OK, so this is the second of our MAPS states, joining Nevada now in full production and fully connected to MSIX. It has been a long haul (but even longer ones are in the works), but we've finally come out the other end. As always, many thanks to the New Mexico MEP and various folks throughout the state for their involvement on this, including Laura Henry, but especially Iggy Campos and Marty Jacobson who have been trooopers.

We've been enhancing the web app to better support mass enroll and withdraw for the past year. The last blog post was here. Most recently we've added a switch for whether or not to use the New Grade column, a dropdown for New Enroll Type, and a place to enter New Residency Verification Date. It now looks like this:

I know some states really use the Resources section of the web app quite a lot and have dozens of folders, and I think others don't even know it exists. It's basically just a place for sharing random files like Excel and Word documents between MIS2000 users. We've blogged about it before here. And it looks like this:

About a year ago we introduced the ability to restrict searches in the web app to students enrolled in a particular school year. I wrote a blog post about that here. I've recently added the same functionality to the new desktop app, which I think I'll start just calling the desktop app from now on. It's not that new anymore. I'll start calling the original one the old desktop app now. Many newer states have never even seen the old app.

We've got quite a few states now using the web app for primary COE entry instead of using the native app. So there have been tons of state-specific tweaks to how COEs look and operate in different states. A good example is the "proof of temporary" item in Alaska only shows if the qualifying work is actually marked "temporary". Here's what the COE looks like before marking temporary:

I blogged a few years ago about the code table editor I had just added to the Web App here. That has been refined and polished quite a bit since that time, but I haven't added a lot of new features. But I did recently add the ability to export whatever code table you're looking at to a CSV file with an inconspicuous little button in the lower right corner of the grid marked with yellow highlight below:

Many thanks, as always, to all the folks at the Nevada MEP, especially Kulwadee and Claudia. Nevada is the first state we've ever converted from the MAPS system, and everything went pretty smoothly. The import data was simple and clean. We did run into an issue with Nevada having been an MIS2000 state ten years ago, so there were some old MIS2000 IDs up on MSIX from that era, but with help from Sarah Storms and the rest of the MSIX team, we were able to successfully dance around that and get them certified and fully up and going on MSIX. If you run across anyone from the Nevada MEP team, be sure to welcome them aboard!

MIS2000 has long had pretty flexible support for various approaches to COE Approval. Typically COEs come in from Recruiters and then flow through an approval process. Sometimes there's just one person approving all COEs, but in the larger programs there might be three or four layers of approval. And the COEs from one LEA, region, or program might route through a different group of people than COEs from another. One thing that we haven't done well over the years is deal with changes to the personnel involved in the approval process. People come and go, and that creates a need to tweak the approval routing. But an even more common problem is people just going on vacation or leave or whatever. We've just never had a good solution to this.

I've been meaning to do this forever, but no one had ever asked for it and prioritized it very highly. So we have the Alaska MEP to thank for this. A few states already have this, but everyone will be getting in their next release of the web system. Basically, you can now go into Codes like so:

Both of these states have, in their own way, been a long time coming. But I'm pleased to announce that they're both fully in production and fully recertified and connected to MSIX at this point. In some ways, these two states were mirror images of each other, in terms of what took the most time to get done. In New Jersey, Tony Hearn and I started talking three years ago about migrating to MIS2000. The procurement process in New Jersey is pretty, ummm, intense let's say. And it took us a long time to finally jump through all the bureaucratic hoops that were presented to us. But we got there, and once we did, we jumped all the hurdles to get to full production pretty quickly and smoothly. I especially thank Kathy Ehling and Pheobie Thomas for their patience throughout.