AwardScience, award and grant management software, released custom domains, an experience preview sandbox and KMS-encrypted secrets in the week of 21 September 2026. Applicants judge a programme’s credibility in the first two seconds, and most of that judgement is the address bar. A portal on someone else’s domain reads as a form; a portal on yours reads as your programme.
The rest of this week is the unglamorous work that makes a security questionnaire answerable.
On this page
- Custom domains
- Experience preview sandbox
- Secrets encrypted with AWS KMS
- German, one-click translation and branding
- Better webhooks
- Also in this release
- Availability
Custom domains
Run your awards portal on your own address — awards.yourcompany.com — alongside the usual one. Admins add the domain, follow the DNS steps shown on screen, and AwardScience checks progress and issues the certificate automatically.
No support ticket, no certificate to renew, and no window where the portal is reachable but untrusted.
Custom domain
Serve this workspace from a domain you own, alongside its usual address.
Waiting for your DNS. We check every couple of minutes.
Step 1 · Delegate awards.northwind.org to these nameservers| Type | Name | Value | |
|---|---|---|---|
| NS | awards | ns-1204.awsdns-22.org | Copy |
| NS | awards | ns-87.awsdns-10.com | Copy |
| NS | awards | ns-1730.awsdns-24.co.uk | Copy |
Step 2 · Optional — not ready to move your nameservers yet? Add one CNAME record instead.
Settings › Custom domain card
For IT teams. Route 53 nameserver delegation (or a CNAME), ACM certificates, a CloudFront distribution, and a scheduled verification sweep. Pro plan.
Experience preview sandbox
Before launch, walk through the login, registration and application pages as a test user of any role, side by side with the settings that control them. Nothing real happens: no codes or messages are sent, no payments are taken, no votes are cast and no AI credit is used. Test applications can be cleared to start again.
Every programme currently tests by registering with a personal email and hoping nobody notices the entry in the reports. This replaces that, and it is a reasonable thing to ask for in a trial — alongside the questions in our RFP guide.
Experience
Pick a role: Researcher ▾Split screenHide settingsRegistration
EmailExperience drawer › previewing registration as a test user
For IT teams. Preview actions are tagged as test data and side effects are refused on the server, not hidden in the interface.
Secrets encrypted with AWS KMS
Stored credentials are now encrypted with AWS Key Management Service: SSO client secrets, payment webhook secrets, WhatsApp tokens and secrets used by integrations. Once saved, a secret’s value can never be viewed again, only replaced.
Write-only is the right behaviour and it does annoy people the first time. A secret that can be read back out of an interface is a secret that will eventually be read back out of an interface by someone who should not.
Edit secret
NameLeave empty to keep the stored value. Stored encrypted. A single line of up to 4096 characters.
Secrets › Edit secret
For IT teams. Envelope encryption, with re-encryption scripts applied to existing secrets.
German, one-click translation and branding
German joins the platform and its emails, bringing the total to 13 languages. Apply to all languages translates your English text into every other language in one click. Admins can upload a logo, page backgrounds and footer logo, shared across languages or set per language.
If AI credit runs out part-way, the original text is copied rather than leaving a language half-populated.
Branding
Favicon, page backgrounds and footer logo
Website settings › Branding, with Apply to all languages
For IT teams. AI translation with copy-through fallback when credit is exhausted.
Better webhooks
Webhook events now include signed download links for attached files, and redelivering a past event sends the original event exactly as it was, with freshly signed file links.
Replay fidelity is what lets an integrator rebuild state after an outage without asking you to re-trigger anything in the programme.
Delivery Log — CRM sync
128 deliveries"files": [{
"fileId": "f_8Kd2…",
"name": "budget-2026.pdf",
"url": "https://…/budget-2026.pdf?X-Amz-Signature=…",
"scanStatus": "clean",
"expiresAt": "2026-09-22T09:14:00Z"
}]Webhooks › Delivery Log, and the file links in a payload
For IT teams. File object carries fileId, name, url, scanStatus and expiresAt. Links are valid for 24 hours from delivery; a retry or replay signs a fresh one.
Also in this release
Flow-editor edge routing, a clean-up job for co-editing history, and environment configuration now loaded from AWS Secrets Manager.
Availability
Everything above shipped in the week of 21 September 2026 and is live now. Features marked Pro or Enterprise are noted as such in their technical notes; everything else is available on every plan.
If you are comparing platforms, these are reasonable things to test in a trial rather than take on trust — alongside the questions in our RFP guide.
Book a live demo to see any of this on your own programme, or review pricing.
