ACEware Systems Newsletter

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July 2022 | Issue #117

Current Releases: SM 8.0.113 (7/11) | AW 3.5.070 (07/14)

Update Webinar - 10/5, 2 p CDT

Become the Master of Managing Reports - 9/26-29, 12-2 p CDT

New! Cancel Registrations Feature

You are sure to love this! Your students can now self-cancel registrations - for courses with or without an associated fee. Registration fees transfer into a student's escrow account.

The Cancel Registrations feature has been enhanced in ACEweb version 070 and is available for you now! Here's a few of the new features:

Cancel settings are now listed in a cancelreg.ini file, located in the Templates folder.
Students can cancel a registration and money paid will be transferred to Escrow.
Staff can cancel a registration and refund money to Escrow or leave it with the registration for later refunding from Student Manager.
Determine what registrations can be canceled by students and staff. Options are they can cancel Free, Waitlisted, and/or Paid registrations.
Set how long before the course Begin date students and staff can cancel a registration. For example, students can cancel up to 2 days before the course begins and staff can cancel up to the course Begin date.
Set who gets cancellation notices. Can be sent to staff listed in the OfficeEmail INI setting, or set it to a different person in the cancelreg.ini file.
You can use the getmemo() function to list your Refund Policy on the Cancel Registration page and in the cancellation confirmation sent to the student. Note this option requires a Memo Text type catalog record called RFNDPOLICY set up. For more information about this option, contact your ACEware technician.

The enhanced features require an update to ACEweb version 070, released July 14th, and updated templates located in the ACEweb update zip.

Enjoy!

Contributed by Cheryl

ACEware Cloud Environment Development Update

If you attended conference, you had the first hard-hat tour of the ACEware Cloud Environment. Since conference, Brandon has built out email templates and course transition scenarios. Watch the short video below to see a course transitioned from active to canceled and see our modifiable email templates. Stay tuned for more updates next month!

Contributed by Sharon

More New Goodies

Student Manager .113 was released Monday, July 11, and contains a handful of new features, including:

Updates to the Blacklist email question highlight NO by default.
Added Hybrid Status field on registration records to roster reports
Updated Refund Wizard Confirmation window to make the text easier to read.
Updated Make Credential option to add unlimited UDFs

See more about the new features and fixes here!

ACEweb .070 released Thursday, July 14, with these new goodies:

Support for student self-cancel on courses with fees (refund goes to a student’s Escrow account)
Updated the optional Document Upload Module to support uploading documents for Proxy registration
New QuickPick Feature: Added link to display other members.
Update to Staff Web Access to look up active or inactive name records.

See other features and fixes here!

You can view an on-demand webinar on these and other new features added in Q2 of 2022 here. When you are ready to add the Document Upload Module to your software package, I’m ready to help!

Contributed by Sharon

Come Play in our ACEWeb Sandbox!

When was the last time you played in the ACEweb demo/sandbox? If it has been awhile, jump on and dig around. You'll be surprised at the treasures you uncover.

A few treasures I'll point out:

Banners with important messages for your students. You too can have these.
Notice the attractive images. You can use those for course groupings.
Log in and appreciate the many things you can do in your account, like add family members, view registration history, print certificates and transcripts, and pay any balances due.
Click the examples link while you are there and see the many, many things ACEweb can do.
Try the new required document upload feature. It works on individual and proxy registrations.

There is lots to discover! When you are done playing, take a look at your own ACEweb pages and see what's missing; we can help with getting you up to date and suggesting optional modules that will make staff and student experiences more efficient.

Contributed by Sharon

Tech Tip of the Month:

Expanded vs Normal ACEweb Errors

ACEweb errors: Nobody loves to see these, especially your students!

Make sure that you do NOT have Expanded Error Display set on your ACEweb Administration page, by clicking the following Normal Error Display link on your ACEweb Administration page.

The expanded error display should only be used at the recommendation of your technician, typically during installation, as it will cause WCAG and Vulnerability scans to flag it as unsecure, as well as be frighteningly scary to your students and staff.

The Normal error display has a much more sanitized view, prompting students to contact your office. Don’t forget you can always have the FULL error emailed to you if you have the AdminSendErrorEmail INI set to ON and the AdminEmail INI has a value (your email, or whomever in your organization you want to receive error emails).

If you notice a surge in ACEweb error emails, it is possible that they are being caused by your ACEweb site being crawled by a search engine bot or other harmless scanning software. When these bots peruse your website, they can trigger the ACEweb error handler when checking up on non-existent paths or by appending invalid URL parameters. Legitimate bots will always have a browser agent identified, so that you can easily determine if they are a bot. Check for the Browser line near the top of the error email, and if it contains anything pertaining to bots, or search engines like Bing, Google, etc., then they can be safely ignored.

As always, contact your technician if you need any help with settings. Also, be sure to pass on those error emails to your tech if you do have a question as to the legitimacy of it.

Contributed by Jason

Report of the Month: Select on Quick Reports

In many of the Course Quick Reports, you get a dialog box (similar to the image below) when you run a report. This has been added to even more areas with the release of Student Manager 8.0.112.

One new area is the Attendance Roster. We've had the select dialog on Name Roster, so adding it to the Attendance Roster was the next logical step. There are many reasons one might do this, but the best example is to not show the attendees on the roster if they still owe you money. They shouldn't be in the class if they haven't paid you! Another reason to use this is for Hybrid courses where you want to run separate rosters for In-person and Virtual attendees.

Another area getting the dialog is the Mass Merge Mail Email to Class. We've had it on the Send Quick Email to Class. There are probably more reasons for using this than there are on the Attendance Roster. One example might be that a customer wants to send different email templates based on the grade a student earns in the course.

I hope that this helps you out going forward!

Contributed by Matthew