Improvements

Administrators can now create a new expense claim for any volunteer without impersonating them. Just tap in the name of the volunteer and complete the form, dead easy.

When exporting the expense details to a CSV, we now include a link to the uplaoded receipt file if it exists, which makes it easier to pass the details on to a different department.

The volunteer’s bank details are now also visible and editable on their management page. All processed claims when marked as paid, are stored along with the bank account details that were recorded at that time, so you will have a nice audit trail if accounts change.

New Custom Emails

We’ve added a couple of new custom email and also split the emails up into three tabs; sent to volunteers, providers and admins.

You can now edit the password reset email to add more information and instruciton if your volunteers are struggling. This email was previously sent but was not customisable.

We’ve also added a brand new process for when a volunteer removes themselves (see below) from the system and we’ve added a custom email to go along with that process.

New Restore Feature For Volunteers

Previously when a volunteer deleted their own account they were taken back to the homepage and their data and login details were immediately removed.

Now the new custom email (see above) is sent and the volunteer is given some information about what happens now; when their data is destroyed etc. Most importantly, the email contains a special link that the volunteer can use to restore their account if they change their mind, or in case of a mistake. The volunteer has 48 hours to restore the account before its removed.

More Customisable Registration Fields

We’ve added the data sharing confirmation questions to those that are customisable from the super admin pages. So you can now update the label and the tool tip for these fields.

We’ve also improved the tool tip recognition code for your customised registration fields so they show more effectively now.

Dual Language Support for Custom Questions

We did previously support dual language for custom questions but now super admins can edit and adjust all their own custom questions at anytime from the same interface as the main language questions.

Dual Language Support for Customised Registration Questions

Additionally super admins can now also adjust the text, labels and tool tips for all the required registration questions instead of relying on the fixed translations.

Provider Search Speed Improvements

You may have noticed the provider search page was slowing down and took a number of seconds to return the first set of providers. These slowdowns when using the same database query as previous are due to table size effects and data complexity. The same query works fine upto a tipping point, then its slows down precipitously. The query has been redesigned and is now nice and snappy again.

As this is an interim release, we dont have the beta test period we employ with our larger release. This means this release will be hitting your browsers this week. Get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.

Thank you.

Network Outage Thursday 30th December 2021

By Rolf Herbert

On 30th December 2021

In Technical Updates

Duration – 4 Hours

Our sincere apologies for the length of the outage reported today, we always strive to give our customers the best possible service and we failed today to identify and resolve the issue quickly enough.

What Happened?

From approximately 08:30 on Thursday 30th December our services started reporting connectivity issues. These increased in severity until at approx 09:15 it was not possible to connect to any of our services. At this point our main network connections were reporting a network cable unplugged error.

The issue was restricted to wider network access and at no time was data loss an issue, the services continued to run successfully and data integrity was retained.

Full service was restored at approximately 13:30.

Why Did This Happen?

A network switch was reporting spikes in packets sent by our services and eventually hit the maximum threshold for packet traffic within 30 minutes. This activated the StormGuard feature of the network which helps to prevent malicious traffic taking over the network by isolating the offending section of the network.

No corresponding increase in traffic was reported and general network traffic generated by our services was within normal limits.

The switch was reset but would repeatedly trigger StormGuard and block access to our services.

What Did We Do?

Initially we requested that all cabling was checked, and this was found to be in place and seemingly active. We then checked our network drivers and reset all connections. It was suspected at this point that there may be a hardware failure of our own network cards and so a new server with new network cards was provisioned in case we needed to move data if we could not restore connections.

Whilst the new server was provisioned we started to audit connection points further up the network chain, that are out of our direct control, with our provider. Eventually a network switch was identified as blocking traffic from our servers.

Once the switch was identified as the cause of the outage, but no corresponding issue was found on the servers we requested that the network switch was switched to its redundant backup partner.

The switch is a deep level switch shared by other independent services and so the switch to the redundant partner takes time to effect.

Once the partner switch was brought online and the block removed all services were restored and all data fully available.

What Are We Still Doing?

We are monitoring network traffic between our servers and the switch and have instigated an audit of the server logs and access to rule out any possibility of malicious programs or access.

What Could Have Prevented This Issue and What Now?

We did not identify the ultimate cause quickly enough. The server interface does not include any indication of this block that is applied further upstream. Our service provider has already prepared some guidance on how to identify this issue in the future and is looking at ways to include StormGuard notifications in the user interface.

This issue was not caused by a bug or misconfiguration but a hardware failure. We could not have prevented the hardware failure, they will happen eventually, but as we were not aware of the potentially blocking actions of StormGuard it took us longer than necessary to restore access.

We will be updating our disaster recovery procedure to include making checks on upstream switches and other network hardware in the case that there appears to be network hardware issues with our servers.

We have had very few outages in our history. This is the first major outage that affected all customers and was persistent for more than a few minutes. Our last unexpected downtime was reported on March 20th 2021 and lasted for less than 3 minutes.

You can view our current and historical status report at https://teamkinetic.statuspage.io/