There are just a few states using the web COE at this point, but I wanted to show one of the nifty new things we've done with it. In Arizona, they wanted a to have a pretty big chunk of form in their COE that isn't anything like what's on the national COE, and it would only need to be filled out if the worker sought work and had a history of moves (generally question 4b on a COE). Otherwise, they just want to collect a comment. So the comment section would look like this:

You may have already run into sites around the internet where you can log in with your Facebook account or your Google or Microsoft account. Like at Rotten Tomatoes you can log in with Facebook:

Many, if not most, MIS2000 states now have some kind of import functionality where data is brought into MIS2000 from some other system in the state. We started doing this many years ago for assessment data and quite a few states now have an import for course history data as well. There are serious timeliness issues to be considered, but imports can make MSIX data much less of a data entry burden. But we only have a handful of states who import enrollment data. Both Maine and Alaska have been doing enrollment imports for years, and we've just recently put a system for importing enrollments into production in Kansas. There may be others that I've forgotten, but all three of these states have taken considerably different approaches to the basic problem. I think Alaska collects information from their districts and builds the import file more or less by hand using Excel before handing it to MIS2000. Maine produces their file from state-level enrollment data and runs the import into ...

We introduced lists of Students into the MIS2000 web app a couple years ago. You can read about them in the blog posts Student Lists in the MIS2000 Web App and Managing Student Lists. But these are named lists, designed for groups of students that you'll want to keep around a while and use many times. Sometimes, though, you may want to work with a group of students just once. And you won't want to name the list, add the students, work with it, and then clean it up afterwards. So we've introduced "ad hoc" lists, lists on the fly, that are created a simply as checking a box beside each student you want. Just do a search that gets all the students you're interested in, check the box beside each, and then click the "..." button above the checkbox column. That button has the same options as the corresponding button beside each named list in the "lists" tab. Here's what it looks like:

The earliest feature of the MIS2000 web app was printing student records. Recently we've introduced a couple different ways to make it easaier to print lists of Student Records in the web app. If you used the custom lists feature (described in blogs Student Lists in the MIS2000 Web App and Managing Student Lists), you can now use those lists to print a Student Record for every student in the list. Just click the "..." menu and select "View student records" like this:

MIS2000 has had student and COE delete management functionality in place for years now where deletes made by regional sites are approved or rejected.  Up until now; however, users authorized to do the approvals would just have to check from time to time to see if any deletes were waiting for approval.   After the next release, those users will start receiving emails announcing that deletes are waiting.  These emails will be generated once daily as part of our housekeeping processes that generally run during the evening hours.  Some users may need to have email addresses configured in the system, but we will address those as they come up.   Enjoy !!  

Many of you who are part of the COE Verification process in your state have saved your signature stamp in the system as part of your account so you don't have to actually physically sign each COE. We've now added support for managing your signature through the web app. Just click on the "Your Account" link at the top right of the web app and you'll be able to see and update your signature.

We've completed getting the new tablet app developed for all the states who only collect COEs on their recruiter tablets and we're ready now to make the new app available to all states for their recruiters. I'll paste in a couple screenshots below to show the current state of work. If you'd like to get the new app for your state, just let us know and we'll get the development rolling. There are no extra charges involved whatsoever.

For some reason I just can't quite bring myself to welcome a state in the blog as soon as they sign on with us. I know there's just too much difficult work ahead of us to feel chipper. But after a couple months, once things are more or less going and things have calmed down a bit, my confidence buoys back up. We signed with Kansas back in August and it has been all-hands-on-deck ever since, especially with Arizona still settling in. But we've got them putting COEs in at this point, we've got their legacy data loaded, and we're working on getting their federal reporting and MSIX connectivity squared a way. There's still a lot of work left to do, but it's getting more calm.

Alaska has been using the MIS2000 web app to enter COEs for quite some time now, but it has been as a replacement for entering COEs in the desktop app. The COEs are still originally collected on paper along with the signatures. But earlier this year, Massachusetts became the first MIS2000 state to begin collecting their COEs directly in the web app, signatures and all. It's not quite as flexible as the tablet app because it does require recruiters to have internet access while the COE is being entered, but it does make it possible to collect COEs on pretty much any iPad, Surface, or Android tablet device. The signature collection piece looks like this: