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:

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 !!  

We've blogged here about the Resources page in the MIS2000 web before but we've made some tweaks to it recently to make it a bit easy to use. The main use of the page is to serve as a secure area to exchange files with the schools and LEAs. It's particularly useful for files that aren't related to a specific Student or COE so you wouldn't want to attach them directly. Each folder can be restricted to individual users or groups of users and they can also be given upload capabilities or restricted to just download.