The Month In Review: December 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

While we may be in a different year entirely, let’s get in our time machine one last time to 2021 where we can review everything we added to the Education management products this past December.Happy New Year everyone! Hope you had a wonderful holiday season!

After a couple weeks off, the Community Blog is back in full swing and we’re kicking 2022 off the only way I know how: looking back at everything we added to the Education Management products during December 2021.

Here’s everything you need to know for our new updates, features, and fixes. Enjoy!

Academics
Date pickers and assignments were a focus for the various Academics teams this month. Specifically, Teachers can now easily see the days and times when their classes meet when assigning dates for assignments. In the Publishing options section, when teachers click the calendar icon, red dots are displayed on days when the class in question meets. Teachers can also hover over the date to the see start and end times for the class. This functionality is available from the assignment center, section assignment lists, and the gradebook.

In addition:

• A diploma manager can now add inactive courses to a degree requirement. This will allow the school to award a degree to an existing student who took courses that are now inactive.
• When editing a degree requirement, the Courses tab will now include inactive courses in its search field.

• When editing a course, the Add other prerequisite menu now includes a search bar. Previously course names appeared in a dropdown menu.
• Teachers who teach a class in multiple terms can toggle between terms in the Seating Chart by selecting an academic term in the upper right of the screen.

Core
For December, the Core team made some adjustments to Sky Reporting. Security tasks for Analyze no longer appear in Core. The menu option no longer appears in the “app” (top navigation in your school colors). Instead, use the security roles and tools in their other location. In a previous release, SKY Reporting tools moved to the Education area (top navigation in grey). If you encounter an error when you attempt to access them, ask a school administrator to check your security missions. For details, review this article.

Also released this month:

• Household information now appears on Student lists in Core. List managers can select to include the household column to view the Household ID and Salutation.
• Users who navigate away from the Handle Profile Changes list will have their filters saved for when they return to it.

Enrollment management
This month for EMS, we gave School forms manager an export button for each category for School Form Submissions. This includes: Submitted, With Declining Recipients, Started, Not Started, and Without Recipients.

Also this month:

• We've added MP4a and MP3 as supported file types when uploading to a Student Checklist.
• Files & Forms now display the Deposit Amount Due for Responsible Signers that have selected In School Payment.
• Parents of candidates can now view the interview date/time on the checklist step once it has been scheduled by the school.
• We've made visual improvements on the Committee Review Summary and Checklist for admissions managers viewing the total scores and matrix.
• Re/enrollment managers can now generate contracts in bulk right from the Assign Contract types wizard.

School Website
While also helping out with some Core features, the SWS team made an improvement to the Team Detail page. Essentially, Suffix and Prefix fields are now a display option in styles for Team Coach on Team Detail page. From the Team Detail page, edit any block Style and then select Team Coach icon to see that Suffix and Prefix display options to go along with First, Last, and Preferred.

Tuition and Financial Aid Management
The Tuition and Financial Aid teams made a number of updates including a few rebrands. The following reports have been rebranded with the Blackbaud Tuition Management rebranding:

• Projected income report
• Cash receipts journal report
• Change allocation report
• Admin Fee Page
• Extended Care

In addition, all references to Smart Tuition have been removed from Family Tuition Statements and Student Payment Statements. These documents will now refer to Blackbaud Tuition Management and display the Tuition Management logo.

Also this month:

• All enrollment sites will now redirect to new web addresses as part of the move away from Smart Tuition branding. For example, enrollwithsmart.com is now enroll.blackbaud.school, and enrollwithsmart.com/charter is now enroll.blackbaud.school/charter.
• Users can now view Billing Adjustments. These can be accessed under Dashboards by selecting Billing Adjustments.
• For schools using the Contracts integration with Enrollment Management, when a second payer is added to an account, that payer’s email will be included in communications by default. Previously schools had to add the second email account to communications by selecting the “Mirror” option.
• When a user is viewing a budget, they can select Budgets to return to the Manage budgets page.

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.

Alright, enough with 2021 already. Next week, we’re moving forward with new blogs on content that will be of importance during the January time frame. Lists and Contracts are on deck, so don’t miss it! See you then!

Lauren Henderson

Thank you for this recap! It is a good reminder of functionality and updates to look for.