ALIVE Platform Bulletin #25

Dear issuer,

welcome to the ALIVE Platform bulletin which regularly informs you about the nearest upcoming changes.

This time, we want to inform you about a new integration of European Student Card (ESC) into the ALIVE Platform and an important change of ‘Personal ID’ cardholder property behaviour. Other than that, on the NCDB dashboard you can newly find an overview of CCDB export errors. The above mentioned news were deployed to production on 17^th September 2022.

In the second part of the Bulletin, you can find information about the upcoming changes and new features.

Deployed Changes

NCDB

European Student Card for ISIC cardholders

The European Student Card (ESC) is a card that is intended to facilitate communication with universities for students who are going to join the Erasmus program. Thanks to the card, the students will have access to the Erasmus+ mobile application where they can handle all the administrative requirements associated with Erasmus. Also, they gain access to online courses and services provided by other higher education institutions. In the future, the European Student Card will allow students to participate in cultural activities and events throughout Europe at a student price.

The aim of this project is to integrate the automatic issuance of the European Student Card to students of universities that cooperate with the ESC. When ordering a new ISIC card, only one card will be issued to such students, which will contain all the data of the ISIC card and the ESC card. Each university involved in the Erasmus+ program will get access to the ESC platform, which is an administrative interface where the school can set its data, get identification numbers and instructions by the ESC and at the same time view the overview of the ESC cards issued under the given school.

Uniqueness of ‘Personal ID’ cardholder attribute and extended support of custom fields

As a part of the ESC integration we were forced to change the behaviour of the “Personal ID” attribute which is a part of cardholder data. From now on, this parameter needs to be unique on a card issuer level. That means there cannot be two cardholders with identical personal IDs under one card issuer. If a user tries to insert a duplicate value in this field, he will receive an error.

Open

If, for some reason, you need some field with non unique values on a card issuer level, you can create your own custom field in NCDB → Card Issuers → Custom Fields. Each custom field needs to be assigned to one or more card issuers.

Your card issuers can use the new custom field in various ways of order creations – bulk excel import, NCDB wizard or APIs. The new excel template containing custom fields applicable for the specific card issuer can be downloaded from NCDB wizard after selection of the specific card issuer.

CCDB/ESC export errors overview

On the bottom of NCDB dashboard, you can newly find a count of failed card exports into CCDB or ESC.

Open

If you click on the text “CCDB failed exports”, you will be transferred to the cards list where only those cards with failed CCDB export will be shown. We only show you the currently valid cards. As you can see, this is a new filter criteria which you can use on the card list as you wish. Of course, you can combine it with other filter criterias.

On each line you can see a yellow triangle icon. If you move your mouse over it, a tooltip will show you a warning linked to this card.

On the card detail, you can find the reason of export failure to address it.

After the cause of the error is fixed, it is possible to force the new export by manual re-save of the card (by pressing Edit Card and then Save). Also, every night the system automatically re-export those cards where the initial export ended with failure.

Upcoming changes

Besides the already deployed changes mentioned above, there are some changes that are going to be deployed within the following weeks. These changes are already in test environment and can be tested also from your side.

Marketing Manager Upgrade

To keep pace with development of Mautic (which is the core of Marketing Manager), we are finalizing an upgrade of Marketing Manager module to a newer version of Mautic 4.4.1 (from 2.16.5). Beside others, this upgrade brings:

• more details about your segments (Date created, Modified date, etc.) which can be used to order the segments

• segments can be filtered using their category

• information about how long the segment hasn't been rebuilt

• email and landing page builder based on new framework

• Mautic tag manager added into the main menu

• fixes of bugs from former versions

• removal of deprecated technologies

The updated version of Marketing Manager is already deployed on the test environment. To make sure the upgrade in live environment runs smoothly, we want to ask you to cooperate with testing, as every ISIC country uses a bit different campaigns, different segmentation rules etc. So, please go into Marketing Manager in test environment and tell us until Friday 30^th September 2022 if you encounter any strange behaviour that could change your campaigns after the live deploy!

Thank you very much in advance.

Online Ordering

Returns of shipments in Online Ordering

Simplification of administration and the possibility of processing the agenda regarding the return of the shipment when resending the customer's plastic card will be implemented directly in Online Ordering in the near future. It may happen that, for example, the customer does not accept the letter or has given wrong delivery address. The button through which the order can be marked as returned will appear automatically if the status of the order is Sent.

For the purpose of informing the customer that his order has been returned, an e-mail template is available in the Online Order, which is sent to the customer after clicking the "Parcel returned" button. Feel free to edit the email in Online Ordering email administration. You will also see the sent email on the overview of sent emails in order details.

Once you're ready to ship the order to the customer again, simply confirm the shipment again in the customer detail. A note window will also open, where you can, for example, note down the new address to which you are sending the customer's card.

NCDB

Removal of the "Create Individual Card" button

We decided to remove the "Create Individual Card" button in the card section of NCDB, as it has been misused for a long time. As we care about data quality, which is also very important for the correct display of digital cards in mobile applications, we will no longer support this function. To issue cards, please use the other standard ways of issuing cards.

Card issuer’s GPS coordinates

In the near future, it will be possible to register the GPS coordinates of the card issuer directly on the card issuer’s detail in NCDB. This new functionality will make it easier to communicate with the API, for example easy to list the schools that issue ISIC in your country and much more. The Delivery Address will be used to determine the GPS coordinates.

The function you know from the Discount manager, a map with a button will be placed in the card issuer’s edit page. When you click the “Determine from Address” button, NCDB contacts Google API to determine the GPS ccordinates based on the delivery address and displays a pin on a map. You can move this pin to fine tune the location of the card issuer. Based on this relocation, the latitude and longitude will be updated.