7029 Webform Version 1.1 features improved emailing reliability. The only conspicuous difference is that IS officers will receive emails from "Webforms Robot in behalf of <your name>" instead of directly from <your name>.

Most of your units have had annual elections, and are beginning to enter your new officers in AuxData. Some of these new officer may be the FSO-IS and SO-IS.  1-3 weeks after entry into AuxData, the new officers will show up in AuxOfficer, and therefore, at the bottom of your 7029 Webform as the officer(s) to whom your submitted 7029 is sent.

It is possible because of the timing that your 7029 will go to an incoming IS officer who is not yet ready to do his/her new job.  In this case, you have no recourse but to alert your elected leaders, and have them make arrangements between the outgoing and incoming IS officers whereby the incoming IS officer simply forwards your submitted 7029 form (an email) to the outgoing officer, until that day when the incoming IS officer is ready to take up his or her new duties.

Production Release: Version 0.4 has been promoted to Version 1.0, first production release of the 7029 Webform System. Beta 0.3 has been retired after 4 months with no bugs reported in Version 0.4.

New News Flashes & Notes "Blog": You are looking at our new blog to provide you with up-to-the-minute news and notes about the use of the 7029 Webform System. You should check for news flashes each month as you use the system.

Access to National Help Desk: Users having questions about the system are now directed to the National Help Desk system. Simply expand "Help & Feedback" and then click on "Obtain Expert Help".

There have been sporadic reports of users losing data after spending a long time entering it into the 7029 Webform. Symptom: the user creates a NEW form, enters data for as much as an hour or more, and then hits SAVE. The form then typically closes, and the users finds him/herself back at dashboard, or even is logged out. When the user returns to the active form just created, it is empty. All the work is lost.

This is not a defect in the form software, but an example of timeout. Unlike a pdf form or Excel spreadsheet, where you may literally leave the document open for weeks, entering data in it as you please, with Webforms you are interacting in real time with a web server and a database over the Internet. As with any Web application where you are filling out very long forms (such as a loan application), you must be acutely sensitive to the issue of timeout. The web server will not wait for you "forever". In fact, for some web servers, 10 minutes is a lifetime.

Experienced users of online applications such as Webforms know to keep their session alive by saving their data every few minutes. Each time you hit "SAVE", you have just told the server "I'm still here", and the server resets any timeout periods as if you had just opened the form.

Saving your data every few minutes, whether composing a Word document, filling out a spreadsheet, or any other document, is a well-known computer "best practice". With online applications that also face timeout, it is the only practice. If this is not part of your behavior, make it so.

Directive

When using the Webform system, after you create a new document or open an active one, click the SAVE button upon entering your first line of new data, to confirm that the system is operating normally. Webforms will always redraw the form, and update the saved date and time shown in Section III to the current GMT. Any other behavior is a fault, and should be reported. Then, as you fill out the form, every five (5) minutes or so, hit SAVE again. SAVEs are free; your time is not. We want your Webforms experience to match that of thousands of enthusiastic users.

Help Menus have been greatly expanded. Be sure to click open and read Questions & Answers..., Usage FAQs, Tips & Tricks, and Bugs & Known Issues. All of this information was updated March 15, 2011.

Unsaved Changes Warning: If you make any changes to your form, and attempt to navigate away before saving or submitting your changes, you will be warned, and given the opportunity to reconsider.

Calendar Year: The calendar year now shows in the upper right corner of the form. If you need to create a form with a prior (or future) year, use the date left-right arrows and click backwards or forwards through December; the year will roll over.

IS Officer Routing on the Webform: The system now chooses the "best two out of three" IS officers in your chain of leadership to list as recipients on the bottom of your Webform 7029 report. If your flotilla, division, and district each have an FSO-IS, SO-IS, and DSO-IS respectively, then the lowest two will be listed on the report (i.e., SO-IS and FSO-IS).

If, by contrast, you have no SO-IS, only an FSO and a DSO, then the system places the DSO-IS on the report as well; your local policy will determine to whom you actually must route the Webform (via the checkboxes). Or, if your flotilla is missing an FSO-IS, the Webform will include the SO and DSO for your routing choices.

Finally, if you are in one of the few divisions in the country that have two SO-IS officers sharing the work, neither SO will be will be listed on the Webform report; just the FSO and DSO. In this event (and under normal circumstances anyways), your FSO-IS knows which SO-IS to route the approved Webform to, and therefore nothing is lost.

Beta Designation Dropped: Although the Webforms system is continually being refined, the designations "Beta" for the various releases has been changed to "Version", as in "Version - 0.4". Version 0.3 is simply Beta 0.3 renamed. Version 0.4, this one, is new software. The first "production release" (1.0), to be supported by the IT User Department as opposed to IT Engineering, is scheduled for May. These conventions should not affect your daily use of the system, or confidence in it. Just remember that you should always shift to the newer release, and only fall back (after submitting Feedback) to an older one if you find a catastrophic bug.

My Webforms Shortcut Considerably Improved: The "one-click" access to your form using My Webforms has been substantially improved, particularly for two-Auxiliarist households. Please read the My Webforms Guide to the left for further details.