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🗓️ Release Notes | September 2026

Written by Michael Stephenson

This article keeps you informed about the latest developments from Element451. Every month, we highlight everything from bug fixes and minor improvements to new features and major enhancements.

We update this article regularly throughout the month as new releases, improvements, and bug fixes are rolled out. Please check back frequently to stay informed.

To explore other months or specific release notes, visit our Release Notes collection. You should also check out our Planned Releases to get a glimpse of what's to come.


New and Enhanced Features

Case Management is Now Generally Available

Case Management left Open Beta on September 1 and is now generally available to institutions on the Student Success package. The module pairs Alerts, the one-time signals that something needs attention, with Cases, the owned and ongoing work to resolve a student's issue, so an early alert becomes follow-through someone is accountable for.

General availability means the feature set is settled and fully supported. Types, statuses, priorities, and templates are stable, both automation engines are complete, and Bolt AI analysis runs on every case. Schools that used Case Management during the beta keep their existing types, templates, rules, alerts, and cases, with no migration or re-setup step. Read the release notes here.

Custom Skills for Bolt Agents

Custom Skills are out of beta and available to every institution with Bolt Agents. Custom Skills teach your agents institution-specific scenarios: when a skill should fire, what the agent should do, and which actions it can take across Messenger, SMS, email, and voice. Skills built during the beta keep working exactly as configured, with no action needed.

General availability adds a library of 12 starter templates, three new tools in @Hand Off to Person, @Share Entity, and @Enroll in Rule, dynamic call transfer destinations, date-window availability with WhatsApp as a new channel, duplicate and download and import for reusing skills across instances, an authentication prompt before sensitive actions, and clearer skill matching detail in the Agent Test Console. Read the release notes here.

Fixes and Improvements

Applications + Decisions

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where an application checklist displayed an incorrect progress count even though every item was complete.

    • Resolved an issue where application document exports completed successfully but produced zero files despite a valid export configuration.

    • Resolved an issue where the Checklist Status segment filter returned an error when more or fewer than one filter property was selected.

    • Resolved an issue where a malformed Did filter could break Intelligent Admissions evaluation.

    • Resolved an issue where admins could not update imported application custom fields on a contact profile.

    • Resolved an issue where conditional logic did not apply correctly on application forms.

    • Resolved an issue where an application conditional built with the contains, starts with, or ends with operator on a dropdown field stored its value as a list instead of text, so the condition never matched.

    • Resolved an issue where submitting an application registration form could return a form validation error and email the verification code without opening the code entry window, leaving the student unable to finish creating an account.

    • Resolved an issue where a student could start a second Flywire payment for the same application while an earlier payment was still in progress, which could result in a duplicate payment. The application site now shows a pending state instead of an active payment action, and the server blocks a duplicate attempt across page refreshes, additional tabs, and separate sessions. A new payment can be started once the earlier one completes, fails, or expires, or after a short cooldown if the checkout window was opened but never used.

    • Resolved an issue where the same supplemental form could be saved twice when it was submitted from two tabs at once or the request was retried, creating a duplicate answer along with duplicate generated documents and notifications. Only one submission is accepted now, and its follow-up actions run once.

    • Resolved an issue where opening an application in the editor showed "This application could not be found" when a submission prevention rule still pointed at a condition that had been deleted. The application now opens and skips the missing rule, and deleting a condition clears it from every application that referenced it.

    • Resolved an issue where changing the date of birth on an application record did not save. Clicking Save Changes had no effect and returned no error message. A date that cannot be read is now flagged with a validation message.

    • Resolved an issue where the notification sent when an Intelligent Admissions rule is deactivated reached every internal user in any group whose role included the rule update permission. The notification is now limited to groups with permission to administer Decisions settings.

Appointments

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Bolt Agents for Students

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where a student asking the Messenger chatbot for their contact details received a connection error when their Ethos record had no phone number on file. Missing values now display as N/A and the remaining details are returned.

    • Resolved an issue where the default Bolt Agent replied to an inbound SMS even though the team handling that conversation was limited to specific phone numbers and none of them matched.

Bolt Agents for Staff

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Bolt Agent Jobs

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where a job's generated email or SMS could list a checklist item as still outstanding even though the student's custom field showed it complete. Message drafting now treats current profile values and the job's own decision as authoritative over earlier assessment history.

    • Resolved an issue where paragraph spacing, bold text, and list markers in a job's email were lost between drafting and preview or send, so blank lines and bulleted steps did not appear as written.

Bolt Discovery

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Bolt Knowledge Hub

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Campaigns

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where a failure while rendering an email retried the entire campaign job, which could send duplicate SMS and push messages. The retry is now limited to the individual email.

    • Resolved an issue where a campaign button whose link was set with a Link URL token rendered as a broken button and could show raw link markup in Gmail. Button links are converted to a plain URL before the email is built, including in saved templates that have not been reopened and edited.

Case Management

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where completed and resolved cases were still counted in the overdue totals shown in the header statistics.

Conversations

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the toggles that limit when Messenger and a Voice Agent are active were missing from Conversations settings, so configured availability hours were ignored and both stayed available around the clock. The toggles are restored and now note that hours are evaluated in your institution's timezone. If you set availability hours after January 20, 2026, turn the toggle on once to apply your schedule.

    • Resolved an issue where a contact's name and email submission activity could appear on unrelated conversation timelines.

Courses

  • Improved

    • Improved data handling for the Canvas and Ethos course integrations to prevent data collisions during synchronization.

    • OpenLMS term and section matching now accepts a period, hyphen, forward slash, or vertical bar between the course code and the term code, and falls back to the course category when the shortname does not produce a match.

  • Fixed

Data, Integrations + Insights

  • Improved

    • Added Payment Gateway Transaction ID as an exportable field in Import + Export, so payments can be reconciled against your other systems.

    • The V3 Decisions API now accepts either a title and description or a checklist item key when creating checklist items.

    • Ethos hold imports now fall back to the hold reason when a hold has no comment, so a Banner hold that carries only a short reason no longer imports with a blank description. Colleague does not use the reason field.

    • Ethos hold imports now store the Ethos hold ID on each hold and set a hold to Released once it is no longer returned by Ethos. Because Ethos returns only active holds, a hold ended in your SIS stops appearing in the feed rather than arriving with an end date, which previously left it showing as Active. Holds imported before hold IDs were stored are released the same way.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where certain records were excluded from exports despite meeting all filter conditions.

    • Resolved an issue where the Test Import and Run Import buttons stayed active while an import run was already pending or in progress, so a second click could overlap the first and record a live import when Test was selected. Run actions are now locked until the current run finishes, and errors returned by the import service are shown more clearly.

    • Resolved an issue where setting up a Blackboard connection for the first time failed with an "Invalid instance provided" error after the access token had already been saved. New installations now complete, and roles and terms load as expected.

Events

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Forms

  • Improved

  • Fixed

General

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Journeys

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Microsites

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Organizations

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Pages

  • Improved

  • Fixed

People

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the Enrolled Programs card displayed a validation error and failed to load after previously corrupted program data was repaired.

    • Resolved an issue where comparing two contacts returned an error when emergency contact data was stored in an unexpected format.

    • Resolved an issue where a contact label saved without a color appeared to succeed but never appeared in the label list. Choosing a color is now required when creating a label.

    • Resolved an issue where updating a contact's email address to one already used by another record displayed an unclear error instead of a message identifying the conflict.

    • Resolved an issue where merging one pair inside a duplicate cluster left the review queue sitting on a match that no longer existed, showing an error with the Merge button disabled. The queue now moves to a pair that still exists, or ends the review when none remain.

    • Resolved an issue where the duplicate review queue could time out and fail to load on instances with a large number of duplicate matches. The list is now paged in the database instead of loading every match at once.

Settings + Permissions

  • Improved

    • Added an optional Credit Account Code field to the TouchNet TLink payment gateway configuration.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where a contact who matched a visibility group's conditions could be missing that group on their record, so internal users assigned to the group could not open the contact. Group membership now recovers when that mismatch is detected.

StudentHub

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Surveys

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Tasks

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Workflows + Rules

  • Improved

  • Fixed

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