Busy Season at Interfolio!

Usually “busy season” refers to the dreaded time of the year for tax professionals. Well, Interfolio deals with numbers too! During our busy season, when scholars are applying for jobs and we are helping them send and quality check their applications, those numbers can teeter off into the thousands. We see thousands of documents from scholars and send thousands of deliveries every day during this season.

It could be a dreaded time for us as well—if we failed to satisfy our customers. However, it’s the time of year that we are most proud of because the stakes and expectations are high—in fact, each year they are even higher than the year before. Each season we try to take things up a notch in customer service. We strategize throughout the year in preparation for a rush of adrenaline that is over before we realize it’s even begun. Everyone benefits from this adrenaline rush, especially our friends at Starbucks! The office atmosphere is that of jockeys in a horse race. Who will get the most deliveries processed? Who will meet their goals first in the office? Everyone is amped up on caffeine and geared up for the first of many pushes of the season. Happy and satisfied scholars are always our goal. To sum it all up: we take great pride in what we do! The atmosphere is highly competitive and busy, but we never fail to have a little fun during this time either. What a perfect reason to order pizza for the office, coffee for everyone, and snacks throughout the day! For me, the pleasure is being able to take the pressure off the scholar to meet deadlines, and presenting a perfect picture of them to their potential employers. It’s knowing that the headache of gathering paperwork, requesting information from various sources, and filling out applications falls on me and not them.

Busy season marks the time of year where scholars are putting their best foot forward in pursuit of their career. Interfolio understands how crucial this time is, and that’s what drives us to give our scholars our very best. While we effectively move your academic identity from one place to another, we also provide personalized scholar support over the phones and via email.

Aside from just providing great service to our scholars, busy season is also a time when we work even closer and harder as a team. Our teamwork is tested on so many levels, and in the process I find that I learn and appreciate my colleagues even more. There’s an unspoken motto we all live by at Interfolio. The motto is: we care—we do—because we know! We see ourselves as a network for scholars, and as friends. We do this work because many of us have been, or are currently, scholars ourselves, so we know what is expected during this time. As a result, we seek to fulfill those needs and expectations. So if you’re in our neighborhood during busy season, feel free to drop in and say hello, especially if you like pizza, too!

New ByCommittee Template Feature and Agile Development

If you’re a ByCommittee Promotion & Tenure user and have been setting up new case after new case for reviews at your institution, then you’re in luck. We just made that process much simpler with the addition of easy-to-use templates for setting up future promotion, tenure, or review cases.

The ability to create a template is a nice upgrade for our users, but the process by which we designed the template also shows a bit about how we go about software development at Interfolio.

One of the strongest tenets of feature design we employ on the Interfolio Software Development Team is iterative development. When we create something for our users, we like to gather feedback and data, and then take a second crack at our idea (or sometimes even a third). This particular attitude towards feature development is part of an overall software development philosophy known as Agile Development. We put this attitude into practice with our newest ByCommittee Promotion & Tenure templates feature.

Our goal at Interfolio is to remove complications and friction points for users by providing a seamless workflow that is simple to start, conduct, and finish. We learned that one of the most difficult parts of conducting a committee-based review was the organization and coordination involved in starting the whole process. With ByCommittee P&T, administrators now have the ability to set up case templates to act as starting points from which they can begin the formal process for an individual candidate in the future. ByCommittee users set up case templates just like they would individual cases: templates contain much of the same information as a normal case, including material requirements and custom workflow features.

One issue we ran into early in development was that the process of creating a template was not distinct enough from creating a case. Our solution was to have the template creation look like a distinct workflow. After rigorous testing and analysis of user feedback, we decided that the second implementation was still a bit clunky. There was no easy way to manage case templates, and the language used in the feature was still a bit off. So, we took another pass at it. We went back and adjusted how users enter and exit the workflow, made significant revisions to the language that the user sees, and gave users a dedicated place to manage their list of case templates. Then, after more testing, we released the revised feature to our users.

So, while the first version of the templates feature didn’t quite meet our expectations of a finished product, we didn’t stop there. We set out to give users a way to plan out the logistics of conducting future promotion and tenure reviews, and we iterated on the work until the end product was a fully polished feature that will hopefully make our users lives a bit easier!

Fulfillment + Customer Support = Scholar Services!

When you think of mergers, what do you think of? You probably imagine two huge establishments making agreements over millions of dollars. The merge between the Fulfillment and Customer Support departments at Interfolio is slightly different.

In my current role, I’m a Scholar Advocate. Before the merge I worked as part of the Fulfillment team as an Intake Document Specialist. I quality checked all of our incoming documents, assisted in scanning copies of documents received via paper mail, and processed conversions (conversions are a packet of documents also known as a “credential file” that we receive from an institution’s career center).

Our Fulfillment team was great at processing the document and delivery commitments for scholars who submit applications through Interfolio. Our Customer Support team was great at listening to and resolving our customers’ issues when they are having problems with our product. However, there were many situations that called for actions from both teams in order to satisfy the customers’ needs. Coming together, we have created the Scholar Services department. Scholar Services now has the ability to perform all essential functions to provide our users with the best experience possible.

Throughout the past 5 months, former Customer Support Advocates and Fulfillment Specialists have stepped up to the plate as we started to undertake cross-training efforts between the two teams. Before the merge, a scholar’s electronic credential files were sent to me, which meant that only I could process and keep track of these documents. After the merge, we gained the ability to ensure that all team members are aware of users whose files have been sent, and the ability to have more than one member of the team work on these documents. It is a great feeling to know that you have extra hands to help out and more members of your team understanding the process it takes to get the job done. Each member of our team is now well-rounded and understands each function it takes to achieve a common goal. By merging, the team is now able to work through the amount of mail we receive and meet promised delivery times, and is also able to hear our scholars concerns by responding to emails, voicemails and phone calls. By combining the two teams we have avoided preventable glitches we occasionally saw when we were separated, and built stronger communication, which means a quicker response to users’ concerns.

By cross-training each member of our Scholar Services team, we have established a common level of knowledge and created a better flow of productivity and operations within our team. We now have a greater ability to listen to our users concerns, as well as to notice issues and fix them in a timely manner. Our team is now stronger than ever before!

Answers to Your Questions about Heartbleed

We know many of our clients are concerned about internet security after learning about the Heartbleed bug last week. Our engineering team provided the following statement outlining Interfolio’s response to the bug:

Interfolio is secured against the internet security vulnerability known as “Heartbleed.” The Heartbleed bug affects the OpenSSL framework used by many websites to encrypt and secure data being transmitted across the internet. There is no evidence that Interfolio was compromised by Heartbleed, however, it is a good idea to update your passwords when a widespread security vulnerability like this one is discovered. We recommend that you reset your Interfolio password at this time.

As soon as we were made aware of Heartbleed, our team of engineers acted to ensure that your personal and account information are kept safe. Here are the actions we’ve taken to safeguard your data:

Worked with Amazon Web Services to patch all servers against the vulnerability
Updated and patched our network servers
Deployed updated OpenSSL libraries
Renewed all of our SSL certificates
Verified that Interfolio’s Single-Sign-On was not affected by Heartbleed
Validated all changes through several CVE Vulnerability Assessment tools

What you need to do: Follow these directions to change your password.

If you want to know more about Heartbleed, you can read a full explanation here and see the FAQ at the Heartbleed website maintained by one of the teams who discovered the vulnerability.

Our clients are our number one priority. If you have any comments or concerns please contact us at help@interfolio.com or (877) 997-8807.