The Month In Review: February 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

Believe it or not, but February has come and gone. While it’s the shortest month of the year, the Education management products had a lot to say, so here’s everything we released for February 2021.The shortest month of the year has seeming come and gone and with it, the promise of spring and warmer temperatures, no matter how small, are hopefully right around the corner.

With the start of a new month means it is time for you and I to take one last look back at the month that was. Even with less time to work with in February, the Education management teams managed to still pack in plenty of new content and updates to dig into.

Here’s a recap of everything released for the Education management products for the month of February 2021. Enjoy!

Academics
In February, we added a course code to the class list under Course selection and schedules. Select the Classes tab here to see the new course code column in this list. Alternatively, you can search its contents using Find in this list.

Core
As expected, the Core team had plenty to say in February. This month, certain placeholders from the text used for a variety of notifications throughout Core, and Enrollment Management were removed. Check out the full release notes for the complete list.

Another big thing we’re stressing this month for “legacy” ON API users is to update and utilize the new authentication tokens (Key and Secret), instead of “legacy” usernames and passwords, by June 30, 2021. For more information on this change and what to do next, check out our blog post.

In addition, Core also released:

• When a platform manager impersonates another user while uploading user files in bulk, the platform manager’s name appears in the history log since the platform manager performed the upload. The name of the person who was impersonated does not appear in the history log since.
• Platform managers or integration managers should sign into your school’s Google Analytics account and copy the Tracking ID (Property ID). It’ll look similar to UA-00000000-1. Next, go to Core, select Integration settings, select Site tracking, and enter the Tracking ID from Google Analytics. It may take up to 24 hours for data to appear in Google Analytics after the integration is configured.

Enrollment management
Arguably the biggest update this month for Enrollment management was the addition of the latest feature, Student Reapply! Admissions managers can now give existing students the candidate and student role at the same time through either Reapply users from Admissions, then Admissions management or via the resource board. The option to reapply will only be available if a grade level has been marked as able to be applied to under Core, Settings, School information, and then School & grade levels. This will allow existing students to proceed through the admissions process again as if they're new candidates.

Want to learn more? We’ve got plenty of resources for you including our help documentation, Tutorial, as well as its announcement blog post.

A new feature wasn’t the only update this month for EMS. Lists also received new updates this month. The Candidate and Candidates for review list now have a Financial aid column and filter. The Contract list received the Financial aid type and school decision filter. Speaking of filters, we cleaned up the filter list to help keep things better organized. For example, Community connections has moved under Candidate/Student, Role and Role Criteria have moved under Contract Access, and Access and Candidate Category have been removed entirely.

Also this month:

• US based Candidates, the Phone Number field on an Application, Inquiry, or School form now automatically formats properly to look like (XXX) XXX-XXXX.
• When making a change to an active Visit or Interview reminder notification, a new message appears asking if the newly updated reminder should be re-queued and sent to those who have already received a reminder notification. Selecting Yes will resend the reminder, while no will skip those individuals.

Billing management
During February, Billing management made a number of design enhancements to the payment process to help streamline it. Changes include things like a more visually distinct Convenience Fee/Surcharge as well as Payment method changes. For example:

• I'm paying with Credit card now appears as Credit card.
• I'm paying with ACH now appears as Electronic transfer from a bank account (eCheck).

In addition, Past Due Amount is now an available column on the Transactions list! The Past Due amount column displays differently for charges depending on if they are part of a payment plan. If the charge is part of a payment plan, and the due date has already passed, the total Past Due Amount appears accordingly in the respective column. Otherwise, $0.00 displays in the Past Due Amount column. If the charge is not part of a payment plan, and the due date has already passed, the open amount appears in the respective column. Otherwise, $0.00 displays in the Past Due Amount column.

Other Billing management updates this month include:

• The Financial aid awards list now features a Role filter! Billing clerks leverage this filter to precisely pinpoint Financial aid awards based on role-based criteria. Examples of filterable roles include Current students, incoming students, past students, and alumni.
• Billing clerks now see Enrollment Management derived Financial aid records alongside those created in Billing management in the Financial aid awards list.
• The Remaining amount for Charges and Credits on the Work with transactions list is now specific to that payer’s allotted responsibility.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in February, 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, but we hope these updates have proven useful in your work across the month of February. Stay tuned for plenty more throughout March. Make sure to tune back in here next week as we’ll have another brand new topic for you. See you then!

Dawn Alonso

I know a lot of people are happy about the phone number formatting!  Thank you for the efforts to keep updating and listening to the community.