The Month in Review: October 2020 Feature Releases

Elizabeth Perron

Believe it or not, we’re rapidly approaching the end of the year. With another month under our belts, let’s take a moment to look back at everything we added to the Education management products for October 2020.Is it really November? I hope you had a Happy Halloween and I don’t know about you but it’s a little strange to think that Thanksgiving is now right around the corner.

Regardless, the start of a new month means it’s time that we all take a look back. In this case, let’s comb through October 2020 for the Education management products and discuss all of our latest additions and features. Alright so with that said, let’s get started!

Academics
The Academics dashboard is definitely more unique than the other Education products as schools can add numerous tiles to the screen. In order to make finding the right documentation even easier, we’ve added targeted help links to each tile. Select the question mark icon to pull up a help reference for that specific area of the dashboard.   

We’ve also made a number of updates to the Edit student enrollment area. When viewing the offering type, you now have access to a sort tool for parameters like course a-z, z-a, course preference form first to last, and block schedule order. In addition, the grid display can be modified from the settings.

Other updates this month include:

• The Assignment center and section assignments list views now display the full width of the available page.
• For work that is an assignment, assessment, or discussion, an optional Format column appears on Assignment list views.

Core
For higher Education Core this month, contact card managers can now opt in to receive a notification when a profile is changed.

Enrollment management
After launching in August, we’ve continued to make improvements and updates to Student checklists. In October, we added a warning that appears when an admissions staffer attempts to link an inactive School or Medical form to a checklist step. Parents and students should no longer be able to proceed to an inactive form either.

Speaking of Student Checklist, if you want a visual overview of what this feature is, we now have a new video on our Blackbaud YouTube Channel you can check out. Make sure to subscribe to our channel to stay up to date on all the latest content we have coming up.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqKGl6B0IzU


We also made a ton of list updates this month as well. In the Visits, interviews, and Events list now have the Attendee email and Attendee name columns. The Application status filter on the Candidate list was converted to a multi-select, and admissions managers can now display candidates with a manually attached application. For the Process Recommendation list, the Recommender email column can now be added.

In addition, the EMS product also gained the following updates in October:

• Admissions managers were given more placeholder options for Official Notes Templates like household salutations, custom candidate fields, and more.
• The email address defaulted to the top when using the Username formula for the Username generator.

Billing management
For the Billing management product in October, even more quality of life improvements were added. A lot of work this month came to Tax Forms including a new column called Class Schedule Info. In addition, students can be excluded from having their tax forms published to their billing profile or the IRS.

Not only that, Tex forms now have two additional filters to better refine the results: Agency status and Excluded.

Other updates this month include:

• A newly added column and filter for the Transaction list allows Billing clerks to identify the Payment source (e.g., electronic, in-school) for transactions.
• We’ve added additional flexibility when defining each Statement recipient’s payment responsibility. Now, Statement recipients can pay for a percentage of both a specific fee and overall charge. Assigned Statement recipients are now removable as well.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in August, 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 though we have plenty more for you on the way in 2020. Make sure to stay tuned and as always, stay safe and we’ll talk again next week!