The Month In Review: December 2020 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols
Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ Announcements
While we may now find ourselves in 2021, we need to take one last look back at December 2020. Here’s everything we released last month for the Education management products.Welcome back, I hope your holiday season was memorable and amazing! As promised, we’re back in full swing over here with the Education management team, with a whole slew of new and cool things to talk about real soon.

However, for this week’s blog, we’re taking one last look at 2020. I’m sorry, I know the vast majority of us would love to forget 2020 was even a thing, but in order to move forward, let us take one final look at everything that came out in December for the Education management products. I promise, no more 2020 talk after this. Let’s go!

Academics
Per usual, Academics had a lot going on during the month of December.

Some quality of life updates were made to allow the help panel to be usable when working on a transcript or report card template. Now, you won’t have to save and back out to use the help system. In addition, we continued to add targeted help options. On the Course selection and schedules overview page, you will now see question mark icons on the Master schedule, Course requests, and Student schedule tiles. Select an icon to open instructions in the side panel.

We also gave scheduling administrators the ability to sort requested courses based on course preference. To access this, head to Scheduling, then Requests and schedules. Open the Student enrollment tab, then select the Edit icon next to a student’s name. Open the Sort menu and choose Course preference (first – last). Alternate course requests will be sorted by order of preference, then by alphabetical order.
Other updates this month include:
  • You can now use the Students list to see the dates when former students departed the school.
  • On the Students list, the Withdrawal reason column will now display information for students who have pending withdrawals.
  • Administrators can now indicate the reason for a student’s withdrawal. 
Core
The Core team applied an under the hood change to replace the Flash based service that handled user files uploaded to Core. The changes made were to ensure that schools could continue to upload files, that completed jobs appeared in a history log, and when users access user profiles that the uploaded files appeared as expected with the designated folder and file name. 
In addition, Core also released:
  • Administrators can now edit the withdrawal information for a student who has withdrawn from the school.
  • The reporting navigation also changed a bit as well to differentiate the number of available reports. This includes SKY lists, Basic Lists, Advanced lists, and Legacy reports.
Enrollment management
In the month of December, the EMS gave admissions managers the ability to run a Committee Review Report under Admissions or the Committee Review Category. This report is intended to show Committee Review summaries for a particular candidate or groups of candidates and display information such as the committee review name, members, as well as candidate last names.

Contracts also got a lot of attention this month. Admissions managers now have an archive option when editing a contract type as well as filters for type statuses and archived states. Candidates now have their answers to the login/apply optional questions processed when their account is created. Finally, when editing a contract form, re/enrollment managers can now add a school signature image, text, or both. This signature will be applied at processing and anyone printing a contract will now see that signature.

In addition, the EMS product also gained the following updates in December:
  • Admissions managers now have new filters on the Candidate List for the Custom Candidate fields. 
  • Admissions managers can now view the entering year inside of the Process file submissions page. 
  • From Application forms then Login setup under Admissions Setup, admissions managers can set optional questions and make them required if needed. These include International, Boarding/Day, School program, and Preferred name.
  • When completing a Blackbaud Tuition Management contract, responsible signers will now see E-mail me an invoice instead of Mail me an invoice as a Payment Method.
  • Admissions managers can add a GPA question to the sending schools block on an Application or Inquiry form. When processing an inquiry or application, the GPA is now included in the Sending School tab.  
Billing management
For the Billing management team in the month of December, they created a new Aged accounts receivable list.

In addition, Non-financial aid credits no longer apply to the Payments received for qualified tuition and related expenses calculation on 1098Ts.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in December, make sure to visit our What’s New letter. Use the Recent option at the top of the page to view past and archived releases. Want to stay updated whenever we have a new release? Get notified via email by signing up for our mailing list here.

That's going to do it for this week, but make sure to bookmark this page and subscribe if you haven't already because we're hitting the ground running in 2021. We've got a lot of great stuff lined up, so make sure to come back next week when we dive into our next topic. Thanks for reading everyone!

 

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