Previously, Directory permissions were very broad-brush. You could say whether a field was required – so you could make sure everyone entered their phone number. And you could say if a field was hidden, which was useful if you were a Samaritans branch and didn’t want to store both “home” and “term time” addresses. You could also say whether a field was something a user could “self manage” if it changed (like a phone number), or something where edit permissions were “Admin only” (such as Friendly Names, where unannounced changes might confuse people looking at the rota).

What you couldn’t do was say who could see information. There were four levels of Directory access: None (you can’t see anything in the Directory, not even your own page), View (You can see everything in the Directory, but you can’t change anything), Self-Manage (You can see everything in the Directory, but you can only change your details for fields where an Admin has allowed you to do so) and Manage (You can see everything in the Directory and you can change anyone’s details).

Pre-Milestone Krypton, this is what the inside of the ‘Admin > Properties’ button looked like. Note that you can’t adjust who can see which property! (Click for a bigger version.)

If you stored information in the Directory, then everyone who had View permissions or higher could see all of it. Over the past few months we’ve had an increasing number of feature suggestions and data-related enquiries asking us to allow organisations to store information in the Directory which was only visible to some people. A common example was Next of Kin details: people wanted volunteers to be able to see and edit their own Next of Kin, but they generally didn’t want everyone at their organisation to be able to see what they’d put down.

For Milestone Krypton we’ve massively increased the degree of control organisations can exercise over the Directory properties.

For a start, you can now order the Directory properties in any way you like, by clicking and dragging them to higher or lower positions in the list, just as you might drag-and-drop volunteers around when filling the rota.

You can see here that the “Gender” property is being dragged up to join the three other properties that appear before ‘Personal Details’ on the Directory page (click to see a bigger image)

More than that, however, Three Rings now allows you to set not only who can edit a property, based on their role, but also who can see a property. So you can arrange matters so that a user can see and edit their Car Registration number, but only select members of your organisation can see it. It’s even possible to have properties which a user can’t see!

Here’s an organisation where only people with the Director role can see what a volunteer’s commitment is!

This is a huge  change from the way Three Rings worked before Milestone Krypton, and it’s taken a lot of work to get everything in place for it, but it’s a great example of our long-standing belief that Three Rings should fit the way your organisation operates, not the other way round.

Now, instead of the old binary approach where a property was either visible to everyone or completely hidden from the system, you can now regulate how much of their fellow volunteer’s data an individual user can see, based on their role within your organisation. As in the screenshot above you can select from simple options like “Owner and Director”, or you can create more complex role-based permissions to view Directory properties, as in the example below:

You select which roles have permission to view a Directory property using the checkboxes. Permissions to edit can be assigned in the same way.

The fine-grained controls over who can see what in the Directory mesh nicely with the overall theme of Milestone Krypton, which has focussed heavily on increasing organisation’s control over the system. It’s why we’ve implemented tighter auditing of Three Rings staff along with a system to remind you of outstanding maintenance tasks, why we’ve made it easier to track the messages you’ve sent through Comms, and why we’ve made it easier for you to control what bits of System News you do or don’t see.

Milestone Krypton should make it easier than ever for you to use Three Rings to run your organisation the way you want to run it. And we’re proud to be helping you do just that.

Amongst the changes we’ve made in Milestone Krypton is one which introduces a new button to the Admin panel: the Maintenance Tasks button, down in the ‘Three Rings and you’ section.

The new Maintenance Button, on the right hand end of the line (click to see a bigger version)

Maintenance Tasks is a new feature designed to help you keep your organisation’s Three Rings account running smoothly. They will automatically alert you to one of three maintenance tasks which you might have forgotten to carry out:

Purging accounts belonging to Sleeping volunteers if they don’t seem to be coming back to help keep you on the right side of the Data Protection Act in terms of not keeping personally-identifiable information longer than necessary.

Nominating Support People if you don’t have any within your organisation (that’s important because Support People are the people Three Rings will tell your volunteers to get in touch with if they get stuck, and they’re also our first point of contact if one of your volunteers gets in touch with us and needs something we can’t do, like a password reset!)

Highlighting Accounts which nobody has logged into for a year, so you can lock or sleep accounts belonging to users who have effectively left the organisation without formally quitting (or else follow whatever alternative policies your organisation has in place for such cases).

In addition to showing what number of tasks there are ‘to do’, as shown in the picture of the button above, the number of outstanding Maintenance Tasks will be highlighted by an information bar when someone with Admin permissions logs in:

The information bar helpfully gives you a link direct to the Maintenance Tasks page to save you going via the Admin tab (click to enlarge)

Any Maintenance Tasks which need to be completed will be explained in more detail after you click on the ‘Maintenance Tasks’ button from the Admin panel, or the link in the information bar. The task list is seen in this next screenshot:

The list of incomplete Maintenance Tasks (click for full-size version)

Note that none of these things will happen automatically, and you’re free to click the ‘Dismiss’ button on the list, which will get rid of the reminder for another 12 months. Maintenance Tasks doesn’t make you do tasks, or do the tasks for you – it just suggests that you should address commonly forgotten issues, whilst leaving you in full control of your organisation’s account.

Closer Auditing of our volunteers

We’ve always said it’s important to give organisations as much control over their accounts as possible (and indeed that’s a big part of why we’ve changed how System News will work after Krypton!). Sometimes, when people get in touch with the volunteers on the Three Rings support team, they present us with an issue that we can’t solve without going and looking at their data and how they’ve set their organisation’s Three Rings account up.

We have a strict policy that no Three Rings volunteer may ever look at an organisation’s data unless they are responding to a support request (and they mustn’t look at any data that isn’t directly related to resolving that support request). Although we’ve always adhered to this policy, the only way we’ve been able to check it was being followed was by looking at the server logs themselves – which is a perfectly good way for us to check, but which isn’t accessible for any of our users!

We’ve now added a further safeguard to this process, which is to show any instance of a member of the Three Rings support team logging in as a regular user as a separate kind of login in your own organisational logs as well as on our server logs. The login note will show which member of the Three Rings team logged in, as which volunteer, and for what reason:

Here’s some mocked-up logs from the fictional “Santiago Nightline” on our beta server. The new log trace is visible on the second line of the image (click to see it bigger)

It’s always been incredibly important to everyone at Three Rings that we not only act in an open and ethical manner, but that we’re seen to do so (which is why, on the rare occasions that something goes awry, we explain exactly what happened, and what we’ve done to fix things). Although we’ve never looked at an organisation’s data without being asked to do so, it’s important that we can demonstrate that as clearly as possible, and that’s exactly what this new feature will help us to do.

Katherine, who submitted the best and clearest bug reports during the Jethrik test period, received a certificate signed by the Three Rings team and was allowed to nominate a feature which we guaranteed would appear in the very next version! She chose a feature from the list which she herself had suggested, and that feature is the ability to see messages you have previously sent from Three Rings.

The real Best Tester certificate is sealed and framed. But it’s not as great a prize as the chance to pick a feature to prioritise! (Click to see this example certificate in a larger version)

In the process, we’ve also added a note to the Comms page to remind users that every message sent through Three Rings will appear in the system logs, and will be visible to anyone with Admin permissions (and, like everything else in the logs, can’t be deleted).

An important point to note is that this feature will only work for messages sent after Krypton goes live on the 10th of June: if you send a message on the 9th of June, you won’t be able to see it in the Sent Messages section of Comms, if you send a message on or after the 11th of June, you will see it in your Sent Messages. That’s important to us, because it’s possible that some users wouldn’t have sent messages if they knew they’d enter into a second log (even if they’re the only people to access it!), so the feature won’t work retroactively.

However, the feature will work if you send a message using a role that gives you Comms permissions, even if you subsequently lose that role. That means that if you’re a Rota Manager with permission to send emails, your messages will still be logged, and you can access that personal log even if you stop being a Rota Manager and don’t have any special permissions (you just won’t be able to send any new messages).

We’re actually really excited about this feature, because we think it will be a big help to people – before if you wanted to check what you’d said in a message, you had to go and look at the system log in the Admin Panel. You’d still need to do that to check what a message said if it was said by someone else, but if you sent the message you can now access that message directly by scrolling down to the bottom of the Comms page.

Viewing a sent message in the Comms archive. Click to enlarge.

This is a really exciting feature for us (and we hope Katherine’s proud of herself for getting it included in Milestone Krypton!) – it’s a great feature in its own right, but it also represents a big part of what we announced at our birthday conference last year: our determination to ensure that all the volunteers who are running Three Rings feel valued, and get to see what a difference they’re making to the volunteering world.

We can’t wait to see who’s going to be the Best Tester of Milestone Krypton!

Three Rings has always used system news to relay important information to users, especially information about planned downtime (such as that required for new releases), and details on what has been changed after a release (because we think it’s important everyone is told what we’ve done to the system while it was offline!)

For much of the life of Three Rings, the System News was unique – it sat above organisation’s own news, right at the top of their Overview page, and it couldn’t be pushed down the news feed even if organisational news was added after it had appeared. That was fine, and didn’t seem to cause anyone any problems.

However, about 18 months ago we introduced “Sticky News”, which allowed organisations with a particularly important bit of news to keep it right at the top of their newsfeed. This had been a fairly common request, but it was a minor change compared to other Iridium features like customisable inactivity types and rota autopopulation.

Small though sticky news was, it had a surprising side-effect: people started to dislike System News. We honestly hadn’t expected that – after all, we created the Sticky News feature because so many organisations wanted to have their news work the same way as System News – but, within a few months of Iridium’s release, people had become used to having their own most important news right at the top of the page and they didn’t like it when an item of System News was placed above it.

How System News used to look. Click for a larger version.

You can see that they’ve got a point- yes, it’s important to warn people that Three Rings is going to be unavailable, but we don’t know what’s going on in the organisations using Three Rings, and System News could be pushing really important information down to where fewer volunteers would see it. We don’t perform password resets for volunteers, because we don’t have the knowledge of the situation in their branch. It seemed wrong that we weren’t extending that logic to the Overview page as well. As a result we’ve put a lot of thought into what we can do to satisfy the people who don’t like seeing System News without disadvantaging anyone else too badly, and we’ve completely overhauled the way it works.

• First, System News will no longer appear on the overview page. Instead it will appear in a pop-up box when a user first logs in, leaving the Overview page to display only news created by a local or a regional account.
• Secondly, once someone’s logged in and seen the system news, they’ll be able to “snooze” it by clicking a ‘Tell me later’ box which will instantly dismiss the System News pop-up, but show the message on their next login, when they might have more time to read it.
• Thirdly, a user who’s read a system news popup can dismiss it entirely – like marking an email “as read” – and that news item will never show up for them again.
• Fourthly, we’ve created three kinds of System News – Announcements, Warnings and Release Notes. They’ll each be used for different kinds of message, and a volunteer can now say they never want to see any System News items of a particular type. That means that if they really dislike some bits of system news – say Announcements – but still want to be warned of upcoming downtime, they can adjust things so that they never see any Announcements, but they’ll still see Release Notes and Warning Messages (at least until they dismiss them).

(There is also one other kind of new System News – it’s called Unskippable, because it’s the one kind of new system news that can’t be dismissed. We don’t intend to ever use it, but if there’s ever an emergency that means we absolutely have to get in touch with every single user of Three Rings, we’ve left ourselves a way to do so. It’s not at all likely, but the fact it’s technically possible saves us from having an ugly gap in our disaster recovery plans!)

Release Notes, as the name suggests, will be used after each new version of Three Rings. They’ll explain what the latest Milestone is, and provide a link to a full feature list, to give volunteers the chance to see what’s just been changed.

Warnings will alert volunteers to anticipated downtime (fewer releases will require downtime after Krypton, but we still want to give people the chance to know if there’s any coming up).

Announcements will be used specifically for non-system related messages which we still think volunteers would benefit from knowing – for example, an Announcement might mention the upcoming Three Rings roadshow – useful for Three Rings users who want to keep themselves informed, but don’t want to follow our blog or Twitter feeds (and, of course, permanently dismissable for anyone who really doesn’t want to be in the loop!)

Here’s a sneak preview of how new System News items will appear:

The new appearance of System News. Click to enlarge.

The screenshot there shows you all the key points of new System News – the ability to snooze the message with the “Tell me later”, the option to mark it as read by clicking “Dismiss” and the additional ability to never see that type of System News again, by clicking the “Never show me announcements” checkbox before clicking dismiss.

You can also see that the new kinds of System News stack up within the popup, so the ‘Announcement’ type is tucked on top of one ‘Warning’ System News and one ‘Release Notes’ system news. Clicking on each of the news titles would unfold the item to allow you to read it fully, and click whichever button was appropriate.

The changes to System News fit really nicely with the overarching theme of Milestone Krypton – increasingly fine-grained control of how Three Rings works for you. Not only have we re-established a clear difference between System News and local news, we’re also letting our users pick for themselves what their ideal exposure to System News should be, instead of trying to guess that for them ourselves!

The biggest change in Krypton is to the way the Directory works. As we promised, the latest version of Three Rings will make it much, much easier for administrators to control who can see what information stored about a volunteer. It’s also the last of the monolithic releases – after this, we’ll be releasing a new version of Three Rings every two months, meaning we’ll be able to be much more responsive to how people want the system to be developed.

We’ve got lots of Three Rings users out there working really hard to test the system, familiarise themselves with the new features before they “go live” on the 10th of June, and – of course – get in with a chance to be voted ‘Best Tester‘ of the milestone by the Three Rings team and get a chance to nominate a feature which will “leapfrog” the usual feature selection process and get included in the update after Krypton, Milestone Lutetium!

…If you’d like to help make Three Rings better, please do contact us and ask to join the testing team – it’s a great way to see the new features, and it really helps us to see how the features we’re writing actually get used in real life (because it’s not always the way we’d expect!)

As usual, we’ll be updating the blog here with detailed information and screen shots about some of our more exciting features, but for now here’s the full list of new features you’ll have when Krypton goes live:

We’ve been getting a lot of enquiries lately about the requirements of the Data Protection Act and about what Three Rings users need to do to stay within the law, and we’re going to use the Roadshow to address both those subjects: the focus of the first session will be on what the DPA requires, and what you need to do about it.

Then, after the break, we’ll be revisiting the most popular subject of our Birthday Conference: Admin Training. We know the Admin Panel can seem a little daunting to some of our users, but we want to make sure you can all find the features that will help your organisation get the most from Three Rings.

You can reserve your space at the Roadshow on our Eventbrite page.

See you there!

Almost all of the feedback was extremely positive, but two common complaints kept coming up (three, if you count complaints about the food!). Firstly, lots of people were disappointed that they weren’t able to make it all the way to Buckinghamshire for the event, and secondly, people wanted more time to discuss the system with the Three Rings Team, and less focus on topics other than Three Rings itself.

We’re now announcing the first ever Three Rings Roadshow – a smaller conference than our 10th Birthday celebrations, but with a closer focus on Three Rings itself. We’re going to be bringing back some of the most popular sessions from 3R2012, such as Admin Training, and we’ll be helping delegates to share ideas with one another and the developers, in the hope that everyone who comes will leave with at least one way their organisation can get more out of Three Rings!

We’ll be running the Roadshow on the afternoon of Saturday the 20th of July, and – in line with our promise to those who couldn’t make the Birthday conference because it was too far to travel – we’re holding it in Manchester, at the Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre run by Manchester University.

Although we’re a not-for-profit company, we’re sadly unable to offer celebratory discounts and free conferences places indefinitely, so we are asking for a fee of £10 per delegate, to contribute towards the costs of bookings and refreshments, etc. We’re pretty sure that offers great value to everyone, but (in case you don’t agree!) we’re also offering an “early bird” discount of just £5 per ticket for any places booked before Thursday the 11th of April.

As usual, we’ll be giving you more updates and a more detailed schedule closer to the time, but in the meantime, if you’d like to reserve some spaces for delegates from your organisation, you can book your place at the event page on Eventbrite.

For those of you who are also Three Rings testers, it’s worth putting the date in your diaries even if you aren’t planning on attending the Roadshow – in the evening, after the other delegates have left, we’re going to host the first ever Testers’ Barbecue which we promised you last winter! There’ll be more details on that in a separate update, so be sure to keep an eye out for new updates!

This post covers the third part of that talk, announcing our plans for a massive shift in the way users interact with both their Three Rings accounts and with the organisations they volunteer for.

Three Rings Accounts:

Ever since the very first version of Three Rings, a user account has been part of an organisation. When a user logs in, they’re logging into their account at their organisation: as long as they keep their password secure only they can access it, but the account itself belongs to the organisation. You can’t log in to Three Rings if you aren’t volunteering with an organisation that’s using Three Rings.

That’s fairly logical, at least, but there are occasions when it creates trouble:

Example of ‘Account Sharing’ at the imaginary organisations Finnpool Samaritans and Gesway Community Centre. Click for a bigger look.

The above diagram shows one of the biggest problems of the current Three Rings account structure. Dave lives in Finnpool, where he volunteers as a Samaritan, but he catches a bus every day to go and work in neighbouring Gesway. After work, he volunteers with a youth club at Gesway Community Centre. Because user accounts belong to one single organisation, Dave has to have two separate accounts on Three Rings, with two unique usernames: one for each organisation he gives his time to.

And the problems don’t necessarily end there. Let’s imagine Cathy gets a new job in Gesway and, instead of commuting to work like Dave, sells her old house and moves to Gesway. She stops volunteering with Finnpool Samaritans, and instead joins Dave as a volunteer at the Community Centre. Right now, this is what has to happen:

The dotted line here shows the conceptual path Cathy’s account takes to “move”. Really, the old account is destroyed and she gets a new one in Gesway, which is why all her data is lost. Click for larger view.

The need to delete old accounts (and the need to create new accounts for people who actually had accounts on Three Rings before they moved organisation) is creating quite a lot of work for volunteers. What’s worse, is that it’s been creating that extra work since we started offering Three Rings to Samaritans branches back in 2009, and the workload is increasing as more and more organisations adopt Three Rings. We want to fix that.

A new account model

In addition to the other improvements we’re planning for Milestone: Krypton next spring, we want to make some changes to the way user accounts are structured. These changes will then pave the way for further developments, with one big change in the pipeline for the future: we want individual volunteers to own their own Three Rings accounts.

So, instead of logging in to your Three Rings account and seeing information for the organisation your account belongs to, you’ll be able to log into your Three Rings account and see any information that’s been shared with you by organisations to which you belong. That’s a big change, but it should make life easier for a lot of our users, both right now and in the future, as they develop their volunteering careers.

When we make this happen, all existing Three Rings accounts will remain associated with their current organisations. Organisations will still be able to create accounts, too. But a big difference will be that – as long as the user and the organisation agree – a user can link their account to more than one organisation.

Just look at what that would do for Dave, with his two accounts:

Here Dave is using just one account, with different permission levels at each organisation, depending on what roles those organisations grant him. Click to see more details.

We’d ensure that the organisations retained control of each user’s permissions within their organisation – Dave wouldn’t have Rota Manage permissions at Gesway Community Centre, even though he has them at Finnpool Samaritans- and in the same way, Dave would be able to share some of his personal information, like his phone number, address or CRB status, with Gesway volunteers that he might not want to share with the Three Rings admins at Finnpool: in this new model, everyone would have more control over what data they share, and who they share it with.

This new system works well for Cathy, too:

Now when Cathy changes which organisation she volunteers with, she can keep all her personal data and take it with her when she moves. Click for a bigger view.

As the newer version of Cathy’s tale shows, the proposed new account structure would also save volunteers at the new organisation the trouble of creating a new Three Rings account and filling it with data for someone whose account already exists on the system.

If you’ve taken a close look at the above diagram you might also have noticed the note talking about ‘Alumni Settings’. That’s the second big change we’d like to make to the way accounts work.

Account Levels

Currently, Three Rings assigns volunteers permissions via the Roles system (and, to a certain – and sometimes confusing! – extent, through Experience Levels). We’d like to tidy that up and fold Experience Levels into Roles, because that better matches the way people are using (and expecting to use) the system these days. But we’d also like to introduce different account Levels.

That’s not some sneaky way of charging more, or of suggesting that a ‘Trainee’ account wouldn’t be cheaper than a ‘Volunteer’ account (we’re really not after your money, and we’re not introducing individual accounts just so we can charge you for them!). Instead, we want account Levels to better represent the different types of volunteer that already exist at organisations usingThree Rings.

Before we go any further, let’s take a quick look at how Roles & Experience Levels work right now:

Every user starts out with the same permissions (granted by the ‘Everyone’ role), but they can gain extra permissions based on the Roles or Experience levels they are given. Click to enlarge.

As you can see, Three Rings currently assigns permissions on a model founded on the assumption that each organisation has only one type of volunteer, reflected by the Everyone Role. Some of those volunteers then get given extra permissions based on their role, but nobody can have fewer permissions than the Everyone Role has.

That’s because Three Rings has historically focused on volunteers staffing a rota – what many of our organisations call ‘listening volunteers’ – and our design has tended to ignore the various ‘support volunteers’ who do essential work to keep their organisations running, but don’t have much to do with the rota.

Increasingly, though, we’ve found people asking how they can use Three Rings to manage those support volunteers, and even whether they can use Three Rings to keep in touch with former volunteers, who’ve got no business seeing what the rota looks like today, but who might want to be updated about outreach or fundraising events.

So, we’d like to introduce a system of account Levels. A Level would be like a very general Role (in fact, it’d be most like a really big ‘Everyone’ Role, except you could have more than one!). Users would be able to have both an account Level and one or more Roles (so someone with the Volunteer Level could still have Roles like Training Officer & Biscuit Monitor, just as they do now!), but the Level of their account would set their basic permissions – the minimum level of data they could access without any modifying Roles to increase their permissions.

Right now, we’re kicking around words like ‘Trainee’, ‘Volunteer’ and ‘Alumni’ when we describe the different sorts of Account Level that might exist, although we’re likely to be a lot more flexible than that in real life! To keep things simple, though, let’s imagine an organisation that has set those three Levels of account. That would mean that instead of following the old model with an Everyone Role, they’d have a structure of Three Rings permissions that looks something like this:

Each account Level can still be modified by Role, but there’s far more flexibility in terms of the basic permissions – users are no longer constrained by the Everyone Role. Click to enlarge.

This is actually a much simpler structure. Organisations would be able to create one account Level for their Support Volunteers (who don’t need to see the Rota or the Directory, but could do with having access to the Wiki so they can see the list of maintenance tasks) and a different Level for their Listening Volunteers (who obviously need to be able to see the Rota!). Both types of account Level could have extra permissions granted through the Roles system, but organisations are spared the need to hamstring the permissions granted by the old catch-all ‘Everyone’ role, because the Levels system gives them closer control over which volunteers can see what.

What’s more, we’d allow organisations to change an individual’s Level just like they can change Roles. So if Charlie finished his training, he could be moved from Trainee Level to Volunteer Level, and automatically get more permissions (based on his organisation’s settings). Even better, if Charlie later moved on to volunteer for another organisation his account could be switched to an Alumni Level – he’d lose access to the Directory and the Rota (and any other data the organisation decided to keep away from him), but perhaps he’d still be able to see some information, such as ‘Alumni Level News’, as defined by his former colleagues: that way, he’d be able to keep in touch with developments back at his old organisation and, if there was ever an opportunity for him to help them out in some way, he’d hear about it through Three Rings without someone else needing to tell him specifically.

What that means is that our plans would make it possible for Three Rings to enable something we call ‘End to End Volunteering’.

End to End Volunteering

Right now, Three Rings is helping thousands of people to volunteer. It’s making it easier for organisations to manage their volunteers than at any other time in history. But we think it can do more.

Right now, Three Rings can only help manage volunteers who are fully trained and currently part of an organisation. Our vision for End to End Volunteering is that Levels could be used to let organisations track volunteers through Three Rings from the moment they apply  to join until the time they move on to another organisation, and perhaps beyond.

Here’s a view of a volunteer’s path through an organisation, as it relates to Three Rings:

Red highlights areas of a volunteer’s time at an organisation where Three Rings could be making things easier, but currently doesn’t. Green shows where Three Rings is helping the volunteer & their organisation at present. Click to enlarge.

Of course, that diagram is a bit of a simplification – included in that single green box are no end of features that Three Rings provides to make things easier for the volunteer and the organisation. But, once Account Levels allow organisations finer control over what their users can see based on what kind of volunteer they are, End to End Volunteering creates a chart that looks more like this:

Starting with a Trainee-Level account through to an Alumni-level account, End to End Volunteering means Three Rings can enhance a volunteer’s entire experience with an organisation! Click for full version.

That’s a much more exciting prospect: because the permissions levels for a Trainee-Level account are much lower than those of a regular volunteer (at this organisation they just let a user see the dates & times of training sessions, and the contact details for the Training Team), a new volunteer can join the organisation with a Trainee-Level account that will track their progress through Training, and once their training is complete they can move up to a Volunteer-Level account, with more general access. When they leave they can take their personal details (together with their training record!) to a new organisation, where they can continue to useThree Rings. They’ll also be able to stay in touch with their old branch using the much-reduced permissions of an Alumni-Level account even as they gain new permissions and experiences with their new organisation.

That’s what we mean by End to End Volunteering: using Three Rings to make the whole volunteering experience easier for our users and organisations.

As far as we know, Three Rings is the oldest system of its type in the world, and the last ten years have seen some amazing developments, in terms of the number of people Three Rings is helping, the variety of different organisations on board and the technical capabilities of the system. We want to start the next decade of online rota management by continuing that improvement, and by making sure we offer as much help and support to volunteers as we can – whether they’re a new trainee, a current volunteer, or an ex-volunteer enjoying some well-earned rest.

There’ll be some exciting changes in our future, but we hope you can agree that our desire to forge closer relationships with our organisations, to streamline our own release cycle, and our re-affirmation of our ethical, non-profit business model puts us in a great position to lead all our users into the future.

This post offers a re-cap of the second part of that session, which unveiled our plans for more frequent upgrades to Three Rings using a less-disruptive method.

Where we are now:

Back when Three Rings was only helping a handful of Nightlines, it made sense that we released a new version of the system two or three times a year, in line with the University holidays. Technology’s changed a lot over the past ten years, though: back then, even having a basic rota online was seriously cutting-edge, but now people expect a lot more from an online system.

We’ve always prided ourselves on responding to our customer’s needs, and as new technologies develop and our users make new feature suggestions, we’ve found we’re often taking longer to release new upgrades than we’d like – although that’s at least partly because we’re creating features that demand some seriously heavy-duty calculations from scratch!

Even so, we want to get back to the faster development cycles we had in the old days.

The end of Monolithic Releases:

The next version of Three Rings, Milestone: Krypton will be coming out in the early months of 2013. We want that to be the last “monolithic release” (that is, the last release in which all the new features are released as a single massive block). The problem with a monolithic release pattern, like the one we’ve had, is that if 99% of the new features are written and ready for testing, but the last 1% aren’t complete, everything has to wait until the final changes are ready.

Instead, we want to adopt a regular release cycle, where the emphasis isn’t on completing a set jount of tasks, but instead on introducing new features at a steady, predictable rate. So, after Milestone Krypton – which will help to lay the groundwork for these changes – future Three Rings milestones will be unveiled every two months. As soon as a feature is written it will be listed as appearing in the next release.

If one feature happens to be unfinished at the end of the two month cycle, all the features that are complete will be released as part of the upgrade, and only the incomplete feature will be held back (and that will come out in the first upgrade after it’s been finished).

This is a major overhaul of our existing processes, but it means all of our users will be able to see when a new feature is expected to be completed, and they’ll also know exactly when the next system upgrade is coming. On top of that, we want to create a section of the corporate website where you can see whether a feature suggestion is shortlisted, in development or scheduled for release, and check how things are going, helping to reduce the uncertainty that the old monolithic release style sometimes created.

Less Disruptive Upgrades:

The second big change we want to make to our release policy is to do with downtime. In the past, every time we’ve released a new version of Three Rings we’ve taken the system down for a couple of hours whilst we upgraded things. When Three Rings was younger, and upgrades only happened in the middle of university holidays, that didn’t cause any disruption to anyone (because once the students have gone home, the Nightlines usually take a well-earned rest!), and it wasn’t a problem.

As more and more organisations have adopted Three Rings, though, it’s become harder and harder to find a time when it’s OK to take the system down for upgrades – we’ve managed OK for the past few years by starting releases in the middle of the night, but now that we’ve got users based in both Australia and New Zealand, not even that’s going to work!

So, once we’ve switched from monolithic releases to regular ones, we’ll do our best to avoid that sort of downtime. Sometimes, it will have to happen – if we make big changes to the database, for example, we can’t allow people to access the database and change things at the same time as we’re moving everything about! – but wherever we can we’ll ensure that the regular releases ‘just happen’.

There’ll still be nothing for you to install, because Three Rings will still be an online service, but users should find they just log in to find the system’s been upgraded without inevitably going through two or three hours where they’re completely unable to get into the system!

This still isn’t all we talked about for the Future of Three Rings – there’s a third part yet to come – but we think it’s a great step forwards: with these changes, we’ll be able to make our improvements to the system much more frequent, much more responsive, and much less disruptive for everyone.

One or two of our users have told us they’re having a problem accessing Three Rings through the Internet Explorer 7 web browser: when they go to the site to log in they receive a message that says something like

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://3r.org.uk. Operation aborted.

This is caused by a known bug in the way Internet Explorer 7 handles certain web standards, and appears to be affecting users who are:

• running Windows Vista,
• whilst using Internet Explorer 7,
• but not installing automatic updates from Microsoft

Microsoft have documented the problem on their support site, and recommend that users make the (free) upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 or higher, which does not share this problem with IE7.

(In general, the recommendation from the web security community is for everyone to use the latest version of any software, and to ensure all operating system and software updates are maintained. This not only helps avoid compatibility issues between older browser versions and systems built to more modern web standards, but also helps to safeguard your computer against malware attacks that might take advantage of loopholes or bugs in older, unpatched, software).

Users can also find information on a large number of alternative web browsers at the browserchoice.eu website.