On Friday, March 31, Little Rock, AR was hit by a EF3 tornado which was on the ground from West Little Rock and moved across the city, into North Little Rock and eventually into Sherwood, where the MS/EdD offices are located. The tornado grazed the MS/EdD office building, but luckily we did not have any significant damage. A couple hundred feet away however, there was significant damage. Utility crews have been working since to clear downed trees and restore utilities, but as of today, Sunday, April 2, we don't have an ETA for restoration of power or internet services. Because of that, our email server is temporarily unavailable and we are unable to receive or send email through the msedd.com server at this time. All hosted client services are in AWS, and are unaffected by the power outage. Please bear with us as our utilities are restored and we are able to get our lines of communication functioning again. Thank you - The MS/EdD Team

This is only of interest to Admin-level users in MIS2000, but it's a feature that many of you may not even know about, and we've recently made it much more robust. In the MIS2000 web app, we've long had the ability for an admin to "become" another user. This can be really useful for debugging permissions problems and for being able to see the app exactly as another user sees it. It's done by visiting the Users page, selecting a user, and pressing the "Become User" button.

I think this is one of the most requested features we've had over the years, but it's both somewhat of a power-user feature, meaning it may not be widely used, and it's pretty complicated to implement. So it has sat on the back burner for quite a while. Many of you may be familiar with Student Lists and Sharing within the MSIX application, but the MIS2000 implementation is pretty different from the MSIX one. In MSIX when you share a list with someone else, there become two copies of the list and each user can only see their own copy. Changes made to one won't happen to the other one. I wanted something richer in MIS2000, so in our system, when you share a list, whoever you share it with is seeing the same list that you see. And if one of you make changes, you'll both see the changes.

Tl;dr - your uploads should be much faster after you get your next release.

We just barely squeaked in Missouri as the third state to come aboard in 2022. This one was definitely more harrowing than most. The same week that we signed the contract, their state director of twenty years retired, and I think their data coordinator moved on as well. Basically we were left with a bit of a leadership vacuum. And it sucked up Julia Cowell and Teresa Webber, who have been troopers throughout this turbulent period. But we're uploading to MSIX now and I think we're on track. As always, thanks to all the Missouri team for your patience and diligence. I wouldn't say we're quite out of the woods yet, but I think we can see some daylight now.

Those of you at the state level are probably accustomed to occasionally seeing an email from MIS2000 that looks like this:

Jeff recently added this enhancement at the request of Yesica Ordonez in Georgia, but we decided it was such a good idea, we'd roll it out to everyone. So right now, whenever someone has a COE working its way through the approval process that's waiting on them to do something, they'll get an email letting them know about it. But that was it. If they didn't do anything about it, they'd never get reminded again. Now, the system will continue to pester them about it once every couple of days until they push it on down the line. Hopefully this will provide more value than annoyance. We think it will. Let us know whether you like or not. It should be filtering out to all the states over the next few months.

We're in the process of doing a major overhaul of our EDFacts reports. In the past we had always done them as part of our existing general reporting mechanism, but they were always right on the edge of what that system could support. And they were a maintenance nightmare for us to boot. So Marcy and I have put our heads together and developed a whole new way to approach them that we're pretty happy with. They have their own page in the web app now that looks like this:

This has actually been a long time coming. It has always been a bit of a problem dealing with certification routing when people leave or go on vacation or whatever. I covered one approach to dealing with it last year in my post on COE Approval Routing and Ownership, but that only works for states who are using this newer style of routing. Most states continue to use the older person-to-person style routing that is really sensitive to personnel turnover and absences.

Most states have a state student identifier that they record in MIS2000, but the great majority of them are doing this process manually. To do it in an automated way definitely requires support from the state DOE, but it can be done. We more or less just completed a project to do this in South Carolina, and both Michigan and Wisconsin have fully automated systems to do this. There may be some others that I'm not considering, but there definitely aren't many. If you'd like to explore whether your state can do something like this, let us know and we'll talk through the ins and outs with you.