RFS 6.9 release notes

The Elements Research Funding Solution (RFS) continues to grow and in this release we are pleased to introduce new functionality supporting various aspects of the research funding lifecycle.

In response to user feedback and in order to enable support for a write API, in this release we have introduced a number of updates to the Funding Opportunities datamodel, including:

• New fields for identifying the funder’s opportunity identifier, the source identifier, whether the opportunity is research funding, and the currency of the award

• Improved funder programme and funder scheme functionality

• Improved key dates functionality

• Expanded support contact functionality, enabling the selection of existing users and the input of a support URL

• New field for identifying the Funding Opportunity managing group

• Removed 'Keywords' field, replaced by more comprehensive Classifications functionality

• Improved ‘copy’ functionality, ensuring all populated fields are copied when creating a new opportunity from an existing one

• Improved 'inheritance' functionality such that where certain values are specified on the Funding Opportunity, they no longer also need to be configured in the Proposal form template to be captured against the Proposal

Further details on creating and editing Funding Opportunities are available here.

In this release we have also introduced the first phase of a write API for Funding Opportunities, supporting institutions in creating Funding Opportunities using the RFS API.  Further details are available here.

We have updated the budget functionality in the Console such that modifying the Approved budget no longer uses draft budget functionality; modifications to the Approved budget now function in the same manner as all other pre-award budget views.  Draft budgets continue to be employed for active Projects.

The Budget extract of the RFS Finance integration has been updated to only include current Active budget snapshots, rather than all budget snapshots.