Blackbaud’s Education Management Solutions: What’s New For August 22, 2023

Derek Nichols · August 2023

Here are the latest changes, updates, and new features for the Education management products for August 22, 2023.

Academics

Preferred Name Update for Lists

We've made two adjustments to Preferred Name. First, the Nickname column name field has been updated to Preferred Name. The following SIS related lists are impacted by these changes:

Medical Visits Worklist
Medical Worklist
Student Athletic Clearance list
Student Medical Allergy and Condition List
Student Medical Notes List
Student Medication List
Infractions List
Consequences List
Manage Holds list

To help situations where a student does not have a Preferred name listed, we've added a new column called Preferred|First. The field is now available in the following SIS lists:

Infractions list
Consequences list
Class attendance list
Day attendance list
Request and Recommendation list
Medical Visit Worklist
Medical Worklist
Student Athletic Clearance list
Student Medical Allergy and Condition list
Student Medical Notes list
Student Medication list
Faculty list
Manage Holds List

Coming Soon: Pronouns on group rosters

In an upcoming release, we will display Pronouns on the Roster tab of group pages. With this change, we are not modifying a user’s ability to view Pronouns, but surfacing pronouns in this additional area.

Currently, a user must navigate from the roster to a user’s profile to view their Pronouns.

A user’s ability to view Pronouns is based on Profile Access settings, including View/edit profile fields, Profile publish access, and Profile relationship access. In preparation for this upcoming change, you may consider reviewing your Profile Access settings in Core > Security > Profile Access.

This change affects rosters for classes, activities, advisories, and community groups. Dorm and athletic team rosters are not affected.

Billing management (Limited Availability)

Blackbaud Billing management is available to customers not currently using Blackbaud Tuition management.

Student name now available for use in billing notifications

Student name is now a selectable merge field for billing notifications, enabling Billing clerks to further personalize notices with the Preferred name (if available), or otherwise First name, and Last name of the student receiving the notification.

To get started with notifications, head over to Core, select Communication in the navigation, and then select Notifications. On the Notifications page, select the Billing management tab.

Core

More search results in school directory

Previously, when users accessed a school directory, results for view, search, and printing were limited to 200 entries. With this release, we’ve increased the number of results to a maximum of 2,000.

Impersonation

Users with the platform manager role can now go to the Access tab of a user’s Core profile to select to impersonate the selected user. This saves “clicks,” makes it easier to troubleshoot issues, and helps user navigate the system, especially at the beginning of the school year.

Please remember that some data and functions, such as medical data, are not visible during impersonation.

Also, to disable the impersonation ability for a clone of the platform manager role, update the clone role’s tasks to disable the “Impersonate user” task within the “people” domain.

Enrollment management

Pronoun Field Additions

The Pronouns field has been added to a number of locations within Enrollment Management. Admissions managers can find it within the Applicant and Household blocks on Inquiry Forms. It can also be used on User Profile, User Children, User Sibling, and User Grandparent blocks with School Forms and Profile Update forms. In addition, the Sample Inquiry form and Sample Application form has the pronoun field on the Applicant, Household, and Siblings blocks.

Tuition management

Select All option when defining rate card criteria

When defining criteria for rate cards, a new Select All option is available when choosing type codes, payment plans, student codes, and grades.

API and Integrations

School API

New fields added to GET users extended endpoints

We’ve added new fields to the responses returned by the GET Users Extended by User, GET Users Extended by Role(s), and GET Users changed by base role(s) endpoints.

The new fields include:

birth_place
created_date
home_languages
- home_language
is_latino_hispanic
is_international
is_responsible_signer
in_state
- resident
- county
- from_date
last_modified_date
locker
- number
- combo
mailbox
- number
- combo
passport
- number
- expire_date
primary_language
profile_photo
- photo_url
- thumbnail_url
public_bio
school_program
state_id
visa
- status
- number
- type
- issue_date
- expire_date

School API and OneRoster API Changelog

For information about recently added endpoints and other updates, view the School API and OneRoster API changelog.

Subscribe to “What’s New”

To receive email notifications when the What’s new update appears, make sure to subscribe to the K12 community’s blog by logging into the community site and selecting the Subscribe button.

To manage your community subscriptions:

Log into the community and locate your name and profile picture in the upper right corner.
Select the drop-down arrow and select My Account.
From the My Account page, select the Subscriptions tab and scroll down to the Blogs section.
Locate Blackbaud K-12 Education solutions Blog. If you want to be notified as soon as the What’s new content goes live on the community, select the Instant option. You can also opt for Daily and Weekly notifications.
Scroll to the end of the page and select Save changes.

What’s Recent

Missed any of our weekly releases? You can catch up on everything in our Month in Review blog posts, which cover every feature and update Education management releases each month.