Ten years ago when MSIX first went into production, I figured lots of states would want to begin importing data into MIS2000 for the express purpose of sending it on to MSIX, particularly Course History and Assessment data which isn't nearly as useful to the sending state as the receiving state, so many of them weren't doing a great job of collecting it. If you had told me then that I'd still be putting lots of effort into developing these import processes ten years later, I wouldn't have believed you, but it's true. I wanted to spend a blog post talking about the current state of this development and who is doing what. Early on, quite a few states had me develop simply, manual imports that they could run once in a while whenever they got data from wherever they could get it. I think I did some imports like this for Alaska and Kentucky and Lousiana and several others.

We're continuing to develop the new app at a steady pace, although we've been pretty bogged down lately working to bring new states on - more on that later. One of the big milestones for the new app that we recently reached was being able to support the full COE Approval process and the hardest part of that is doing the student search and resolution. Here's a look at Vermont's version of it:

Anyone who uses the MIS2000 web system regularly may have noticed a rare but highly annoying bug that has been around for a long time. Basically, if you leave the MIS2000 web app idle for fifteen minutes or so, it will show a dialog to count down the five minutes before it automatically logs you out. But it has a button on it that will (supposedly) keep you logged in if you click it. But every once in a while, even if you click the button, you'd wind up finding out you've been logged out anyway when you tried to do something. I've known about this bug for, well, I'm not comfortable saying how long. And every once in a blue moon a user would complain about it or I would have it even happen to me. I've taken a couple stabs at fixing it a few times, but never could pin down exactly why it was happening. So a couple months ago I decided to do whatever it took to kill it. The worst part was going to be tracking it down, so we put in some "traps" (what we call & ...

We've done several blog posts about the Student Lists in the web app. We introduced Student Lists here. We wrote more about how to manage your Student Lists here. We wrote about printing lists of Student Records here. And we introduced the notion of Ad Hoc Student Lists here.

MIS2000 admins have access to some extra features in the web app than regular users have. One that's useful but a bit hidden is the ability to send emails to users. You get to it by clicking the "Users" menu and the "Email Users" link:

The web COE has been around for a few years now and it has been refined and adapted during that time. It's one of those things that everyone thinks is a great idea and wants it initially, but it doesn't always turn out to be a great fit for every state. It really depends on where COEs are collected in your state and whether those locations have decent internet access. The tablet COE is designed for those states that don't have good enough internet access for web COEs to be practical. But I thought it might be good to take a look at what some states have done with the web COE.

The ability to add supporting documents to MIS2000 has been around for a long time, initially taking the form of capturing documents from an attached scanner. But as the web app has become more and more popular for certains kinds of data entry and as scanners have become less and less common, the ability to upload PDFs became more of a thing. I covered our initial efforts to support PDF uploads (and other kinds of files as well) in this blog post. A few months later we introduced better management for deleting uploaded documents and I covered that here. But all of that support was separate from the older style of being able to keep scanned documents against students and COEs.

MIS2000 has all sorts of built-in measurements that it keeps track of, things like which features are being used and which are not, how long uploads take, etc. One of the things I look at every month is how long web searches take. I've never been completely happy with our web searches. In some states they're almost instantaneous, but in others, a search can take several seconds, depending on circumstances. Last winter I put quite a bit of effort into optimizing the web searches and was able to get a considerable speed up across the board for all states and all student searches. I didn't work on COE searches at that time.

One of the earliest notions we built into the MIS2000 Web Search is "Active Only", meaning the search would be restricted to "active" students only. And then we support each state in their own definition of what "active" means. That's all covered in this blog post.

I'm pretty excited about this new piece of functionality. I haven't been a big fan of our code table editor in MIS2000 for a long time, and I wrote it! I decided all of our code table editing really needs to be done through the web app, so that's what I've done. Now any MIS2000 administrator can visit the new Codes menu item and edit pretty much any code table. It looks like this: