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:

We've been adding a lot of new features to the MIS2000 web app and I'll be covering some of the other big ones in future blog entries, but today I'd like to talk about using the web in your COE verification and approval processs. Most states use the MIS2000 tablet system and almost all of them use the approval process. Until recently, the entire approval COE process had to be carried out in the old desktop application. Most verifiers just review the data on the COE and then either reject it or send it on up the chain with remarks. There's really no editing involved, so for many of them, having a full desktop install of MIS2000 is way more than they need.

Last year Alabama became the first MIS2000 state to introduce a fully automated way to set the migrant flag in their state student data system using MIS2000. It has been working smoothly in production for nearly a year now and we're starting to use this same approach in other states to allow MIS2000 to integrate more tightly with other state systems. For Alabama, we basically just hammered out a Snap Report that could be run at any time to produce a list of currently eligible migrant students that the state was interested in. Then we turned that into a web service. See my earlier blog post about how Maine is using Snap Reports as web services. From there we gave their IT folks a way to access the web service.

We've been working rather quietly (but frantically) to bring Arizona up on MIS2000 over the past couple of months, and I think we're finally far enough along to announce it. Everyone involved with the AZ MEP, but especially Mary, Patrick, and Laura, and have been remarkably patient and tireless in working out the myriad issues that have to be sorted to bring up a new system.

I did a blog entry just last May COE Rejection Email Notifications about a new feature that would let Recruiters know when they have COEs that have been rejected. It didn't take long to get requests for emails about other COE statuses. So I went back and took another run at this feature. Now all users can get emails when they have COEs in their work queue. As I mentioned in the previous post, the process runs overnight by default, so users will only get one email each morning. But we can make it run throughout the day as well if that's desirable.

So we're counting down the last few days before the ESSA COEs go live. We've put new releases in every state that should automatically support the conversion to the new ESSA COEs on July 1. Everyone should find all the new fields in place and the new wording in the "Qualifying Moves & Work Section", but you may not find all the wording across the entire COE completely consistent with the ESSA National COE. The reason for this is that almost no state was consistent with the old NCLB National COE across all the labeling and wording, and this was in general by design. So when you get a look at the new ESSA COE on your system, if it's not exactly what you're expecting, just let us know and we'll make whatever tweaks are necessary to bring it into line with your expectations.

Jay made it back home last night. He's had a couple surgeries but is in good spirits and on the mend. He'll definitely be out another day or so, but he's talking big about trying to get some work done on Friday. We'll see. I think it will be weeks or months before he's typing normally again. He plans on getting pretty cozy with Siri and Cortana in the meantime.