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🗓️ Release Notes | January 2026

Michael Stephenson avatar
Written by Michael Stephenson
Updated over 2 weeks ago

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

Expanded Day-by-Day Availability Settings for Messenger + Bolt Agents

We’ve significantly enhanced the scheduling flexibility for both Messenger and Bolt Agent availability settings. Previously, you could only apply a single time window across selected days, limiting how precisely you could configure when Messenger or automated agents were active. With this update, you can now set different availability windows for each day of the week, including multiple time ranges within the same day—giving you full control to align with your staffing schedules and student engagement needs.

Email Verification for Form Submissions

To better safeguard contact data during form submissions, we’ve introduced Email Verification for Forms Submissions. This enhancement allows Element451 to verify that the person submitting a form is the rightful owner of the email address being used—before any data is matched to or updates an existing record.

UI/UX Improvements for Bolt Agents & Bolt Agent Jobs

We’ve introduced a set of UI and UX enhancements to simplify how you set up, manage, and use Bolt Agents and Bolt Agent Jobs across the platform.

These updates focus on making agent configuration more intuitive, consolidating agent-related settings into a single location, and embedding job creation directly into key workflows. Together, these improvements reduce navigation, streamline onboarding, and make it faster to launch and manage agent-driven work.

Improved Control Over Custom Field Access for Bolt Agents

Previously, agents could automatically view all custom fields associated with a student record while working on a Job. To improve data privacy and ensure institutions have greater control over what agents see, this behavior is changing. Moving forward, agents will only be able to view custom field data that has been explicitly granted through the User Data Access skill within the agent’s permissions settings. This change helps ensure that sensitive or internal-use data is not unintentionally exposed in student-facing interactions.

Update to Email Unsubscribe

We’ve improved how unsubscribe requests are processed when recipients click the unsubscribe link in campaign messages. Now, users are asked to enter their email address before being unsubscribed. This ensures that only the specific email address entered is removed from future communications. The update is especially important for campaigns using CC’d contacts or Guardian tokens—such as when a parent receives the same message as a student—so that if a parent unsubscribes, only their email is affected, not the student’s.

Fixes and Improvements

Applications + Decisions

  • Improved

    • Added second major, third major, minor, and concentration application fields to the Applications profile card.

    • Added user-applications-housing field to the Applications profile card.

    • Added Azerbaijan DIM Secondary Entrance Exam (SEC Grade 9) test type with support for Mathematics, Language of Instruction, and Foreign Language sections.

    • Added Azerbaijan DIM Master Admission Exam test type with support for Logic, Informatics, Foreign Language, and Essay sections.

    • Added A-Level (International Track) test type with support for multiple subject areas including Math, Physics, Chemistry, and more.

    • Added "Cancel" button to Bolt AI Application Reader to allow users to cancel in-progress evaluations.

    • Updated external SSO login to display a user-friendly error message instead of a 404 browser error when users attempt to log in with an email that doesn't exist in the system.

    • Added Date of Birth and School ID fields to the Decision header for easier identification of applicants during review.

    • Updated application submission prevention error messages to accurately reflect which fields (term or major) triggered the rule.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where cohort totals did not match the actual number of decisions displayed in the cohort.

    • Resolved an issue where searching by Spark ID or School ID in All Decisions did not return all associated decisions for a record.

    • Resolved an issue where students could not submit applications after changing their citizenship status from non-citizen to citizen, even when no documentation was required.

    • Resolved an issue where deleted visibility groups were not removed from Decisions, causing users to lose access to applications they should still see.

    • Resolved an issue where AI Analysis was not being generated for Decisions even when App Reader was enabled.

    • Resolved an issue where the payment button was not visible or accessible on mobile devices when students attempted to complete application payments.

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Application Reader Analysis displayed "Evaluation Failed" status when processing applications with a large number of criteria.

Appointments

  • Improved

    • Enhanced the mobile view for the Appointments Site to show appointment availability by default instead of displaying only filters, improving the user experience on mobile devices.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where users were unable to save appointment time changes when editing via mobile devices.

    • Resolved an issue where calendar availability was grayed out when date range spanned from 2025 to 2026.

    • Resolved an issue where appointments were not automatically syncing to internal users' Google Calendars when scheduled.

    • Resolved an issue where appointment cancellations sent duplicate notification emails.

    • Resolved an issue where same-day appointment availability was incorrectly blocked when Date Overrides were applied, preventing students from booking appointments on the current date.

    • Resolved an issue where users were unable to save time changes when editing appointments via mobile devices due to missing save button.

Bolt Agents for Students

  • Improved

    • Enhanced Bolt Agent responses to correctly distinguish between required and optional application checklist items when providing application status updates to students.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where "Display Knowledge Source" toggle was missing from Bolt Agent settings.

    • Resolved an issue where the email capture prompt appeared inappropriately when using custom messenger buttons with AI Agents enabled.

    • Resolved an issue where phone conversations with Agents became stuck in loops and did not end properly.

    • Resolved an issue where Agent Teams were not displaying in StudentHub despite being configured.

    • Resolved an issue where newly created agents were not automatically added to their assigned team.

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Agents only shared limited event dates.

    • Resolved an issue where text messages sent by Bolt Agent during phone calls (such as inquiry flow texts and appointment booking confirmations) were not displaying in the conversation view.

    • Enhanced Bolt Agent guardrails to prevent the chatbot from continuing personal conversations outside the institutional scope, ensuring it appropriately disengages when conversations involve non-school-related topics.

Bolt Agents for Staff

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Staff Agent created Bolt Agent jobs immediately without waiting for user confirmation.

    • Resolved an issue where the Internal User Support Staff Agent became unresponsive when asking for assistance with about Element451 features.

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Agent Job campaign creator returned errors when attempting to install campaigns.

Bolt Agent Jobs

  • Improved

    • Enhanced conversation assignment logging to include which Bolt Job assigned a conversation to an internal user, improving traceability of automated assignments.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where agents were not appearing in the assignment list when creating Bolt Jobs.

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Jobs created from shortcuts did not retain the initially selected agent assignment after subsequent adjustments were made to job settings.

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Agent Jobs with complex outreach instructions, such as time-based delays, were not scheduling contacts according to the specified timing rules.

Bolt Discovery

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Bolt Knowledge Hub

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Campaigns

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where campaigns with unselected channel variants incorrectly triggered validation errors.

Conversations

  • Improved

    • Enhanced inbound SMS matching to only associate messages with external user phone numbers, preventing replies from being incorrectly routed when a student's phone number matches an internal user's number.

    • Added a new Conversation Rule action, "Assignment and Mark as Private," to automatically mark conversations as private.

    • Enhanced visibility of automated SMS messages sent by Bolt Agent skills (such as scheduling links and inquiry flow texts) so they now appear in the conversation thread.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where internal user responses sent via email appeared as student responses in the conversation thread.

Courses

  • Improved

    • Added email notification when Canvas LMS integration authentication fails and connection becomes inactive.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where new Canvas course terms were not appearing in the term selection list for sync preferences.

    • Resolved an issue where Canvas integration displayed instructor ID numbers instead of instructor first and last names in course sections.

    • Resolved an issue where dropped courses from Blackboard LMS continued to display on student records regardless of the "Show Dropped Courses" checkbox setting.

    • Resolved an issue where grades synced from Blackboard LMS displayed incorrectly due to percent scores being calculated against total points rather than possible points.

Data + Insights

  • Improved

    • Added home phone international field (user-phone-home-international) to export options for improved data export capabilities.

    • Removed "Manually" as a sorting option from term data sources since manual sorting is not supported.

    • Enhanced data source validation to automatically trim whitespace from data source property values.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where Knowledge Hub source references in Conversations Insights displayed "null" instead of the article title.

    • Resolved an issue where the Event Payment Insights incorrectly displayed $0 for discount codes used when students had actually applied discount codes to event payments.

    • Resolved an issue where the Form Payment type was missing from the Payments Insights dashboard.

Events

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where users could be created through event registration sites without completing required fields.

    • Removed Event Type filter from StudentHub Events page since event types are for internal use only and should not be visible to students.

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Agents did not provide all available event dates during phone calls and provided incorrect registration links when students requested specific dates.

Forms

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where Forms with payments displayed a "404 - Not Found" error when refreshing the page after completing an Authorize.net payment.

General

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Journeys

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where Journey step conditions failed to load when editing steps, preventing users from adding actions like "Run Rule."

Microsites

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Organizations

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Pages

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the button was missing from Billboard with CTA and Billboard with Form page components.

People + Segments

  • Improved

    • Added ability for staff to manually upload contact profile photos directly from the admin dashboard without impersonating the student.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where SSO login did not work for users who created accounts through forms rather than the application page.

    • Resolved an issue where Active Traits were not populating even though application data was present.

    • Resolved an issue where users were unable to delete any schools listed on the Schools card, with the system consistently returning errors on deletion attempts.

    • Resolved an issue where the Intended Term column displayed as blank in segments even though records had Intended Term values populated on their profiles.

    • Resolved an issue where imported address records displayed country names inconsistently, showing values in the address card view but not populating when editing the address or filtering segments by country.

    • Resolved an issue where the Living field on the Family Member profile form defaulted to true, causing confusion when filtering segments by Living status.

    • Resolved an issue where prolonged loading times occurred when viewing people profiles, with "loading" messages displaying for extended periods.

    • Resolved an issue where the Related Workflow column in segments did not populate when the segment was actively being used by a workflow.

Settings + Permissions

  • Improved

    • Added a new "Administer Bolt Agents" permission to allow users to create/edit/delete Bolt Agents and Agent Teams.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where users with "Edit Profiles" permission were unable to edit contact profiles.

    • Restored the Sender Domain Authentication navigation link to the General Settings page.

StudentHub

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where Agent Teams were not displaying in StudentHub despite being configured.

Surveys

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Tasks

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Workflows + Rules

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Restored missing "Opt out from automatic territory assignment" toggle to the Set Territory workflow action.

    • Resolved an issue where the Related Workflow column in segments did not populate when the segment was actively being used by a workflow.

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