Recent items & performance

Prior to the holiday’s we were working on improving performance and also adding recent items to every search box. We’ve just released those updates and wanted to let you know what the changes are.

First up, when you now focus on a search box, a drop down of the items you’ve recently viewed/selected will display immediately. The benefit to you is that instead of having to search for the item you want the item will often be in the drop down list, which is much faster.

Please note; to accommodate this additional feature we’ve made a change to the location of the recent item list. The recent item list used to be in the left hand nav-bar, now you’ll find it simply by clicking on the search box at the top of the page. You’ll also find the link to "Latest activity" here, remember Super admin's this option will let you see not just your activity but everyone’s activity, this way you can ensure everyone is using people’s personal information appropriately.

You may also notice that we’ve added a new toggle to the top of the left nav-bar to either keep the nav-bar open or close it, try it out we’re sure many of you will appreciate it.

Performance wise you should find that things are humming along even better than before, we’ve improved the speed of many pages (some by a factor of 10) and you’ll also find that searching is now much faster by a factor of 100.

We’re not finished with performance either, we’re automatically collecting new metrics so that we can identify the slowest parts of UCare, this will allow us to identify where best to apply further same performance enhancements. Using these new metrics we’ve already identified that search groups that find people related to other people were running terribly slow, now the speed of those search groups are at least 100 times faster.

In fact we were able to improve their speed so much that we were able to enable a search option to find people that "live with" other people, previously this was so slow that it timedout after 3 minutes. For example some of our users wanted to find all people that live with children that attend the kid’s ministry and are also over 18, that way helping them identify parents where the correct relationship hasn’t been added yet. This is now not only possible but performs very well.

With these and other updates we’re working hard to make UCare smarter and easier to use, if you have any feedback we’d love to hear from you, simply email support@ucarehq.com.