The MIS2000 web app has a general way for showing messages which we call the "flash" area. Here's an example of what the flash looks like after a student has been added to a list:

Several states now allow their web users to upload supporting documentation through the web app for things like Needs Assessments and so forth. We've been gradually enriching this functionality from supporting a single document to supporting multiple documents. We started with the ability to only download all the documents for, say, a Needs Assessment in a single batch as a zip file, but then enriched the system to support either downloading the full zip or individual documents that had been uploaded. And now we've added the ability to delete uploaded files. It looks like this:

I think most of you have seen an increase in the number of students rejected by MSIX in the past couple weeks. It's a temporary situation, but I'd like to take a moment to explain it. The main two causes are that MSIX recently did a major new release of their system that introduced some new rules for student rejections. Ordinarily this wouldn't have caused any issues, but they also wanted all states to reupload all their recent data. I set each state's system to resend all students that had been sent within the past three years. In the case of several states, that included some really old students that we've already put in filters for, but they got caught up in the resend effort. But then many of these old students were also missing Qualifying Move information because they never had COE records in MIS2000 due to having been imported from older systems. And so MSIX rejected them.

Some of the best features in MIS2000 have come from people who use the system every day, up close and personal with what works and what doesn't. So we try to make it easy for these very people to tell us what is on their mind. In the upper-right corner of the web application, there's a link any user can click to send a suggestion.

Last spring David Fisk in the Maine MEP challenged us to find a way to make MIS2000 data available to a greater variety of reporting tools. He was trying out all sorts of tools and online services and mapping applications as ways to organize and direct their recruiting and services effort during blueberry harvest. He had been telling people how to run a report via WebSnap, save off the data, and then refresh their reporting tool to see the new data. My first attempt at something better is described in this blog post from last fall. It was a step in the right direction because it eliminated some of the steps the users would have to take to get fresh data, but it was still pretty cumbersome. David went on to try using Microsoft's OneDrive to address more of the issues, but it was still far from perfect.

This is a big change for MIS2000 that will be phasing in over the next few months. Be sure to contact me and let me know if you don't want this for your state. Over the years we've been very focused on making sure we don't lose any of your data. Being able to pull up old students and old reporting data is a big part of MIS2000's job. But some of the systems out there have some very old data and we need to be thinking about getting rid of it after it has served its purpose, both to comply with privacy and data rentention laws, and just to keep the system running smoothly without being burdened by lots of old data that is no longer useful.

Annie Babcock at Deloitte recently sent out an email showing dates of cut-over to a new format for MSIX submissions. I've gotten several emails about this so I wanted to take a moment and let everyone know - You're Covered!

We said it was coming in 2016 and roll out has begun! We're now piloting the new tablet app in Nebraska. I'd like to take a moment and lay out the roadmap for this app and the future of MIS2000. For now this is just the new tablet app, but in the near future it will completely replace the old MIS2000 application, both for tablet users and desktop users. The new app will have a shiny new interface and will be much simpler than the old app. But it will also have all the old functionality and, most importantly, retain all of your carefully worked out processes and validations. That's the part that has actually been taking so long - making sure that the new app works exactly like the old app when it comes to the data.

We've been hosting the MIS2000 systems for a number of states for many years. Basically this means we'll keep a dedicated server for your state that will run the web system, receive all the uploads, and run the state level database. You don't have to bother with any of that and we'll handle all the details of keeping the hardware up to date, keeping the operating system patched, doing backups, etc. You just log in and use your system. We take care of the rest.

Getting useful data back out of MIS2000 is about as important as getting data into it. We've always offered a rich and powerful report development system and ways to deliver reports to different kinds of users, but delivering report data to another program is something we've been working quite a bit on recently. The best way to do this is using what are known as web services in the industry. I'll be writing more about those in a later blog post.