The Month in Review: July 2022 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

And just like that, August has arrived. With the heat still set to sweltering and a little bit of summer left, let’s take one final look back on everything that happened through the month of July for the Education management products.I hate to be a downer, but the summer is rapidly approaching its end. Time to face facts, I’m afraid. With August here, there’s still a little time left before the buses roll up, school bells ring, and the sounds of students flood the halls.

Okay, now wipe that from your mind and enjoy the weeks and/or days left of your summer. In fact, let’s go ahead and completely change the subject by going through the monthly recap for July. Here is everything you need to know about what changed and arrived to the Education management products.

Academics
Would you look at that, Assignment Annotations got a brand new tool in July. With it, faculty have more options and improved features when reviewing files submitted with assignments. This includes the ability to annotate in color, add text anywhere in documents, and print and download files with annotations intact. Want a visual overview? No problem, we’ve got you covered right here.

In addition, we’ve enhanced the Faculty view when managing the roster for a class. Now, both teachers and students are both listed in a uniform grid with details that can be edited. Please keep in mind that this is only for Classes and does not affect Athletic, Activities, or Advisory groups.

Also this month:

• Managers are now able to delete a Department even if it is linked to faculty through their Employment. Previously, faculty had to be removed from a Department before users could delete it.
• Diploma managers can use the Students list to see the Declared on, Completed on, and Conferred on dates for diplomas.
• Users who edit a student's enrollment via a student's academic profile will now be directed to the modern Edit student enrollment page.

Billing Management
Billing clerks now have greater flexibility and transparency when generating charges for things like Billing year and term, Tuition fees, and Required fees. In addition, Billing clerks can assign a Charge date and Due date that apply to all generated charges.

Other updates:

• A new filter, Deposit, is now available on the Recent payments list. Filtering recent payments using the Deposit filter results removes payments that do not match the specified deposit number from the list.
• Billing clerks can now add, view, and edit Post to GL run comments when reviewing a previous Post to GL run. Previous run pages now feature + Add Comment that Billing clerks use to add a comment to the Post to GL run. Comments can be edited using by selecting the pencil appended to the end of the comment.

Core
Blackbaud ID was another big focus for Core in July. In case you missed it, platform managers can select to join the early adopter program (EAP) which forces all users to log in with Blackbaud ID (BBID) before it’s required for all schools. In fact, we’ve extended the deadline to migrate users. Ensure your school’s users are on BBID by September 27, 2022.

When platform managers review the list of Unregistered users for Blackbaud ID, they can now disable accounts in bulk to prevent the users from logging in. As you migrate users to Blackbaud ID, consider using this to disable users who withdrew as students or who are no longer employed as faculty, if you hadn’t disabled them previously.

Speaking of BBID, platform managers now have more options when reviewing a list of users who have been connected but are still Awaiting Response. Specifically, they can view a column for and sort by Last Invited Date or most recent Connected Date as well as filter based on how many days the user has been in the Awaiting status.

More Updates:

• OneRoster integrations now support OAuth 2.0. New OneRoster OAuth 2.0 integrations require Platformer managers to generate a new key and secret to distribute to vendors from the OneRoster settings page (Core > Settings > Integration settings > OneRoster settings).

Extracurricular
Managers are now able to delete a Sport even if it is linked to faculty through their Employment. Previously, faculty had to be removed from a Sport before users could delete it.

Financial Aid Management
At the Enterprise level, Advanced Enterprise Users can define Budget Codes to use as custom tags for managing possible students to add to a budget. To create and manage Budget Codes, set the Schools drop-down to All Schools, and select Settings > Codes. Codes are assigned to families on the Family Detail page.

When adding a new school or enterprise user via Manage Users, administrators now enter the user’s Blackbaud ID email and send them an invitation to connect to BBFAM using BBID. When accepting the invitation, the user creates a BBID account or signs in with their existing BBID to access BBFAM.

Other updates:

• Following a recent Gradebook update, we've fixed the Missing Assignment Notification to correctly link to the right student.
• Users can now run the Enterprise Awards Detail Report to review information, including Budget Codes, for possible students to add to their budget. The report includes filters for Budget, School, Region, Type, and Category.

School Website
Accessibility was a big focus of the team for July. Specifically, Form field labels were made available inside the School website editor list.
In addition, when there is no Long Description present in a news item, the Read More option is now hidden.

Tuition Management
When exporting payment data to Financial Edge or Financial Edge NXT, users can now select Override Duplicate Export Check to allow previously exported data to be exported again. Previously, users had to contact Support to override the duplicate check and allow data to be exported more than once.

As part of ongoing updates to security protocols, on September 27, 2022, Blackbaud ID (BBID) will replace the existing log in process for school users signing into Blackbaud Tuition Management (BBTM). Please note that this change does not affect parents signing into BBTM. Have questions? Visit this KB which goes over the sign in process in greater detail.

Other updates:

• In the Payments Center dashboard, Account Info now includes both the payment type (Phone, Web, In School) and the payment mode.
• Payment Mode is now available as an optional Additional Field in the Payment Details report. Payment Mode indicates if a payment was made by Checking, Savings, or Credit Card. For Invoice Payments, Payment Mode will display "check."

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We hope you've been enjoying the Summer Content here in the blog so far. Just a few more weeks until we're back at our normal, every Tuesday pace! In the meantime, if you haven’t yet, make sure you’re subscribed to the blog and feel free to leave a like or comment below to let me know you’ve stopped by. As always, thanks for reading and talk soon!

Lisa Baylor

Our teachers love the additions to the annotations tool. However, the ability to rotate a PDF or image is no longer in the tools. When students submit and their work is upside down the teachers cannot turn it. Advice?