The help you need, where you need it!

Derek Nichols
Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud K-12 Education Solutions™ Blog
Perhaps you may have noticed but context sensitive help has started appearing within the Education management products. We've got plenty more on the way, but come learn about what this is and how it aims to make your life easier.The Blackbaud Education Management documentation team worked hard this summer, not only creating new content to improve the back-to-school experience, but to make the content easier to find.

Working with other departments at Blackbaud and our customers, we started adding context-sensitive help that you can access in the application, in the location where you need it. For example, we know schools regularly struggle trying to figure out incomplete student schedules, so we created a troubleshooting document based on the exact steps used by support analysts. We then added help icons in the application in locations where we know users will discover the scheduling issue: the Student schedule tile on the Overview tab in Request and Schedules in Academics.

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The same troubleshooting help is available from the Generate student schedule results page also in Requests and Schedules in Academics.

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We have plans in place to add similar help options throughout the application, and we will make sure to keep you updated as we implement the additional resources. Also, we’d love to hear from you. Where do you usually struggle in the application? What questions do you need addressed? We want to hear from you, so please post your thoughts below in the comments. We'll see you next week!

Comments

  • Kathy Steinman
    Kathy Steinman
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Participant Facilitator 1

    I love the idea of having help options sit within the area in which I am working. I know my team sometimes struggles to find answers to their questions from the help flyout and the knowledgebase. I would also suggest that you consider adding ‘tips & tricks' as a feature the user could turn on/off on any given window. For example, if someone is working in Admissions setup>checklists, a helpful tip or trick would be that there is a character limit in the Step Description. Those types of little hints sure would be helpful. People usually know the bigger things but it's those little things that can eat up a lot of time.

  • Derek Nichols
    Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    Thanks for the suggestion Kathy! We'll definitely be looking into it!

  • Coco Parham
    Coco Parham
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    This is great! But I don't see it in Enrollment Management. What am I missing?

  • Derek Nichols
    Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Coco Parham This is a feature that will be continuing to roll out over time and isn't everywhere in the product as of yet.

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