Information to Run Your Program

December 2014

What's on Your ACEware Wish List?

Team ACEware will have their annual staff retreat in early January. This time together is used to discuss how we will better serve our customers in the new year. To determine where to focus our development efforts in 2015, we need to hear from you. So we ask you, "What's On Your ACEware Wishlist?"

Completing this short survey will allow you to provide input on ACEware software development, and as a special bonus, you get to help a charity at the same time! ACEware will make a $250 donation to the charity selected from three options made available at the conclusion of the survey.

A response by December 19 is appreciated.

Contributed by Sharon Brookshire

Encouraging Software Use

We spend a lot of time at ACEware talking about marketing to your customers. But lately we've been thinking about marketing your registration system to your co-workers.

Most of us who implement a software system assume an "if we buy it they will come" attitude that couldn't be further from the truth. And yet, if you have participation from everyone in the department every aspect of running a successful program, from registration to reporting, is made a little easier. So, here are a few tips for encouraging those with a "less than enthusiastic attitude" to become more hands-on.

Programs where the department head is a hands-on user make the best use of any new technology - ACEware included. Get your dean/director type involved - pronto!
Offer frequent training opportunities via various media. Email is great for a Friday tip, but a quick flyer with a single tip is just as important. Heck, post a monthly tip on the back of the restroom door - it's a captive audience
Be a name dropper! Subtle testimonials like "Last month when Sally ran X report she found..." can be powerful
Point out how much floor space you'll gain in the office by eliminating some of those filing cabinets, the contents of which can be stored in your software
Take time to know how each user would benefit from actually using the system. Share this knowledge with everyone, including the user.
A new employee is a new opportunity.

Last, don't be discouraged if this is a slow process. Reward yourself, and your staff, for little steps of progress. One great reward? Attend the annual ACEware conference, and bring a staff member with you. The synergy created by attending with two or three peers is phenomenal!

Contributed by Lauri Thompson

MATTHEW'S CORNER (of the cabin) - New Option for Splitting Attendance Rosters

Attendance Rosters for courses with a ton of sessions can be a pain to print. The way the Microsoft Report Writer is designed only allows for data elements to flow down a page. If you have columns that need to run onto a second to the right, you are pretty much out of luck. This happens all the time with Attendance Rosters.

The old solution was to run multiple reports. Run the first Attendance Roster to show the first page of dates and then run a different roster showing the second page of dates. Not exactly the greatest solution.

In 7.2.A, I created a new feature to work with a special report. This allowed you to split your attendance report on a weekly or monthly basis. This worked well for some situations, especially when the instructor needed to turn in attendance records every week or every month.

But what if you have a course with sessions every day of the week that meets for 16 weeks? Printing rosters on a weekly basis would print on 16 pages, which is a bit of a waste when considering that only 5 sessions would print on each page. Plus, you wouldn't be able to print on a monthly basis, since that wouldn't print the last week or more of the class each month.

Enter the better option available in 8.0.011 or newer. It allows you to specify the number of dates you want per page. So if your report only handles 15 dates, then type in 15. Your 16 week course meeting 5 days a week now prints on 6 pages! The last page shows as a partial page of dates, but it is the only one like that. There are also no dates missing like when you would print on a monthly basis.

This feature is available on the Course Quick Reports and the Reports -> Registrations -> Rosters -> Attendance Roster areas. Contact your technician if you do not have one of the new Roster with Splits reports (they should have been added to your system during the 8.0 upgrade).

In my opinion, this new option makes the Attendance Roster Split feature much more usable than before. I hope that it saves you some time!

Contributed by Matthew J. Olson

SMS & SM

You've asked for it and ACEware Systems is delivering. In the next month or two, we are going to be partnering with Twilio to provide you the ability to send SMS messages from Student Manager. One downside to this is that Twillio does charge a fee to send SMS messages, but it's only $1 a month for the phone number and $0.0075 per message for their cheapest plan.

We are planning on having a focus group talk about some of the things you would like to see this feature do. The focus group will meet sometime during the week of December 8th. Please email matthew@aceware.com if you are interested in being in this focus group.

Just a reminder: Sending SMS messages must be agreed to by the recipient. So at the very least, there will be a new opt-in checkbox on the name screen in Student Manager, and you can add this to your ACEweb signup page as well. We'll talk about this, along with uses for the technology, in the focus group. If you want your opinions heard, please join the focus group!

Look for an announcement on the ACEware Forum for when this feature is available.

Contributed by Matthew J. Olson

Happy Holidays!

As 2014 draws to a close, we want to express our gratitude to you for your continued partnership with ACEware Systems. It's customers like you who enable us to be the best Continuing Education software provider in the industry. We are so appreciative of your valued comments, suggestions, and ideas that have helped us grow into what we are today.

We take this holiday season as an opportunity to wish you all of life's joys, successes, and contentment now and in the new year.

We look forward to serving you in 2015!