Release Notes
Changelog
What's New in the May 2024 Release
- Added seven new default vehicle manufacturers to the “Make” picklist for construction and agriculture vehicles including CASE, John Deere, and YANMAR.
- Machinery Trader is now a supported integration partner for vehicle data and photo exports.
What's New in the April 2024 Release
- Enhancement: the Window Label printing app has been updated to utilize the latest content and functionality from the CARFAX Connect API. Pre-owned vehicle window stickers will continue to display CARFAX vehicle history report graphics and content; moreover, the content visible in window stickers will be the latest graphics and metrics available from CARFAX.
- New Feature! A new custom website frame-in template for construction and ag vehicles (equipment and machinery) is now available for use. Super dulce!
- Enhancement: added new Vehicle Options categories named “Agriculture Vehicles and Machinery Features & Options” and “Construction Vehicles and Machinery Features & Options”
- Enhancement: added 50 new Vehicle Options checklist values that are unique to Agriculture and Construction vehicles.
- New Integration: the system now supports vehicle data and options imported from the CRMSeries application.
- Defect resolved that prevents excessive calls to ChromeData’s vehicle data API for Ford model vehicles.
What's New in the March 2024 Release
- Enhancement: modernized the existing integration with CARFAX vehicle history reports to use their latest “CARFAX Connect API” version and their ICR (Instant CARFAX Reports) functionality. This replaces the old batch, flat-file processing that had been used with CARFAX for many moons.
- Enhancement: added four new Products & Services values to the Tenant Admin web app and deprecated 15 old Product & Service values that were no longer in use. We also renamed one existing integration product. This included related updates to the Billing Report UI in the system that rely on these Product & Service values.
What's New in the February 2024 Release
- Resolved a defect where the monthly, OEM Factory Warranty data updates were not processing automatically. While data had been updated in the past, these updates are now fully automated again.
What's New in the January 2024 Release
- New Feature! A new photo and video harvest system is now available for use. All existing photo and video integration partners will be migrated to the new version in Q1 including eVN, VIN Real, MAX Digital, vAuto, HomeNet, and many more!
- New Feature! A new administrative interface was released for the Vehicle Data Import system, allowing AULT support and onboarding reps to resolve requests faster and more efficiently.
What's New in the April 2020 Release
- New Feature: the data syndication system (aka “exports”) now supports a custom FTP port value for an integration partner that receives data from AutoUpLink Tech’s software. If the data recipient company requires a unique FTP port to receive data to “their FTP server”, our syndication software can now be configured with any FTP port for delivery of inventory, sales, and service data.
- Improvement to the high resolution photo overlay functionality that automatically applies overlay graphics to vehicle photos to resolve a defect related to the proper formatting of standard resolution overlays for standard resolution images.
What's New in the February 2020 Release
This release follows up on the January release that included improvements to support the application of overlays to high resolution photos. While the inventory management application already supported the capture, storage, and syndication of high resolution images, the programmatic application of high resolution overlays and graphics onto high resolution photos was limited. This release includes improvements to the following:
- The primary public API to support the application of high resolution overlays and text to high resolution photos.
- The “Text-on-Image” interface / functionality
- Related back-end systems / applications
This release also includes an improvement to the Bulk Photo Upload interface to prevent a session timeout from occurring during a very large upload (i.e. a large batch of high resolution images).
What's New in the January 2020 Release
A number of interfaces, apps, and systems have been updated to support the application of overlays to high resolution photos. While the application already supported the capture, storage, and syndication of high resolution images, the programmatic application of high resolution overlays and graphics onto high resolution photos was limited. This release includes improvements to the following:
- The “Image Manager” interface / app
- The Bulk Upload interface
- The “Silent Salesman” interface / functionality
- The “VDP” interface (Vehicle Detail Page)
- Related back-end systems / applications
What's New in the December 2019 Release
- The VIN Decode functionality available in the web app (i.e. add vehicle, re-decode vehicle, etc.) has been enhanced to cease use of a legacy, third-party vehicle data product in favor of a new vehicle data source with OEM Build Data, similar to other AutoUpLink Tech products.
- For Firefox browser users, the login page now activates the login button as expected when the username and password were previously saved in FireFox (using the browser's autofill feature).
What's New in the September 2019 Release
What's New in the May 2019 Release
- Replaced the legacy navigation bar at the top of the Window Label Printing web application with a new bar to improve usability, including a button to the window label shop;
- Improvements to the Tenant Administration web app (fka IIM back-end):
- Replaced the legacy navigation bar at the top of the start screen with a new bar to improve usability, including a button to the window label shop;
- Improved both the names of and the order of numerous Products and Services visible the account administration UI (aka dealer detail). When authorized users add/edit/remove products or services to a dealer tenant’s account, the list of “Services” has new values and renamed values to sort items together in the list (i.e. all lot services values are now listed together).
- Back-end improvements and optimization related to Vehicle Notes (which are visible in the inventory management web application per vehicle).
What's New in the April 2019 Release
- Improvements to the photo upload workflow on both the VDP (Vehicle Detail Page) and the Bulk Photo Upload UIs
- New Feature! The Window Label Printing application now allows the viewing/filtering/printing of window stickers and Buyer's Guides for new vehicles. Prior to this release, window labels could only be generated for pre-owned vehicles.
What's New in the March 2019 Release
- Added a new inventory data import for the Frazer Dealer Management System (DMS). This integration is a “direct API” integration with this DMS application that will send vehicle data to AutoUpLink Tech frequently each day based on the scheduling ability of the Frazer DMS itself.
- For the HangTags+ Web App, the Location Code attribute has been added as a new printable data field for window labels. Tenants can now insert and print Location Code values on their window labels.
What's New in the February 2019 Release
- Added support to import inventory data from Jaguar Land Rover North America via its new integration partner Shift Digital (which replaced DMi as the integration system)
What's New in the September 2018 Release
- Improved the VIN Decode functionality to better handle data for electric vehicles.
- Resolved a minor / sporadic design flaw that occurred when data was imported via the CDK 3PA integration (aka CDK 3rd Party Access) and time zone conflicts resulted in data anomalies.
What's New in the August 2018 Release
- Improvement to the inventory data export application to support advanced security protocols for secure delivery of inventory data to third party systems.
- Improvement to the Photo Harvest application (which imports vehicle photos from third party systems) to better handle cases where the external system presents photos for import that AutoUpLink's software previously imported and does not need to import again. Not only does this improve application performance, but it avoids rare cases where your user has manually replaced one or more vehicle photos (for a discrete VIN), but your external system (that we are harvesting photos from per your configuration) does not yet have the new photos(s) and is therefore attempting to "over write" the correct photos with now out-of-date photos.
What's New in the July 2018 Release
- Improvements that optimize Text-On-Image and Silent Salesman related photo processing
- High Resolution graphics can now be inserted into the vehicle photo stream and syndicated with vehicle photos (a.k.a. Silent Salesman)
- Improved the Photo Upload workflow with an upgrade to ensure retention of photo position / numbering in cases where the vehicle already had marketing tiles / graphics (applied by the Silent Salesman feature) in the photo stream
- Improved the Photo Upload functionality to prevent successfully uploaded images from rarely loosing their association with the selected / identified VIN
- Improved the error handling UX for vehicle Package Code updates
- Improvements to vehicle locking rules (which prevent vehicle data added/updated by users and/or third party data imports from being overwritten by the other) to finalize support for data sync'd from the Flow mobile app for on-the-lot service technicians
- Improvement to the vehicle locking rules business logic that will allow the Vehicle Mileage and the CPO fields to be updated after a vehicle has recently been updated by a user of the legacy "Handheld" mobile app
- The Photo Harvest application now supports harvesting photos from URLs that redirect to a secondary URL
What's New in the May 2018 Release
- The Photo Harvest application now supports harvesting photos from https source URLs
- Improvement to printing CarFax content on vehicle Window Stickers
- New Validation to prevent active tenants from having the same physical address
- Improvement to the VDP to better identify vehicle prices updated by a user via our mobile apps for auditing purposes
- Improvement to the Photo Upload workflow to improve photo position handling and position assignment during upload of multiple photos
- Increased the maximum allowed character length for vehicle Package Codes to better handle rare cases where a tenant's inventory data source includes many package codes in a single field
- Added Vehicle Wheelbase to the Data Syndication Application to export wheelbase data to third party sites
- Addition of new Account Services and Settings to the Tenant Administration Web App
What's New in the April 2018 Release
- Increased the font size of the vehicle Stock Number on Buyer's Guides per user request
- Improvement to VIN Decode handling of certain vehicle Model & Series combinations on the VDP
What's New in the January 2018 Release
- Improvements to the Photo Harvest system to harvest vehicle photos automatically from additional third party systems to support vendors and apps that retailers use for different photo capture and image generation services
- Further improvements to the Vehicle Audit Trail functionality. Includes visibility in the IIM Web App for users to see entries (in the Audit Trail UI itself) from Vehicle add, edit and delete activity performed by users in the VIN Studio for Android Tablets app.
- Vehicle Photo URLs and URLs for Additional Graphics and Images in the Photo Streams of Vehicle’s (marketing “tiles” / slides / graphics) will now be available with the “https” security protocol. These photos and images can now be syndicated to one or all of your third-party destination sites, apps and systems in https URL strings. This new feature is directly in response to Google’s Search algorithm changes in late 2017 that essentially rewards websites that display 100% SSL secured content. #OKGoogle
- Added new vehicle options values to the generic (all makes and models) options list including Apple CarPlay, Android Auto and UVO eServices
- The VDP in the IIM Web App was upgraded to improve the manual VIN Decode functionality. This improvement ensures that vehicles added and VIN Decoded by users in our native applications (e.g. VIN Studio for Android tablets) will display as decoded inside the web app.
- Improvement to the Reynolds Certified Interface (RCI) integration to consolidate multiple inventory files/accounts from a dealer's single Reynolds DMS into a single AutoUpLink Tech inventory management account.
What's New in the November 2017 Release
- Major improvements to the Bulk Photo Upload (multiple vehicles at once) and to the VDP's Photo Upload to a) support storage of high resolution photos, b) dramatically reduce the time it takes to upload photos and c) to remove obsolete FLASH tech from the interface to improve security and ensure long-term compatibility with all popular, modern web browsers
- The Photo Harvest functionality (which will import photos programmatically from third party systems) received a major upgrade that a) dramatically reduced the time for photos to be harvested, b) supports storage of high resolution photos, and c) delivered a cloud-native photo harvest technology reducing costs for our clients while improving the scalability of the inventory application
What's New in the October 2017 Release
- Release of Reynolds Certified Interface integration (RCI) to import inventory data from both the ERA Ignite and the POWER DMS products (learn more by clicking here.)
- the latest version of the web app's sibling, native Android app (VIN Studio) released to the GooglePlay Store. The apps are now more seamless than ever in terms of vehicle & photo adds, edits and deletes from either app! See the Vin Studio Release Notes for details about VIN Studio v3.3
What's New in the September 2017 Release
- Improvements to both the Processing of all Uploaded Photos and to the FTP photo import process to upgrade performance and to dramatically reduce photo processing time. Faster processing means faster photo uploads and imports, which means quicker downstream exports of new photos!
- A minor improvement to the Add Vehicle workflow related to Package Codes
What's New in the August 2017 Release
- Inventory data syndication now supports delivery of high resolution photo URLs to third party integrators. All exported vehicle data can include high res images, or individual exports can be configured as needed;
- Inventory data syndication now supports the photo count without graphic ads (aka SilentSalesman graphics or tiles). Prior to this release the "photo count" included these advertising graphics, so it was difficult to programmatically identify a count of photos vs the total count of images with ads;
- Minor update to the web app's VDP (Vehicle Detail Page) UI to rename the "Packages" accordion/section header to "Manufacturer Option(s) & Package(s)" and to rename the "Options" accordion/section header to "Common / Popular Options for all Vehicles"
What's New in the July 2017 Release
- The Window Label Printing App received a new product logo in the UI
- Upgraded the Window Label Printing App to improve the placement of the "Prior Rental Vehicle" text in Spanish language Buyer's Guides
- Upgraded the Window Label Printing App to improve the appearance of vehicle and warranty data printed onto pre-printed Buyer's Guides label stock. The alignment of inserted vehicle and warranty was improved to prevent this data from "over writing" pre-printed lines and the information on the label stock
- Upgraded the Window Label Printing App to improve future application performance by implementing a new database technology. All configured window labels have been migrated to the new database accordingly, and all new labels configured in the future will be stored in this new data layer
- The Inventory data import system was upgraded to utilize new cloud tech for importing data which will improve underlying import performance in the future
- The vehicle photo upload screens (individual vehicle photo upload and multi-vehicle photo upload) were upgraded to support storage of high resolution photos. This release deploys the upgrade to a small batch of "beta" clients; the functionality will be released to all other tenants in a future release
Releases prior to July 2017 have been removed from this release notes page simply for brevity. If you would like more information about what was released prior to July, contact support@autouplinktech.com.