Our friend and colleague Jay took a tumble on his motorcycle yesterday and banged up his hand and his ankle pretty badly. He's going to be fine but it's going to take a while before he'll be back to his job duties. I ask that everyone be a little extra patient over the next few weeks as we help him get back on his feet and productive. He's pretty out of it right now, but I'm sure the boredom of being stuck in bed will settle in by Tuesday morning and he'll be checking his email. If you want to wish him well, that would probably be the best way to go. I'll post updates in this blog.

If you aren't already familiar with the Resources part of MIS2000, you should take a look at Jay's post for a general overview. Tennessee uses their resources to share a variety of reports and spreadsheets with LEAs around the state.

We've added in support for sending out emails whenever a COE going through the verification process gets rejected. This will be going out to all states in their next release of the system. The way it works is that whenever a COE gets rejected, and then the rejecting user does their next upload to the server, if the COE hasn't yet been reworked by that evening, the user to whom it has been rejected will be sent an email during the nightly processing letting them know there's one to be worked. By default the process just runs once during the evening, but we can set it up to run as often you'd like throughout the day to give people a quicker notification.

If you're like us, you enjoy getting to put a face to a voice on the phone or words of an email. So here's everyone's chance. Jeff, Natasha, and I will all be working the booth at the NASDME conference next week in Orlando. Come by and say hi to us, stranded out there in the vendor space. We'll show you some of the latest things we've been working on, but we'll also be happy just to see everyone.

MIS2000 provides a lot of ways for our users to get at their data and as of today, you can add one more option to that tool box.  With your next release, you will have the ability to export data to a csv file directly from a data grid !   This will primarily be useful within the context of the code table editor, where you may want to export your facilities or supplemental programs, or data from any of the other code tables displayed in the editor.   To access this new feature, simply right-click on a data grid and choose "Export to CSV...".   Once you choose a location and file name, your data will be saved and you'll be able to work with that csv file in Excel or whatever your favorite editor may be.  Enjoy !

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.

If you do not turn BitLocker on to encrypt your data, you will be getting a call from us to get you to turn it on.  
The process is very simple and takes less then 5 minutes to get it started.  

The simple steps are:
• Go to Control Panel > BitLocker Drive Encryption
• Click Turn on BitLocker
• Save the the Encryption Key or Print the Encryption Key
• Start Encrypting your drive

All MIS2000 database machines that are portable and go out into the field should be encrypted to help protect your migrant data as much as possible. Data on a lost or stolen computer is vulnerable to unauthorized access, either by running a software-attack tool against it or by transferring the computer's hard disk to a different computer. BitLocker helps mitigate unauthorized data access by enhancing file and system protections. BitLocker also helps render data inaccessible when BitLocker-protected computers are decommissioned or recycled.