The Book Bag : Happy to Help

Happy to Help – Attention FAWeb & NC Users on Windows Server 2008

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:06:00 GMT

Are you on Windows Server 2008?

If yes, and you are about to update your Faculty Access for the Web or NetClassroom to version 7.77 or install these programs for the first time, you need to hit pause before going forward. When you upgraded to Windows Server 2008, Internet Information Services 7 (IIS7) components were not installed by default. You must install II7 for use with Faculty Access for the Web and NetClassroom.

Before you install Faculty Access for the Web or NetClassroom, you must install the IIS7 roles first.

For more information about how to install IIS7, see Knowledgebase Solution BB521642.

Also, we recommend you review the following two guides on the Education Edge User Guides page.

Administration Guide for Faculty Access for the Web
Administration Guide for NetClassroom

I especially recommend you review the Installation and Security Considerations section before you complete your install or update.

Happy to Help – A new Bio 2 tab checkbox for Applicant and Student Records

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:37:00 GMT

After a brief absence I’m back and more than happy to help. It’s been a busy fall especially with 7.77 releasing a couple weeks ago. Not to start back on such a downer but an important feature was added to 7.77 for student and applicant records. If a student or applicant passes away, you can now mark the Deceased? checkbox. The Age field disappears and the applicant/student no longer appears in your mailings. Not only does this help in your processing but you can show sensitivity to the relations of the applicant /student and not send letters or mailings when they are already going through such a difficult time.

On the Applicant and Student records, the Deceased? checkbox appears on the Bio 2 tab.

For more information, see the Records Guide for Registrar's Office or Records Guide for Admissions Office on The Education Edge User Guides page.

Happy to Help - 7.77 Feature Preview #2

Lindsey Robbins — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:39:00 GMT

Sneak Preview #2 – Transcript Enhancement

For transcripts, we added the option to print outside school information in one of three different ways:
#1. You can print the outside school information with the current school information.
#2. You can print the outside school information in a separate section above.
#3. You can print the outside school information in a separate section below.

You now have even more control over your transcripts' format. This small enhancement can mean a big change for your transcripts and potentially happier students and colleges who receive copies of your transcripts. Your students' future schools may need to see your school information separate from other schools the student attended. Also, visually it may be easier to determine if a student has met the requirements for graduation based on separating the content out. And if you prefer to keep the records mixed, you are certainly more than welcome to do that.

For more information about Transcripts, please see the Mail Guide, Transcripts chapter.

Happy to Help - 7.77 Feature Preview #1

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:19:00 GMT

Wow, where has the summer gone? I know on the EE team, we’ve been feverishly working to produce our next great release – The Education Edge 7.77. Triple 7's, Lucky 7's, or whatever awesome name you want to call it has some fantastic features I’m excited to share with you. Over the coming weeks I’ll be giving you a sneak preview of our new features and enhancements.

Sneak Preview #1 – Admissions Office Academic Performance History

When you add an education record for an applicant, have you ever wanted a place to store information about an applicant’s history at a previous school?

With the academic performance history, accessed on the education record, you can enter previous academic information such as GPA, Class Rank, Diploma, and more. You can then use this performance history information in your recruiting and marketing process as well as your financial aid decision-making if the applicant enrolls.

For example, to aid in your admissions process, you could use this information to rank your candidates.

Also, when you are evaluating your admissions process success, you could review your recently graduated students and compare the success in your school to their academic performance history. Are your most successful students applicants that came in with a high GPA or high class rank? Perhaps you are successful enrolling students from a particular geographic area with a high percentile (class rank out of class size).

I'm sure you can come up with even more excellent ideas for how to use this feature in your organization. If you'd like to share your ideas with other EE users, add a comment below!

Check back soon for more sneak previews…

Happy to Help – Top 5 Places to Use F1 in Student Billing

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:41:00 GMT

I had such a fun time writing my first top 5 for my (borderline freakish) love of the F1 key, I decided to create a special edition focused only on Student Billing. We all know billing students can become complicated and stressful with deadlines, complicated fee setups, and (most importantly) trying to get your bills paid on time. To help you use Student Billing more effectively, here are my top 5 places to use F1.

5. Student Billing Processing page. What's even better than a page that graphically lays out the processing order for you? Press F1 and see documentation that outlines the different steps and how to complete each successfully.

4. Config > Determination Tables. If you bill students based on information from The Registrar's Office, setting up your determination tables correctly might be the most important thing you ever do. You can make your determination tables as simple or as complicated as you want.

3. Admin > Set up Student Billing > Define Schedules. When you spend time on your schedules in the first place, you create a gift for yourself that gives back year after year. When you define schedules you establish templates that you can reuse on billing item records. And, yes, I did use the word reuse. I love that word because to me it's the joy of doing something right once and not having to fuss with it later.

In fact, there are many such places in Student Billing where, if you spend the time to set up properly, you can save yourself time in future financial years. If you spend, or have spent, a majority of your time in Admin & Config you're doing something right.

2. Fast! How can anything be fast when you need to press F1? Well, by spending the time to learn how to use Fast!, you can speed through the process of designing datasheets in no time. Soon, you'll be faster than Tyson Gay when it comes to data entry. And we all know less time spent on data entry makes the world (well mostly your life) better.

1. Records > Students > Payers tab. No, this feature isn't the hardest area of Student Billing but when you press F1 on this tab and see "Adding Payers and Billing Item Exceptions", you are in a place where you want to get the information correct. Right?! After you've done all the setup, defined your billing items, and generated transactions automatically, what's vitally important that needs to come next? Well if you guessed getting your bill into the right hands so that it gets paid (and might I add on time), you're right. To make sure bills are paid, you need to make sure every student has the correct payer information on record.

In past decades you might have rolled your eyes at me because adding payer information was easy - Mom and Dad needed to send in the big check. However, after I attended a Student Billing class this past year, I know differently. I know it's become increasingly difficult to handle extended and complex family situations. You need to define the payers and scenarios in which the proper person pays the correct amount for the correct billing item. Mom pays for housing and books but Dad pays tuition. Or, Grandma and Grandpa pay half the tuition and Mom pays the rest. And so on. Of late, the expanded definition of the American family is causing those forehead stress lines for those working in student billing offices.

These are my top 5 places to use F1. Where do you find yourself itching to press the button?

Happy to Help - Tell Me My Options

Lindsey Robbins — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:26:00 GMT

Don't we just love the idea of knowing our options? I do. I like to know what I can and can't do when I customize a program, a website, or even my grocery list. I like to know what's available to me and then make my choices.

So when you find yourself working in The Education Edge, have you thought about your options? If you aren't personalizing EE, then you're missing out on some great opportunities to customize the program around your every day program needs.

Where do I access Options?
From any menu bar, select Tools, Options.

What can I do with Options?
With Options, you can customize the look of screens and establish a wide variety of default values. Select the settings that best suit your personal needs, whether you want to open records directly from the Home page or change the color of text appearing in certain grids. The program stores your options in the database, so any workstation you enter with your password uses your settings. Other users are unaffected by your settings in Options. Generally, options specify defaults that help increase the ease and speed of data entry.

Can you give me an example?

You can choose to open EE in Registrar's Office or Admissions Office and then choose the start page to be Config, Admin, Records, Mail, Dashboards, and more.
On the Color tab, you can choose the color of your required fields. Want a bright reminder to fill out a required field, try hot pink?!
On the Records Tab, select Scheduling. For Scheduling options, you can choose to prompt yourself to save if you are changing views. No more accidentally leaving a view and losing data? Hurray!

Tell me more!
Certainly. On the Education Edge User Guides page, open the Program Basics Guide, and read the Options chapter.

If you have a story of how you're using Options to improve your work processes, we'd love for you to share it in the comments.

Happy to Help - Top 5 Places to Use F1

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:23:00 GMT

5. Dashboard. Because, I just love them to little pieces. We all want to create pretty little charts to see our data don't we?

4. Configuration > Registrar Setup > Patterns > New Pattern screen. Wow, I don't know how educators do it. I remember as a kid being amazed at how schools magically created schedules that had us rotating around the building in perfect synchronization. Now I learn you can actually do things like Patterns to help you schedule classes. So magic is involved but it's not such a mystery to me now.

3. Mail > Report Cards > New Report Card. Something about getting a report card at the end of the semester brings back some happy memories for me. And, if you're not creating them and sending them out on time, you get a lot of cranky parents and students, don't you? That's why I love F1 here. You can learn more about report cards and the many ways you can tailor it to your schools needs. I highly recommend the Report Card Sections because it can help you decide what to include.

2. Attendance > Globally add attendance. Of the many ways to globally do things in the program why did I choose attendance? Well because all I could think about is high school and our Senior Skip Day. Not that any of your students would do that. But, if they did, you could globally add an unexcused absence to all your seniors. Just when you thought you'd be spending all day adding attendance information, now you're thinking of creative ways to punish them for skipping.

1. Any Records screen. I was sorely tempted to put something here that went directly to documentation I had written or to say everywhere else in the program. But, that'd be a little biased of me and I'm nothing if not fair . However, I do have to say that any of the screens in Records are a great opportunity to hit F1. With so many ways to capture information about your students, faculty, staff, parents, rooms, and more it's important to make sure you're using the software to make your life easier. F1 can help you identify what every field is for and how your organization can use it.

Is your curiosity piqued yet? I dare you to go hit F1 on your keyboard for any of my top five. Better yet, what are your favorite places to get a little help from your friends at the Documentation team?

Happy to Help - Using the Class Report after Scheduling

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:25:00 GMT

Scenario. You already entered your student course requests, you generated student schedules to automatically enroll students in classes according to their requests, you made any extra adjustments manually, and now you have no idea who ended up in which classes. You could print student schedules but that's not really helpful when you're looking at the big picture.

One way to solve this mini-crisis is to make use of the Class Report in the Registrar's Office Course/Class Reports section. This report was specifically created to make all your worries disappear . Actually, this report does provides you the ability to display selected information about classes and the students enrolled in them based on the school, academic year, session, and term.

You can use this report as a strict class roster, or you can also include classes without enrollment in order to further examine your scheduling for a particular term. Also, if you're trying to examine classes that have changed recently, you can generate class reports only for them. For example, you generated class rosters and now you want to generate only the ones that have been changed after the drop date. You can mark Include only classes that have changed as of and then enter your drop date. This will save you time and trees by creating only the class reports that have changed.

Now all you have to do is perform miracles when students come in at the last minute and request a class change!

Happy to Help - So you’ve got a help file, now what?

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:59:00 GMT

Scenario. You’re working in The Education Edge and you want advice for completing a procedure, you need help with a problem, or you see a field and you’re not sure what you should enter. What do you do?

Well hopefully you're help savvy and hit F1 on your keyboard or selected Help, The Education Edge Help Topics from the menu bar.

And once you find yourself in the help file, I thought I’d share a little bit about what you can find in there.

The help file is organized by where you are in the program. For example, Configuration is different for each program so we’ll have a section for it under Admissions Office, Registrar's Office, Student Billing, etc.
Because many schools integrate EE with FE, we include the FE help file information.
There are a few areas that overlap – Query, Export, Mail, Admin, Dashboard, and Program Basics, to name a few – and you’ll find those in the Common Program Areas.
Almost every procedure you complete will have a how and a why. We provide buttons to help you go back and forth depending on which content you need.
At the top of every page (except the welcome, glossary, contacting, and copyright), we provide breadcrumbs. These can help you understand where you are in the help file.
Breadcrumbs are also great at helping you figure out which User Guide you might want to refer to for more information. The User Guides, besides having more detailed information, have screenshots. Some people may prefer to see a procedure explained in that format. Using the breadcrumbs, you can decide which guide to go to. For example:
Registrar’s Office, Registrar’s Office, Attendance, Attendance Planning = Attendance Guide
Admissions Office, Admissions Office Records, Admissions Office Individuals, Adding Relationships, Adding a personal relationship = Records Guide for Admissions Office, Individuals Chapter
If you prefer the alphabetical method, we provide an index and a glossary for your convenience.
If you find a topic you reference often, add it to your favorites. How?

With your favorite page displayed on the right, select the Favorites tab.
At the bottom, in the Current topic field, enter a name for this favorite.
Click Add. Your favorite is now added to the Topics section. You can refer back as often as you need.

Use the Search tab to scan through the help file for topics you need more information on. I recommend you use only a 1 to 2 word search. The Microsoft .chm file we use for The Education Edge can sometimes be picky about spelling, and long sentences can make finding information difficult. Try one or two words that identify what you are looking for. Also, think of similar words and search for those if your original search doesn’t find what you need.
Don't forget the power of F1. Almost every screen in The Education Edge is linked to its help content. For example, if you're on a student record, Bio 1 tab, and you hit F1, you go to the Managing Biographical Information topic to learn more about the numerous bio fields available for students.

These are just my top ten tips on getting the information you need from the help file efficiently and effectively. If you ever find a missing F1 key or you want to see a particular section of the help file improved, let us know. We'd be glad to make adjustments and improvements for you.

Happy to Help - Introducing the Past/Future School Report

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Have you ever wanted to report on where the majority of applicants went to school before they attended yours? Do you want to determine where the majority of your students go to school after graduating from yours?

If you track past and future schools for applicants and students, you can now report on that information in Admissions Office and Registrar’s Office with the Past/Future School Report. The Past/Future School Report was a new feature for The Education Edge 7.75.

Tracking past and future schools can aid you in your recruiting efforts. For example, with a few clicks of the mouse you can inform prospective applicants where students attend college after earning their diploma. Or, you can determine which schools send you your best students. One possible way to determine which past schools provide the best candidates is to create a query of currently enrolled students with top GPAs and then use that query in the Past/Future School Report on the Filters tab. You’ll then have a snapshot of your top performers’ history.

I’m sure like many of our reports, you can use it in a multitude of ways. How do you plan to use this new report?

Happy to Help - The Update Guides Get an Update

Lindsey Robbins — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:01:00 GMT

In the previous release, we redesigned the update guides across all products. We wanted to be consistent in the way we presented the information so you knew from release to release where to go for information. The EE Update Guide now has two chapters -

Chapter #1 - How to update
Chapter #2 - New features and enhancements

The most important information is in the first chapter:

Pre-Update Recommendations
Installation Requirements
Install the Update
Post Update & Troubleshooting

I recommend you carefully review the pre-update recommendations and installation requirements every time you update. And while the first chapter is really important, I also recommend you are aware of what new features and enhancements you're getting in the update so be sure to read the new features and enhancements chapter also.

My favorite requirement: Before you update, make a complete backup of your database.

It never hurts to be extra careful when it comes to your organization's most important information.

The Education Edge 7.75 Update Guide

Happy to Help - Who Changed that Grade?

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:29:00 GMT

Have you ever been in a situation where a grade was changed and you aren’t sure who changed it, when, or why? Worry no longer! A new feature for version 7.75 is the ability to see grade changes from any grade entry screen.

To view a history of grade changes, from any grade entry screen, right-click on a grade that has been changed in the Grade column, and select View grade changes. A screen appears for you to review the grade change information.

Helpful Hints –

Until a change has been made to a grade, the View Grade Changes option is not available.
Still can’t access View Grade Changes? Have you saved the record recently?
Don’t forget to enter a reason when you make a grade change. This creates a great audit trail when you’re questioned later as to the specifics.
Any time Grade, Attempted Credits, or Awarded Credits are entered or changed and saved, an entry is generated on the Grade Changes screen.
If you delete any grade record you are also deleting the history of grade changes.

Grade change fields are included in Query and Export to help determine which records changed, who changed them, and why the record was changed. For example, if you want to notify students by email of grade changes, you can use Query to find any student with grade changes last week. Then, you can use Export to send their grades to a NetMail email.

Happy to Help - Most Popular User Guides

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:41:00 GMT

Each month we get feedback about which user guides are downloaded most often on our website. I thought I’d share with you a snippet of that report and show which users guides were downloaded most for March 2008.

Top 5 Education Edge User Guides:
1. Records Guide for Admissions Office
2. Records Guide for Registrar’s Office
3. Scheduling Guide
4. The Raiser’s Edge and The Education Edge Integration Guide
5. Mail Guide

Having these statistics definitely helps us know which information, on a monthly basis, you need most. Also, it’s always nice to see our user guides being used.

Do the results surprise you? Or, are these the types of guides you are always reaching for?

Happy to Help - Time Saving Tip for Courses

Lindsey Robbins — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:05:00 GMT

How much time do you spend creating new academic years, sessions, and courses every year? Hopefully not as much if you’re using all the great copy features in EE.

We recently received valuable feedback from a user who was copying academic years but didn’t know where to go for information about how to copy course information. Based on this excellent feedback, we made a change to the Records Guide for Registrar’s Office for EE. Now when you access the Records Guide, in the Courses chapter, you can find information in a new centralized section titled “Copying Course Records”.

After you create or copy an academic year or session, you may want to copy specific course information, such as:

How to copy a course from an existing course record.
How to globally copy course information from one academic year and session to another.
How to copy course restrictions from one academic year and session to another.
How to copy grading information on the course record from one academic year and session to another.

For more information about these time saving procedures, see:

EE Records Guide for the Registrar’s Office

To copy academic years and sessions, go to Configuration, Set up Registrar’s Office, Create academic years. If you copy an academic year, you can choose to copy course grades information, course restrictions, faculty/staff restrictions, room restrictions, and course billing.

For more information about how to copy academic years and sessions, see:

EE Configuration Guide for Registrar’s Office

Happy to Help - How May I Help You?

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:38:00 GMT

I really am one of those weird people who takes great satisfaction and pride in life just by helping others. I abhor being in the spotlight, the limelight, or any kind of light. I leave that to other people who enjoy the attention and are good at handling it. Instead, I would rather stay in the background waiting for my opportunity to do some good. I like facilitating someone else’s success. Somehow it means more to me that way.

And one very important part of being happy to help is also being happy to listen. Otherwise, how do you know how or when you’re needed? I admit I’m still working on my listening skills. I tend to get very animated and excited when talking to people and interrupt way too often.

But, how does this pertain to EE? Well it pertains because I wanted to inform you about an ongoing opportunity for you to give feedback to the Products Documentation Team about what you need, like, dislike, and anything else about our help content. If you have a few extra minutes (5 minutes tops, I promise!), take our online survey. We need your input to be able to help. Plus, as a bonus, on a quarterly basis we enter survey respondents into a drawing for a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. We not only are happy to listen we want to reward you for your time. And if you’re tired of surveys or don’t have five minutes, you can always send a quick comment via email . My ears are already tingling in anticipation.

Help me help you… (yes I couldn’t resist going there, sorry for the bad movie quote )