News in brief

• Option to have your data processed outside of the EU
• New Feature: Informing relatives if an observation is a group one
• Android 9 and Tapestry
• New tutorials
• FSF Team News

Hi Weavers,

Welcome to this month’s Tapestry newsletter! Can you believe it’s the end of February already? We have spent the last month continuing to work on our new Android and iOS apps which are currently in beta testing, you can find out more information about this from here. We have also been able to add some new features and resources which will be covered below. 

This month we also celebrated the 16th birthday of the Foundation Stage Forum! For those of you who aren’t aware, the forum is an online community and support network for all those with a professional interest in the early years. You can also access tutorials for Tapestry from there and is where you will manage your invoices from. Precisely because of this, and in order to have a Tapestry account, all settings or organisations must have an FSF account. This FSF membership is already included within the Tapestry fee and is automatically set up when a setting takes up on a Tapestry account. 

You can read some of the birthday wishes we received and lovely things our members have to say about us here. 
 

Option to have your data processed outside of the EU

One of the many ways we are GDPR compliant is that all Tapestry data is processed and stored inside of the EU. Our head office and almost all our staff are also based inside the EU. 
We do have a few members of staff who fancied sunnier lands so hopped on a plane and they are now living in Australia. By default, they are not able to see any customer data, but you do now have the option to allow them to access any messages you send us and access the data in your account if necessary to help with your query. This may mean you will get a faster response to any support requests you may send in, especially if you are in a time-zone that differs significantly to the UK.  

We wouldn’t necessarily recommend enabling it if you are based in the EU or have staff or relatives who are in the EU as it will increase the work you need to do in order to be GDPR compliant.

To turn this option on, you just need to go to the Control Panel -> Data Protection and scroll down to the ‘Data Processing Outside the EU’ section. 

If you want to learn more about how we are GDPR compliant, you can take a look at our data protection area on our website.

New Feature

To help relatives using Tapestry, we have now added a note for group observations which will show relatives how many children are included in that observation. This does not mean that parents will be able to see the names of the other children that are included in the observation, just the number of them.

As well as this, if you have it set so parents can comment on group observations, they will now also see a note informing them that any comments they add to group observation will be visible to other relatives who have children included in the observation.

Android 9 and Tapestry

Some users have reported that when they have upgraded their Android device to the most recent version of Android, which is 9 Pie, they have found that when they open up the Tapestry app again, they are receiving an error message. The error message will tell them the app was built for an older version of Android and may not work properly. Unfortunately, we can’t get rid of this message, but if you click on ‘OK’ you should find that you are still able to login and use the app anyway. 

If you do have any further problems, we are currently working on a new version of the Android app that will be fully compatible with Android 9 and will also have many exciting new features, such as an offline mode. If you are interested in being a beta tester for this new version, please get in touch with us by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info. 

New Tutorials

We always aim to offer as many helpful resources as possible to help you get the best out of your Tapestry account. We have therefore added several new tutorials recently, such as ‘Enabling and Assessing the EYFS framework’ and ‘Enabling and Assessing the CoEL framework.

You can also find new tutorials for the EYFS Comparison screens and adding/exporting accident forms from the Care Diary.

All of our tutorials, including these new ones, can be found on our main tutorials page.

FSF Team News

This month we were delighted to welcome Kawsu as a new member of the FSF and Tapestry team. Kawsu will be working in our team of developers to help us add all the great features that are on our to do-list. Please join us in welcoming Kawsu to the team!