Snapshots in MIS2000 give you the ability to "freeze" your database, reports, and really just the whole MIS2000 system at a point in time. You'll be able to revisit the snapshot later and get exactly the same reports and data you did when you made it. Marcy did a blog post on the functionality here. Snapshots are the latest bit of functionality to be made available in the new app. You can get to the under the "More" menu like so:

This blog post may leave lots of people saying something like, "We have deletes management?" But yes, you do. Although you may not have ever used it and have no need to. It depends on how your state is set up. The smaller states with a simpler configuration often have no need to manage deletes of COEs and Students. In those states, everyone who can do it is also authorized to do it, so managing them is a non-issue. But in the more complex states, there's often a need to let users delete a COE or Student without its actually being deleted. In these cases, the deletes flow up to the state level as a "delete request". They're still pretty rare, so an email goes out once a month alerting the state admins if they have any to review.

It's time for me to give a big Thank You! to Tena Torgerson and everyone else at the Wisconsin MEP for being so patient while we got them up and running. Wisconsin began the process around the same time that Michigan did, so we were extra busy trying to get both of them squared away. But Wisconsin is settled in, connected to MSIX, and banging in COEs. We still have some loose ends to tie up, but I figured we were far enough along for the Welcome post.

As we march ever closer to producing child counts off MSIX, it will become increasingly important to make sure the data up there is accurate. That's the better part of what the MSIX team has been doing with the child count reconciliation project that many of you have been involved in. One aspect of that process is making sure you don't have a bunch of duplicate records on MSIX. There are two ways to have duplicates:

As part of the ongoing effort to move out of the old app, we've been moving more administrator functionality into the web app. We actually have a new Admin menu now:

In keeping with my policy to never welcome a new state until we've got them up and in production, I can now extend a warm MIS2000 welcome to the Michigan MEP! Although it seems like we've been working with them for about ten years already. And also that it seems like we're only about halfway there. But nevertheless it's a significant milestone. So if you see Michelle or Bruce or any other Michigan MEP team member at NASDME, please help me to welcome them aboard.

Because the new desktop app is capable of displaying just so much information in a single page, I knew we would need some way to filter it down. The very earliest versions of the Student View in the new app had an Enrollment filter that allowed you to select the enrollments you'd be seeing data for, but it didn't provide any way to make that selection permanent. You had to do it and redo it on a student-by-student basis. It defaulted to showing only data for the most recent enrollment, and then provided a single button to show data for all enrollments, but it was pretty clunky. And many users never even noticed it was there in the first place.

We've got a lot of projects underway here at MS/EdD, so moving forward with converting states to the new app is having to compete for attention.

Way back when I first wrote the web app, I figured users would need some way to find groups of students, but I wasn't real sure what would work. Most states have some way to select a district or region in the upper right corner, but I thought something else might be needed. So I added the notion of All Students | My Students | My Schools. It looks like this:

We have a few states that have had the ability to add new enrollments in the web app for several years. And there are quite a few states that have long had the ability to change a small handful of fields on an enrollment through the web app. But Arizona wanted the ability to fully edit all enrollments through the web app just like has always been possible in the desktop app. Here's how it looks: