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.

This bit of functionality has been a long time coming, probably longer than any other bit. But it has finally arrived. We've long had the ability to add COEs through the web app, including the collection of signatures on something like a Surface or iPad, but we've only had limited ability for those COEs to go through the approval process fully within the web app. In most states, they'd have to take a detour through one of the desktop apps (old or new) to do the student resolution step. We added this in for Michigan early this year and it has been run through the wringer since then. Massachusetts is using it as well, and we're ready to open it up to any state that wants it at this point.

Many states that use the web app have the ability to edit Students this way. They can do a search for students and then select "Edit student" from the hamburger menu on the right, like so: