What You Missed: Summer Updates and Features

In this blog, we’ll be looking at some of the bigger features and releases made in June and July for Blackbaud’s Education Management Products!

We hope you had a wonderfully refreshing summer, hopefully one that allowed you to recharge your batteries at the very least.

As we barrel headlong towards another school year, I wanted to get all of you up to speed on some of the biggest new features and releases we made during the months of June and July. Totally understand if you missed it, so think of this blog as your personal recap! Let’s get started!

Checklist Auto-select (June 10)

One of the bigger features we released this summer came from the Enrollment management team. We’ve added Auto-select settings that you can configure as rules that will automatically assign checklists and staff when processing inquiries, applications, need checklists, and event registration forms.

Essentially, when the rule conditions and criteria is met, checklists and/or staff that you’ve set will be automatically assigned. If you want to know more, make sure to check out our Help Topic.

Buildings and Rooms Refresh (June 17)

Next, we turned our attention to how schools handle buildings and rooms inside Core, Academics, and Extracurricular. The biggest change is the modern interface, adding a filter and search bar to better help refine the data being displayed.

Alongside the visual overhaul, users who have access to “admin view only” custom fields can now export this information, along with data about their buildings and rooms.

Athletics and School Website (June 22)

We also made it a point to clean up our navigation a bit with the June 22 release. Specifically, School website (but not Extracurricular/LMS) schools can now access Athletics from their menu. Basically, it ensures those particular schools can continue to manage sports & teams, opponents, and venues as expected.

Admissions Progress (July 1)

Starting in July, we introduced you to the visual overhaul that undertook Admissions Progress for the Parent Portal. Since that time, the update is now live for everyone. But what is it exactly?

In addition to being mobile friendly with collapsible panels, we’ve added a customizable banner to help schools bring their own branding style to the portal. Use Hide Completed to display the steps that are still active, and go to the Candidate Progress Settings from Admissions Setup under Enrollment management to customize your banner image for desktop and mobile. Head to our Help Topic to learn more.

Tuition Management Email Communications (July 9)

Next up is our big email template update for Tuition management. Specifically, for Welcome Letter, E-invoice, and Prior to Debit reminder email communications, we made a number of enhancements to them including:

• Manage which payer names are included in these emails.

• A revamped Header and Footer, which includes more information like links, Family ID, and much more.

• New subjects have been added to Welcome Letter, Prior to Debit, and e-invoice.

• Each email notification also has more details and settings you can display as well.

Review our July 9th release notes from the Month in Review for all the details.

FYI : Old Report Card Grade Entry Is removed (July 15)

By the time we got to July 15, the old faculty report card grade entry experience was officially deprecated. We’ve been giving schools a heads up for a while now and while both experiences lived side by side, this change (hopefully) wasn’t a surprise.

Following the removal, the New Grading tab was officially renamed to Grading.

The Omnibar Turned White! (July 22)

Eagle-eyed users may have seen the Omnibar switching colors are various times throughout the summer. While the new white version of the Omnibar debuted earlier in the Summer, it was rolled back for a few additional updates and improvements.

By July 22, the white version returned sporting a smoother and more intuitive experience overall.

Visits and interview Settings Moved! (July 29)

Finally, the enrollment team launched another major change to the product by giving Visits and interviews a new home. No longer part of the Admissions Calendar settings on the EMS Homepage, schools can find Visits and interviews in its own spot under Admissions setup. The move was intended to add more flexibility for schools, allowing them to define notifications for each visit/interview type individually, rather than only being able to define one notification for all visit types and one for all interviews.

However, on top of that move, the team also made some improvements to self-scheduling. Schools are now able to define self-scheduling rules by type, while also adding 2 new settings that, when enabled, allow candidates/parents to reschedule or cancel the visit/interview.

Want even more details?

By the way, you can always check up on what you may have missed in a previous release. Make sure to bookmark our Month in Review page, which we keep updated on a month to month basis by highlighting what each product was able to release. If you want all the details, many of which were not mentioned here in this journal, make sure to venture over there to get fully caught up.

That’s going to do it for this week. We’ll catch you next time!