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January 2022 | Issue #111

Current Releases: SM 8.0.107 (1/5) | AW 3.5.066 (11/09)

Update Webinar - 1/26, 2p CST

JOIN US NEXT WEEK! Managing Users in Student Manager - 1/19, 2 p CST

Coding Tips and Techniques - 2/16, 2p CST

ACEware Systems Newsletter

Information to Run Your Program

ACEweb Bulletins

Picture it: January 2022. You’ve found yourself in two common situations:

The snow that the weatherperson predicted came in with a vengeance. Interstates are shut down. There’s no way you’re having classes! But how are you going to warn folks who are browsing your website?
Your catalog for the next term just dropped and you want to give your students a sneak-peek before publishing courses to the web. Wouldn’t it be great if you could put announcement with link on your site for everyone to download the new catalog?

Well get ready, because your job is about to become a lot easier with the use of ACEweb Bulletins!

To start using ACEweb Bulletins, you’ll first need to update your foundation templates (Home.htm, Standard.htm, and Minimal.htm)—your tech can help you with this part. Then it’s time to set up some bulletins in Student Manager by going to Module >> Catalog >> ACEweb Bulletins.

Give it a code and a title, choose whether it’s a regular bulletin or a warning (each type has its own location on your webpages, and warnings will have a red background), set an expiration date if you don’t want to have to remember to unpublish it later, and if you’re feeling really fancy, take advantage of the Generate HTML option! Once the bulletin is active and your templates are up to date, it will appear on your website.

But warnings aren’t meant to display all the time, right? You probably wouldn’t need a snowstorm warning on April 25^th when it’s not too hot, not too cold…and if you do need a snowstorm warning, there’s a good chance that you aren’t even in the office. So for times when you need more than just a light jacket, you can use the Staff Web Access area (you are taking advantage of this feature, right?) of ACEweb to publish, unpublish, or edit bulletins. Just click on Edit Bulletins toward the bottom of the Staff Options list, select the one you want to edit, and then make your edits*.

*Fine print: We've provided you one of each bulletin in Student Manager already, but of course you're free to create as many as you might need. Keep in mind, though, that you can only edit existing bulletins in the Staff Web Access area; if you want an entirely new bulletin, it has to be created in Student Manager first.

Visit our Online Help Guide for more detailed information about ACEweb Bulletins. To see them in action, check out our ACEweb Demo.

Contributed by Lindsey Lieberman

ACEware Planning Retreat Postponed

Earlier this month, I shared that in this newsletter I would provide a summary of the ACEware planning retreat and would share all our new ideas for 2022. That summary will have to wait until February. We had to postpone our planning retreat – many of our team have had a hard start to the new year with personal and family illness. We will give them some time to fully recover before we do the heavy thinking! Thank you for your understanding!

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

Save the Date!

The ACEware Annual Users’ Conference is scheduled for June 6-10, 2022. Because most of you shared that your institution has not reinstated travel, we’ll be virtual.

We will use the Whova Event platform to deliver a week full of software news and how-tos, networking, and sharing. Have you used Whova? Tell us in the poll below!

If we find that many of you are unfamiliar with Whova, we will have a Get to Know Whova session preceding the conference so everyone is ready to navigate the sessions, roundtables, and conversation boards.

Monday, June 6, is reserved for concurrent preconference workshops. We are still discussing and finalizing topic areas. A few possible topics are shared in another poll below. If you have another idea, email me!

The main conference (Tuesday - Friday, June 7-10) will be full of timely topics to help you get the most from your software. Sessions under discussion include:

Reporting Tools
Data Clean Up Resources
AW Pendings
Proxy Registration Options
New Cancel Registration Features
Membership Options

Email (acelist), newsletters, and aceware.com will be your sources of information about conference and registration. For now, hold the week on your calendar.

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

Have you used Whova before?

Yes

Select

Which topic for a preconference workshop interests you the most?

Coding for Success

Select

Billing and Invoicing

Select

Reporting Basics

Select

Keeper of the Flame Training

Select

2022 New Features Webinar Series

A new year is a good time to review the schedule of new releases of your software. Student Manager releases monthly – on the first Monday. ACEweb and Quick Pick release on a quarterly schedule.

These software releases provide bug fixes and new goodies. How do you know which bug fixes and new features are included? Everything is listed in detail in the ACEware Forum. Even more convenient for you is to sign up to get notified about new releases. Instructions are included on the Forum.

For those of you who like to hear about new features and see them in action, sign up for our New Features Webinar series! A review of last year’s webinar data shows you all appreciate these quarterly webinars, especially the option to view on-demand.

Below are the dates for 2022. Sign up for one and you are signed up for all! Sessions begin at 2:00 PM CT and are recorded for on-demand viewing.

Wednesday, January 26 (SM 105,106,107 & AW .067)

Wednesday, April 6

Wednesday, July 6

Wednesday, October 5

Two quick assignments:

Join the Forum if you haven’t done that
Sign up for the 2022 New Features Webinar Series

We will see you for the January session soon!

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

Focus Groups - We Need to Hear From You!

We are planning two customer focus groups for the first quarter of 2022.

Hybrid Course Types
Proxy Registration

In both groups we will listen to what works well, what you (or your customers) find challenging, and the ideas you have for further enhancement. Please email me if you want to participate in one or both. Thank you to those who responded to the poll sent earlier this month. That gave me a good head start on our hybrid course type group!

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

Tech Tip of the Month: Certificates

There are three ways for your students to get their certificates –physically print them, email them, and let your students view and print their certificates from ACEweb. You can set Student Manager to email out certificates from Quick Reports, the course screen, or Reports > Registrations > Certificates.

You can then select students and send out your certificates.

For ACEweb there are additional steps that need to be taken, and you will need to make sure that you have the Student Online Reporting Module (STORM) set up for you to be able to allow students to print transcripts and certificates. If you want to use a specific certificate for a course, you can set it on the ACEweb Info tab on the course record. Otherwise, the certificate will be the one that you have in your ACEweb INI file (part of the STORM setup). Please note that you may need to modify a specific certificate for use on the web, and you can work with your tech on the finer details of installation and modification of the web certificates. Once everything is in place, you will need to enable the student to print their certificate. This is done on the individual's registration registration record--you just change the, “Get Web Certificate,” dropdown from No to either Yes or Yes/stamped.

Once students lo can let the students log into their ACEweb account, they can go to History>Certificates and should see a screen like below.

Contributed by Joseph Sotkovski

Report of the Month: Report Wizard 8.1 Update

A new version of the Report Wizard was released on January 6th. To update to 8.1, choose Check for Updates from the Help menu. If you aren't able to get the update that way, email me and I'll get you the install file to run or we can schedule a time to update it together.

There are a few new goodies. A new preview window (called a Data Grid) is available rather than outputting to Excel or something first and potentially not getting what you want (bad filter or something). In my opinion, the best thing about it is that you can search the returned data. There are several ways to get to the Data Grid:

Click the Data Grid button in the ribbon or the toolbar
Choose Data Grid from the File menu
Right-click a report and choose Data Grid from the shortcut menu

See the image below for an example.

Another new enhancement is that you can now specify a folder to save Scheduled Reports in. Previously, all files generated were saved in the root of the Report Wizard. Talk about CLUTTER! The only caveat with this is that the Windows Task Scheduler can't handle drive mappings, so it does need to be on a physical drive or a UNC path.

There are more enhancements to 8.1, but I'll leave them for you to discover. Update soon!

Contributed by Matthew Olson