At Permanent, our mission is to preserve and provide access to the rich and varied stories of all people for the educational benefit of the future. We aim to provide you with the tools you need to preserve your legacy. We are constantly working on improving our platform to provide you with a better experience and more functionality to accomplish your goals.
To keep you informed about new features and any requests you may have submitted to us, we have created two resources: our Product Roadmap and our Member Improvements List. Our updated Product Roadmap outlines major projects that the Permanent team is working on and their approximate completion dates. We try to keep this roadmap updated every few months to reflect new releases and any changes to timelines.
The Member Improvements List is an ordered list of member-reported bugs, improvements, and smaller feature requests. These improvements and fixes fit into our schedule depending on their urgency, impact, and difficulty. We will work on the list in the order that they appear. We always want to hear your ideas and experiences, so reach out to us at support@permanent.org if you wish to report a bug or share a feature idea.
Starting this month, Permanent email subscribers will have the opportunity to hear from us about our latest product updates and learn more about our development plans with our new Product Updates email. We created the Product Updates email, as well as the Product Roadmap and Member Improvements List, to keep you better informed about what’s in development at Permanent. All Permanent email subscribers will receive our first Product Updates email so they can check it out, and they can choose to receive future ones by managing their email preferences. Read on for a preview of the upcoming August Product Updates email.
What We’re Working On
At Permanent, we work on a quarterly cadence on several big projects. July was the start of the third quarter of the year, and our team began working on a number of important projects that we hope to accomplish by the end of September:
Continue Archivematica Integration Work: At the end of last year, we made the decision to integrate an open source, archival software called Archivematica as our back-end processing software. This will replace our own home-grown system that processes every uploaded file for preservation. This work is important not only because it will improve our preservation practices, but also because it will make our system faster and more resilient when processing large numbers of files. By the end of this quarter, we will be using Archivematica-processed thumbnails in the system instead of thumbnails processed by our previous home-grown system.
Staff Admin Panel: Our small staff takes care of a lot of logistics behind the scenes. As our platform continues to grow, it’s important that non-engineering team members are able to make certain changes to the application, including creating new promotion codes. Creating an easy-to-use staff administration panel that enables experience team staff to create promo codes and perform other administrative tasks frees up the engineering team’s time to work on bigger projects.
Plan Improvements to the API: Permanent is proud to have a number of partner organizations who plan on utilizing our API to integrate their systems with Permanent. We hope to make improvements to our API to make it easier for our partner organizations to use independently.
Update Onboarding UI: Over the past year, we have begun designing a tablet app so that tablet users can seamlessly use Permanent to preserve their legacies. With the design of this tablet app, we have begun updating our user interface across all platforms. This quarter, we will release a new user interface for the initial account creation steps on Permanent on mobile and web. While you may not see these updates if you have already created an account, we will be working in future quarters on updating the user interface across the platform on mobile and web.
Though many of these projects are behind-the-scenes, we hope you will be able to see the impact of these projects through improved system performance, improved collaborations with our partners, and eventually, more capacity from our engineering team to put out new features.
To learn more about our development plans, please check out our updated Product Roadmap.
Recent Releases, Improvements, and Fixes
Searching Descriptions: Big news — you can now search description text on Permanent! Our regular search bar at the top of your archive now looks at titles and descriptions. For example, if you have pictures from several trips to the Grand Canyon, you might note “Grand Canyon” somewhere in the description of those photos. To find all of them, search “Grand Canyon” in your archive and they will now show up. We know that description search is something that many of you have been waiting for, so try it out!
Bug Fixes: We are always fixing bugs (that is, small problems) that you report to us. For high priority bugs, our turnaround time is one to two weeks. Recently, we fixed: (1) a problem where the upload button was unresponsive on older browsers, (2) a misbehavior in which the description text box broke words in half, and (3) an issue where members couldn’t upload the same file twice in a row.
We want to hear from you! If you find a bug or wish to tell us about a feature or improvement you’d like to see, contact us at support@permanent.org and we’ll add it to the list. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
If you have reported a bug or product improvement and wish to see its status, you can view the Member Improvements List here. We try to work on these bug fixes and improvements in order, so check back to see when your reported issue is resolved.
User Testing Opportunities
What do you want to see out of this Product Updates email? If you are interested in receiving the Product Updates email and want to share with us more about your interest, follow this link to fill out a quick 5 minute survey. This will help us to tailor this new email to your preferences.
Interested in future user testing opportunities? You can sign up to be notified about future user testing opportunities at this link.
