What’s new in 7.5
General information
UNICOM branding
This release has been updated with UNICOM branding. This affects product names, copyright notices, logos, and documentation; but does not impact URLs, installation directories, registry entries, APIs, and file names. Scripts (including interviewing, data management, and tabulation scripts), and data formats will continue to work unchanged.
Licensing
The licensing strategy has also been updated. Concurrent and PVU licenses now require a license server to check licenses. Desktop applications will check license expiration when they are started.
Interim fixes
A list of available interim fixes is now available in the Knowledge Base accessible through the Support Portal. To check for relevant interim fixes, refer to the topics regularly.
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Release
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Knowledge Base article listing interim fixes for this release
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6.0.1 Fix Pack 3
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K73-4669
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7.0 Fix Pack 2
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K73-4660
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7.0.1
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K73-4585
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7.5
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K73-4967
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New features
Restarting active surveys
You can now enable respondents to restart an interview from the start URL and connect back to the original instance of the interview. In previous releases, respondents are prohibited from entering a web survey that uses sample management multiple times to avoid inconsistent data. However, this can block respondents who legitimately need to restart a survey due to issues like poor network connections or accidental double clicks of the survey start URL or difficulty finding the original survey when using a mobile device.
For more information, see
Restarting active surveys.
Interviewer - Offline: Enhancements to the user interface
Interviewer has been enhanced to be more usable on touchscreen devices with different resolutions. Enhancements include:
▪Text and other items such as buttons can be resized by the interviewer
▪The Participant and Contact outcomes panel are dockable items that can pinned and unpinned.
These changes have also been made:
▪The Logs tab displays the latest logs first.
▪The automatic synchronization process has been brought in line with the manual synchronization process. The synchronization system tray icon flickers to indicate that synchronization is in process, with a tooltip that shows the status. The Current Activity tab in the Synchronization Console shows the automatic synchronization that is in progress.
Command line interface enhancements
New command line options enable you to:
▪start a new interview
▪restart the stopped interview by serial number
▪start or restart an interview for a certain respondent ID.
▪close Interviewer when a survey is completed.
Using SSL on a separate device
In clusters with a separate device handling SSL, for example a NetScaler device, you might find that the cluster can be accessed using https but the internal communication may be available only with http. If this causes desktop activation from Professional or Author using a URL to fail, set the new LocalFileManagerWebServiceUrl DPM parameter.
For more information, see
Enabling https access.
Interviewing: Database connection
SQL connection problems can cause partial records in the database, when restarting a survey that was originally started without a respondent database connection. To allow interviews to start only if a database connection is available, use the new RequireDataModelForInterviews DPM property.
Phone Participants
You can now configure:
▪whether the time zone included with the appointment time in the Comments field uses either UTC or Server time
For more information, see
Server or UTC time.
▪the order of the fields in the Participant area at the top of the screen in Phone Participants.
Synchronization
You can now:
▪restrict which file types can be downloaded to the client or uploaded to the server
▪set the timeout period for synchronization table cleanup
Reporting
▪Statistical testing at lower levels when there is no relationship between the lower and higher levels is now supported.
For more information, see
Testing unrelated levels.
▪To increase the number of tables that are displayed in the All Results tab when selecting the .mtd node of the tree, change the MaxRenderCount setting.
Quota web service
The Quota web service is a REST-based web service that is built on top of the Quota object model. The web service holds a cache of Quota Engine objects which provide access to the quota data by using an appropriate Quota Provider, which on the server is the Microsoft SQL Server Provider, QuotaProvider_MSQL.
The Quota API can read quota definitions and modify quota properties (AllowOverQuota and IsCounterOnly) and counts.
For more information, see
Quota web service.
Support for regulatory requirements
Enforcing manual dialing
You can now display a dial keypad in Phone Participants, which interviewers must use to dial a telephone number manually. This feature is intended to meet the requirements of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations in the US.
For more information, see
Enforcing manual dialing.
Data residency regulations
More and more countries and institutions are developing data residency regulations. These regulations may require participant/sample and/or respondent data to be kept far from the cluster performing interviewing.
Performance enhancements
Improving web performance
By default, projects process sample management requests sequentially. If you find that this slows down web performance (because, for example, the database server is in remote location to meet the data residency regulations), you can configure the cluster or individual projects to process sample management requests simultaneously.
For information about how to do this, see
Improving performance of web interviews.
Microsoft Office exports: Improved performance and reliability
The export to Microsoft Excel feature, used to export tables from Reporter, now uses Office Open XML, which improve performance and reliability. and avoids Office licensing issues when exports are run on the server.
The new export is the default. To revert to the previous export, select Use Excel automation in the Export Tables dialog.
Export to other Microsoft Office applications will be updated in future releases.
Other performance improvements
▪Optimized TOM memory to increase table population performance for large tables documents
▪Multi-threaded tables population
Supported platform updates
▪Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition x86-64 is now supported.
▪Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is now supported.
▪Internet Explorer Compatibility View is no longer required for Interviewer Server Administration and associated activities.
▪Systems where only TLS 1.2 is enabled are supported. If only TLS 1.2 is enabled on the SQL Server computer, a SQL Server update is also required from Microsoft. See Microsoft article:
Accessibility
▪To include aria-labelledby attributes in output, set the new IncludeLabelIDs attribute in the mrPage element to True. The aria-labelledby attribute is added to unlabeled controls such as other specify input boxes and radio buttons in grids to establish the relationship between these controls and their parent controls.
For more information, see
IncludeLabelIDs.
▪New tools have been used for testing accessibility: aXe, Total Validator, aDesigner.
▪Updates found when testing with screen-readers.
See also