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November 2021 | Issue #109

Current Releases: SM 8.0.105 (11/1) | AW 3.5.066 (11/09)

ACEware Best Practices for Certificate Programs - 11/18, 2p CST

Marketing with Student Manager and ACEweb - 12/16, 2p CST

ACEware Systems Newsletter

Information to Run Your Program

Your Feedback Needed to Guide Our 2022 Planning

As 2021 winds down, we begin to review the accomplishments and lessons learned from the year and strategize for the future. You run ACEware’s statistical reports, analyze course, marketing and demographical performance data, and set goals for your program. We go through the same process at ACEware. We review our data and your feedback to make or revise short- and long-term plans. Goals are based on our mission to support continuing education with affordable, flexible, easy-to-use software. For software users, support comes through:

Continuous product development centered on your needs, requests, and ideas
Prompt, personal, and real-time support from an assigned technician
Resources to keep you informed of updates and best practices.

We are asking for your feedback as we prepare for our 2022 planning retreat. Please complete this 13-question survey before Thanksgiving break. The clever Survey Monkey says it estimates it will take you just 4 minutes to complete. We sure appreciate it!

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

A Look at the Future

While on the subject of making plans and setting goals, we would like to share a couple of our longer-term projects at ACEware.

1- We are transitioning our applications to be built natively on the cloud. Our end goal, of course, is to converge existing functionality into the cloud product. Our vision for transcending our registration software is to have a solution that operates with scalable performance, using a proven modern programming language and framework, without the need for your IT having to manage servers and software updates.

Phase One: This summer a developer was brought to the team to focus exclusively on cloud development. He has been building out the security foundation: User authentication and access, roles, and permissions. With these features in place, we begin work on the load-bearing fundamentals: Course development, registration, and basic reporting. Our ETA on the initial release of ACEware’s Cloud product is in the first quarter of 2022.

2- Hosting Solution Upgrade. Keep in mind that we do have an existing hosting option if you feel under pressure from your IT department to move the software off campus. We are migrating our hosting services from GoDaddy to Amazon Web Services platform. AWS will give us much more flexibility with matching hardware to your needs, plus infinite scalability (looking at you, OLLI!), and far better redundancy and monitoring.

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire and Jason Allen

Creating HTML-formatted Email Templates in Student Manager: There's an Editor for That!

With the release of .097, we offered you a newer, simpler option for building email templates in Student Manager. And with our latest build (.105), we’ve sweetened the deal by adding an HTML editor for each section of the template!

This editor works in much the same way as the one used in other areas (with many improvements), but there are a few things you’ll need to keep in mind for email templates:

You can only use the editor for templates with the newer email body coding (the kind where you use ## delimiters)
When clearing formatting, you need to select a little bit before and after the part that you want to clear.

To use the editor, you can either enter plain text in the section that you’re working on (header, body, or footer) and then click the HTML Editor button, or just start by clicking the button and entering/formatting all at the same time.

You can format text, add images, hyperlinks, and even include video!

As always, you can review our online help guide or contact your tech if you have questions.

Happy formatting!

Contributed by Lindsey Lieberman

Resource Credentials Change

The passwords for locked items on our website (including Student Manager and ACEweb updates) have been changed. Please contact your technician if you need the new password(s).

Contributed by Matthew Olson

Tech Tip of the Month: Forget Me On This Computer

Have you recently found that when you start up Student Manager, it just takes you right in without requiring a username or password? Well, that is because you have clicked the, "Remember me on this computer," option on the login screen. If you no longer want to be logged right in and would rather type in your password (or IT says you must,) you can go to Tools>Forget me on this computer.

This will turn off the single sign on allowing you to enter the username/password to log in.

Contributed by Joseph Sotkovski

Report of the Month: Report Wiz Sending Rosters

In Student Manager, you can mass email rosters, so the fact that the Report Wizard can do it isn't that big of a deal. However, you have more control of things, and I am using this as an example of the power of what emailing can do in your system.

The goals I had in mind were that I wanted a PDF of the roster for a given course to go to the instructor(s), and I wanted to carbon copy anyone on the Persons to Notify list. The information on the roster isn't as interesting as you can put anything you want on it. However, I did have to add the Instructor Email and the Course Persons to Notify fields so that I could use them in emailing these people. I set those to not appear on the report so that they didn't clutter things up.

This then came down to quickly setting up the Output of the report like what is shown in the image below. Easy! You do need the 8.0 version of the Report Wizard to have the Get CC email address from field, so be sure to check for updates.

Now I did run into one problem doing this report. Since Names (Students) can also be Instructors, there is a link between those two tables. Since I had Name data on my report, the Report Wiz was trying to create a link between Names and Instructors. I had to manually manipulate the from and inner joins on the SQL Statement to get this to work right. If you do something similar, make sure yours has this on the tail end:

from NAMES inner join REGISTER on NAMES.NMID=REGISTER.RGID inner join COURSE on REGISTER.RGCRSE=COURSE.COCRSE inner join LINKINST on COURSE.COCRSE=LINKINST.LICRSE inner join INSTRUCT on LINKINST.LIINSTID=INSTRUCT.INSTID

Contributed by Matthew Olson