Updated:

Pope Tech 2020 Impactful Roadmap

by Pope Tech

Summary: A review of updates to Pope Tech the past year and a look ahead at upcoming features in 2020.

We find that having a transparent roadmap is helpful to our clients and invites feedback. We changed our last roadmap from feedback and will likely change this one if it means we can better serve our clients.

Features Added in the Past Year

We appreciate the many users who have taken the time to give us suggestions on ways to improve Pope Tech. The features we have added in the past year have been a result of feedback and requests from our users. 

Here are some of the more notable features that were added this past year: 

Scanning Behind Logins

Scanning behind logins has been our most frequently requested feature with over 75 separate organizations requesting that we add this to our platform.  With this recent update, users can now scan web and web app content behind basic logins, logins using cookies, and logins using API Tokens. 

Mass Website Import & Management Tools

Imagine importing, scanning, and having your baseline report generated on your whole portfolio of over 5,000+ websites in under a week. With our Mass Website Import & Management tools, you can do just that. Many of our higher education and large web development agencies requested this ability to expedite the process of onboarding their whole portfolio websites and generating their baseline reports. Now, instead of spending their time training users on how to add websites to their account, their teams are reviewing results and working on fixing errors. 

Separate Scanning Queues & Server Scaling

Worried about being stuck behind a university scanning their whole portfolio of websites? No need to be concerned. With this update, each organization is now put into their own scanning queue, so you will only be behind yourself. Doing a large number of websites? No problem, our platform will just increase the number of servers working on scanning your sites. Just schedule those 40,000 pages to scan and head home for the night, in most cases the report will arrive in your inbox the next day. 

Updated WAVE Interface

Along with the new WAVE interface, we added additional tests and updated documentation. Everyone loves the new WAVE update. 

Co-branding for Agencies (and others)

Many of our agencies add their clients as users in our platform or share our platform generated reports with their clients. These agencies wanted a way to remind their clients the scanning service was something they were receiving through the agency. Based on this feedback, we added the option for agencies to co-brand the platform and reports by putting their logo next to ours. We have also had many non-agencies turn this on to have their logo show on inside Pope Tech and on reports. It has helped them orient their users. If you would like this turned on inside your account let us know. 

Reporting by Template/Region

Some of our users wanted to be able to separate out the errors in the platform based on whether or they were in the template or part of the page content. Based on this feature, we added the Template/Region feature. This feature, coupled with our already existing group assignment feature, allows results to be filter and users be assigned to view only the content results or just template results (or both) for only the websites they are responsible for maintaining.  If you would like this turned on inside your account let us know. 

Shibboleth Single Sign On (SSO)

Many of our higher education clients wanted a way to manage user access to the platform using their existing SSO user management system. This integration with Shibboleth SSO allows users to simply use their existing logins to access the platform and gives management easier access to adding and removing platform access.  If you would like this turned on inside your account let us know. 

Other Platform Updates

Besides the major platform updates just listed, there are of course the many other important updates to our platform, including: Improved accessibility; Increased mobile responsiveness; HTML & CSV report options; Sorting and filtering in tables; Crawler & Scanner improvements; Updated crawler & scanner settings; Adding User-Agents to identify our servers; Additional permissions; Additional Error reporting; Sticky user settings in tables; Organization settings; 1-click dismiss (option); etc. 

These updates have also been in direct response to user feedback. 

Upcoming Major Features (Our 2020 plans)

As we are looking forward to the rest of 2020, there are a number of highly impactful features we plan on adding. These features are, once again, being driven by users’ requests. 

Here are some of the more notable features that we are looking to add in 2020:

Canvas Integration (In development)

Many of our Higher Education customers have been asking us for this module. They would like to leverage the power of WAVE scanning inside their school’s learning management system. Our Canvas integration module is currently in development. We expect this option to be available in the next few months. If your school would like to beta-test our Canvas integration, please let us know.  

Integrated Knowledge Base (In progress)

How great is it to have the support documents right there inside the platform, on the page you need them? We think this is a good idea too, which is why we are working on integrating our support documentation inside of Pope Tech.

PDF Scanning (Scoping this out)

Scanning PDFs using the philosophy of WAVE is a very often requested feature request. Being able to see which PDFs are tagged, or have headers or other common accessibility elements will help users know their risk level and which PDFs to prioritize.  We have all created, shared and posted PDFs over the years. Scanning the PDFs found on websites just makes sense as a natural extension of our platform. 

Customized Reporting (Scoping this out)

 Not all our customer’s use cases are the same. It is not uncommon for us to be asked about reporting options beyond what we currently offer. Often these requests are unique to the various use cases of each individual organization. Instead of trying to build additional preset reports (trying to accommodate all these different use cases), we are thinking we will provide a buffet of different reporting options and let users customize the reporting to meet their unique use case. That way each user can generate the report type in the format they need (PDF, HTML, or CSV options will all be available where they make sense). 

Other Potential Features

Besides those features we have already slotted into our development timeline, there are a number of other features our users have been requesting that we are considering. 

Here are some additional features we are also looking into: 

  • API for CMS integration and Error Ticketing/Tracking 
  • XML sitemap importing/crawling
  • Crawl & Scan integration (one click to trigger both actions)
  • Agency Management Tools (Designed to help agencies manage their client’s accounts better)
  • Identifying broken links
  • Integration with other LMS (Blackboard, Moodle, D2L, etc.)
  • Integration with WordPress
  • Partial rescanning (rescan selected pages)
  • Imitating user interactions & scanning dynamic triggered content

This list, of course (as well as the other planned major updates), will likely have some fluidity to it. As we continue to receive feedback from our users and see what opportunities we have to make your life easier, we may adjust some of the priorities to best serve the needs of our community. As always, in this process, we value user feedback as it helps us understand our users’ needs and prioritize development. 

Suggestions? 

See anything you would like to add to our list? Are there any items you would like to weigh in on? 

Don’t hesitate to let us know how we can continue to improve our platform to meet your use case. You can submit feedback using our contact form pope.tech/contact, emailing us directly, or submit feedback using the “feedback” link located on the bottom of every page view in our app.