The Month In Review: March 2020 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols
Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud K-12 Education Solutions™ Blog
The end of a truly strange month is finally here. Before we head into April, let's take a quick look back at all of the new features released during March.This is likely a month that not many people will forget as schools across the country quickly transitioned to remote learning due to the global pandemic. Things have changed for the time being, but once this is over, we’ll all be stronger for it.

In response to the dramatic and rapid shift, we’ve been creating new content from videos and resource pages to help lessen the burden that this change has made. Blackbaud’s Education management products have continued to receive updates each week and it’s time to take a look back at what happened with each one in March.

General Updates
The biggest change for us in March was the removal of reporting on hot fixes. Now, that’s not to say we aren’t fixing anything because the developers certainly are. Since then, the release of bug fixes have been communicated through associated support tickets. Why did we make this change? Believe it or not, this policy has been in effect for all other products in the Blackbaud portfolio, so now we’re aligned with them.

Enrollment management
The EMS team kicked things off this month with an update to the Candidate rating matrix by allowing it to display inside of the Candidates for review list.

We also expanded Contract archiving. Enrollment managers can now create a PDF version of a contract that has already been processed.

In addition, we continued to add new column options for the Contract and Candidates list. Birthday, Current sending school, and Race were added to Contract lists. Candidates list received Race and Middle name.

Academics
Academics was very busy this month. Teachers were given access to view and print the Manual Attendance report from their course rosters, Advisory settings could be modified to control if the students’ advisors appears on their directory profile or not, and Unfulfilled requests can now be hidden.

Numerous changes were made to the Report Card and Transcript builders this month as well. When a Text Area is added, new menu items help control how the text displays across page breaks. The style form for Transcript templates now has font size options ranging from 8 to 36 pixels. A confirmation message now appears before any templates are deleted for Report cards or Transcripts.

Following a recent Apple App Store update, onCampus Attach has been removed due to it now being obsolete.

Just like the other products, the Students list also received a new column option to use: Is Abroad.

School Website
Numerous athletics related changes were made to School website this month. Athletics managers and coaches can give a title to a practice event, games could now be given an end time, and we moved the title field higher up in the modal instead of at the bottom.

Custom forms can now have their thank you page message edited through the Form Intro and Confirmation fields. Head and body analytics tracking can also be added.

Core
Arguably, the biggest update this month for Core is the update made to student profiles to support multi-race. The Race field enables schools to select multiple race values for individuals for more accurate demographic information. The default values are those required by the National Association of Independent Schools, but more can be added as needed from User profile settings under Users in Core.
Like Candidate and Contract lists, Race was also added to advance lists as well.

The login loop issue was also solved this month. The issue impacted logging in with Blackbaud ID with 3rd party cookies or cross-site tracking. Now, users should be able to log in normally without needing to adjust any browser settings first.

As always, if you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products (including today’s update), make sure to visit our release letter to see what’s new. Use the Recent option on the top right of the page to see archived versions of previous releases.

We hope these updates as well as the recent content we’ve launched have helped in some way. In case you missed it, we’re continuing to add resources to a number of locations including: Stay strong and stay safe. I for one can freely admit that I certainly more appreciate of everything I may have taken for granted in my day to day life than ever before. This process isn’t easy, but together, we’ll make it through. See you next week.

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