Last spring David Fisk in the Maine MEP challenged us to find a way to make MIS2000 data available to a greater variety of reporting tools. He was trying out all sorts of tools and online services and mapping applications as ways to organize and direct their recruiting and services effort during blueberry harvest. He had been telling people how to run a report via WebSnap, save off the data, and then refresh their reporting tool to see the new data. My first attempt at something better is described in this blog post from last fall. It was a step in the right direction because it eliminated some of the steps the users would have to take to get fresh data, but it was still pretty cumbersome. David went on to try using Microsoft's OneDrive to address more of the issues, but it was still far from perfect.

This is a big change for MIS2000 that will be phasing in over the next few months. Be sure to contact me and let me know if you don't want this for your state. Over the years we've been very focused on making sure we don't lose any of your data. Being able to pull up old students and old reporting data is a big part of MIS2000's job. But some of the systems out there have some very old data and we need to be thinking about getting rid of it after it has served its purpose, both to comply with privacy and data rentention laws, and just to keep the system running smoothly without being burdened by lots of old data that is no longer useful.

Annie Babcock at Deloitte recently sent out an email showing dates of cut-over to a new format for MSIX submissions. I've gotten several emails about this so I wanted to take a moment and let everyone know - You're Covered!

Our reporting system is capable of producting a variety of reports to help with federal reporting requirements. Whether you prefer to have MIS2000 produce your EdFacts files or a custom set of reports, we can help. 

Awhile back, we added a search option to the Draft COE view that gave users the ability to easily see COEs that are in the approval queue but not yet fully approved.   This was a great way for users to get a feel for the state of things and to also spot COEs that, for one reason or another, might not be advancing.   Today, we have extended that functionality to the Main COE view with a new "Incomplete COEs" search option.   Like it's companion in the Draft COE view, it will give users a good view of the overall state of incomplete COEs which have either not been yet submitted for review or have been rejected back to the originator. Like the other search options, each line in the search results is clickable so that you can view a selected COE in detail.   This feature will start going out in new releases as of 11/30.   Check it out and let us know how it works for you !

We said it was coming in 2016 and roll out has begun! We're now piloting the new tablet app in Nebraska. I'd like to take a moment and lay out the roadmap for this app and the future of MIS2000. For now this is just the new tablet app, but in the near future it will completely replace the old MIS2000 application, both for tablet users and desktop users. The new app will have a shiny new interface and will be much simpler than the old app. But it will also have all the old functionality and, most importantly, retain all of your carefully worked out processes and validations. That's the part that has actually been taking so long - making sure that the new app works exactly like the old app when it comes to the data.

We've been hosting the MIS2000 systems for a number of states for many years. Basically this means we'll keep a dedicated server for your state that will run the web system, receive all the uploads, and run the state level database. You don't have to bother with any of that and we'll handle all the details of keeping the hardware up to date, keeping the operating system patched, doing backups, etc. You just log in and use your system. We take care of the rest.

You can create lists of students to save time entering data. Lists are managed on the lists tab. Here you can create new lists, and edit or delete existing ones.

Getting useful data back out of MIS2000 is about as important as getting data into it. We've always offered a rich and powerful report development system and ways to deliver reports to different kinds of users, but delivering report data to another program is something we've been working quite a bit on recently. The best way to do this is using what are known as web services in the industry. I'll be writing more about those in a later blog post.

Up until this year Assessment Interpretation values sent to MSIX were treated in two different ways depending on whether they were state assessments or not. For non-state assessments, MSIX expected a value of either Passed or Failed, but you could pass any other value if you prefixed it with "Other". For state assessments, MSIX expected one of the values Advanced, Basic, Below Basic, Failed, Far Below Basic, Passed, or Proficient; there was no provision for sending values other than these. This required all states to provide mappings from the values they used within the state to these MSIX-approved values. This was often difficult or easy to forget, but if a mapping wasn't provided, there was simply no way to get MSIX to display the value that the state actually uses.