My, how time flies. It feels like yesterday when we announced eFront, the newer member of our highly successful eFront product family, designed from scratch to take advantage of the newest web technologies while maintaining the ease-of-use and flexibility that eFront is famous for (only, even more so).
eFront was a major release that took some years in the making, and we would be justified to pat ourselves on the back and rest on our laurels for a while.
Instead, we worked even harder in bringing you the first update to eFront, with several new features, goodies and bug fixes.
So what’s new in this update?
A lot. So much in fact, that it’s more than a point update, and almost feels like a whole 2.0 release.
When we wrote that eFront will serve as a stable, modern, basis for the platform’s future, allowing us even faster development cycles we weren’t kidding.
Let’s have a rundown of the major new changes, and what they mean to eFront users:
Support for Surveys
You can now conduct surveys and collect results automatically through eFront.
It’s a feature that’s a god-send for getting feedback from your users, understanding their needs and identifying problem spots and market opportunities in your e-learning offering.
Video-conferencing support
Not only you can now have video-conference in eFront by leveraging BigBlueButton’s or Cisco’s WebEx video-conference tools, but you can also save a video-conference for later replay.
Perfect for giving the opportunity to students to watch a video-conference based lesson they’ve missed, or to refresh their memory with it.
Over 10 new themes to chose from
Aesthetics matter. And web themes are not one-size fits all, they must match your branding ― and your audience.
That’s why this update includes 10 beautiful themes to chose from. From minimal to business or fancy, now it’s your call.
Export Excel compatible files
For those of you who swear by Excel (and you have every right to: it’s an excellent tool for data analysis and statistics), eFront now allows you to export beautiful, richly formatted, Excel files showing system status, test and survey results, etc.
Easier on the eyes and better at making the relevant data pop-out, our new Excel exports come with nice headings, appropriately styled cells, alternating row colors and all that jazz.
REST based API
This might not mean much to you, but it opens a whole new world of possibilities for those wanting to expand and integrate eFront with other systems.
We’ve included a full blown REST based API, so that you can connect, script and interoperate to eFront from any platform or language with the ability to talk to REST services (that’s all of them).
And, of course, we documented the heck out of it.
So, those are the basic new features of the new eFront update. There are other smaller features and changes, as well as several bug-fixes and improvements, but it would take a whole lot of scrolling to cover everything.
Besides, we’re already busy, working on the next bunch of features. Until then, enjoy the update.