MIS2000 has long had pretty flexible support for various approaches to COE Approval. Typically COEs come in from Recruiters and then flow through an approval process. Sometimes there's just one person approving all COEs, but in the larger programs there might be three or four layers of approval. And the COEs from one LEA, region, or program might route through a different group of people than COEs from another. One thing that we haven't done well over the years is deal with changes to the personnel involved in the approval process. People come and go, and that creates a need to tweak the approval routing. But an even more common problem is people just going on vacation or leave or whatever. We've just never had a good solution to this.

I've been meaning to do this forever, but no one had ever asked for it and prioritized it very highly. So we have the Alaska MEP to thank for this. A few states already have this, but everyone will be getting in their next release of the web system. Basically, you can now go into Codes like so:

Both of these states have, in their own way, been a long time coming. But I'm pleased to announce that they're both fully in production and fully recertified and connected to MSIX at this point. In some ways, these two states were mirror images of each other, in terms of what took the most time to get done. In New Jersey, Tony Hearn and I started talking three years ago about migrating to MIS2000. The procurement process in New Jersey is pretty, ummm, intense let's say. And it took us a long time to finally jump through all the bureaucratic hoops that were presented to us. But we got there, and once we did, we jumped all the hurdles to get to full production pretty quickly and smoothly. I especially thank Kathy Ehling and Pheobie Thomas for their patience throughout.

So back in December we started rolling out Mass Enroll support in the web app as an extension to our Student List system. I covered that in this blog post. In that I mentioned that we had automatic grade rollup working as well and student-by-student override for grade rollup, although that wasn't available in the demo at that time. Since then we've added support for adding a withdraw date to the old enrollment as well as creating the new one. The current UI looks like this now:

I'm going to geek-out on this one a bit, so I apologize in advance. In writing the Update functionality of the new app a few years ago, it initially didn't run quite as quickly as the old app, so I spent quite a bit of time profiling it to find all the rough spots and get them smoothed out. I eventually got it to run quite a bit faster than the old app, patted myself on the back, and moved on. So I was a little surprised when one of our Arkansas users mentioned to Jay recently that they still use the old app for doing updates because it's just so much faster. Jay handed this comment to Jeff who brought it to me for consideration. He had already done some preliminary tests, what we call "benchmarks", to see if it also ran slowly for him, and sure enough, it did.

Many of you will be familiar with the MIS2000 Email Heartbeat that goes out on the first of each month that looks like this:

My list of blog topics is growing faster than I'm getting blog posts written. I may need to increase my post rate to get caught up with all the new features we've added lately.

I've been avoiding this for a long time as I waited for divine inspiration about how to do it. But Indiana was on a more restrictive schedule than that, so I had to come up with something. I wish I could say this whole thing was my own idea, but it really came out of the tour of our old Mass Enroll functionality that Kati gave Emily and Adrian in Indiana. Somehow out of that, it was just obvious to them that Mass Enroll should be part of our Student List support in the web app. That had simply never occurred to me, but it made good sense to me too as soon as I thought about it.

MSIX sent out an email back in August about new values that were being supported for AssessmentType and Assessment Interpretation. In case you missed that, here's a screen capture:

I've been putting in a lot of effort over the past year or so to completely overhaul how we deal with emails from MS/EdD staff, our blog service, and automated emails from the MIS2000 system. It turns out that emails are just complicated and I've learned more than I ever, ever wanted to know about them. But I'm definitely getting everything tightened up. This got me brave enough to enable some functionality that I actually wrote a long time ago but have been too chicken to actually turn on.