With enhanced flexibility and control, both faculty and administrative users can create vitas based upon data in the system that better reflect academic achievements and institutional standards. Some new key features include:

• Improved user experience: A redesigned interface makes it easier to build, preview, and manage vitas without needing to emulate a user. Drafting, previewing, and archiving templates are now supported, with all changes logged for audit purposes.
• Greater customization and control: Faculty and administrators can create personal or institutional templates with flexible section grouping, renaming, grouping, and styling options to align with institutional standards and specific academic disciplines.
  • Grants have the added ability to group activities by Status.
  • Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions can also be grouped by Subtype and Status.
• Better represent faculty accomplishments: Users can leverage system data for professional advancement, annual reviews, grant applications, and sabbaticals to better represent all academic accomplishment
• Support for academic and institutional needs: Templates can be tailored to reflect institutional standards and academic disciplines, supporting use cases like annual reviews, promotions, and grant applications.
• Expanded formatting options: Faculty can add section descriptions, modify sorting and numbering, include links to attachments, choose from more citation formats, add freeform or formatted custom text, and preview layout changes in real time.
• Advanced display features: Faculty can show or hide columns in the tabular view for custom sections, ensuring alignment between table data and vita content.
  

  If the tabular display style is selected for scholarly citations, column show/hide capabilities may be limited.

   
• Template archiving: Templates can be archived and restored as needed, helping users manage active and inactive configurations.
• Change tracking for reporting: Administrators can view or export a CSV log of template changes for reporting and auditing purposes.

• The new “Add Custom Text” feature for a generated vita is not supported with the FAR to RPT integration as this integration generates a Vita in real-time based on a template (not by pulling a personalized, generated vita directly from a user’s account).
• Activities cannot be rearranged or reordered in personal vitas.
• The first release will not permit the bolding of the author amongst a list of co-authors/co-contributors within a publication.
• Individual activities cannot be rearranged in generated personal vitas; order is controlled via template sections.
  
• Not compatible with legacy Faculty180 Evaluations.
• Institutional vita templates currently support PDF exports only. We are scoping the work for future improvements, including possible exports in the Microsoft Word format.
• Changes to template section settings do not retroactively apply to existing templates and require manual updates.
• If ‘Terminal Degree’ is not being used, it will still show up as Terminal Degree: No in the Listing and Tabular display styles on the vita output. To remove it, you must hide the column.
• More limited biosketch approach: It is strongly recommended scholars use the government-mandated SciENcv platform for NIH, NSF, and AHRQ grant applications requiring a biosketch.
• Tabular display style is not recommended for scholarly citations due to limited show/hide capabilities.
• Filtering and grouping in tabular format is limited to predefined dropdown options; open text entries cannot be filtered.

Templates define the structure and appearance of a vita. They determine which sections are included, how activities are ordered, and how the content is styled.

• Personal Vita Templates: Faculty can create personal templates to customize their own vita configurations—choosing which sections to display, setting the order of content, applying preferred formatting, and more.
• Institutional Templates: Administrative users with the appropriate permissions can also create institutional templates, which may be designated as linked (automatically updating all associated vitas when changes are made) or unlinked (remaining static once applied). These are also used in RPT cases that use vitas/attachments from FAR as well as activity input forms.

A vita is the final, formatted document generated from a selected template. Faculty can view, customize, save, and export their vita based on their activity data. Within the Vitas section, faculty can select a date range or term for the activities they want to include, add custom text to individual activities, and access personal vitas, institutional vitas, and archived versions

• Personal Vitas: Generated from a template created and owned by the faculty member. Section settings/styling can be updated by the faculty member on the template in order to modify the vita output.
  

  Faculty members can make changes by updating the relevant template under ‘My Templates.’ Any vita using that template will automatically update with the changes.

   
• Institutional Vitas: Generated from an institutional template. Faculty can add custom text but cannot change any section settings/styling on the vita output. Configuration, and style changes will need to be made by an administrator.

Linked Template: Changes to the source (reference) template apply to all linked and nested reference templates. Administrators can modify units and settings during creation, and linked templates can be customized (show/hide sections, reorder, update styling).

Unlinked Template: Changes to an unlinked template do not affect other templates, and subsequent changes to the source template do not apply. While it inherits the source template's unit and settings, it remains independent and does not update with source changes.

Relabeling input forms can impact how section names appear in the generated vita, and the behavior differs between the new Vita Builder and Legacy Vitas.

• New Vita Builder: If a section has been relabeled, that custom label is not inherited from the input form and will remain unchanged—even if the section name is later updated on the input form. When editing the section in the Vita Builder, the original input form label will still appear at the top of the configuration panel beneath the custom label for reference. If no custom label has been applied, the section name will automatically sync with any updates made on the input form.
  

  Template updates are subject to a five-minute cache, so any changes made to section names on the input form may take a few minutes to appear in the Vita Builder.

   
• Legacy Vitas: In Legacy Vitas, behavior depends on whether the section is a default or custom section. For default sections, updates to the section name on the input form are not inherited by the vita, and there is no visible link between the two—so discrepancies can occur. For custom sections, updates to the section name on the input form will be inherited by the vita. However, if the section has been relabeled within the vita, that custom label will only remain in place as long as the input form label stays the same. Once the section name is changed on the input form, it will override any custom labeling previously applied in the vita.

No, a personal template is only accessible by the individual who created it.

No, these product areas will only incorporate vitas generated from institutional templates; personal vitas are unable to be included.

Custom text is tied to a specific vita, not the template. These product areas generate vitas based on the specified template (rather than including a vita created by the individual faculty member), so custom text will not be supported.

• If the template was archived, there will be no impact to existing vitas, but that template will no longer appear as an option to create new vitas.
• A template cannot be deleted if existing vitas were created using that template. If all associated vitas are deleted (not archived), the template can subsequently be deleted as well.

Vita Builder does not currently support vita auto-generation upon creation of the template,