News and Blog
February 2008

Escape Announces New Chief Operating Officer
Dateline: Roseville - February 2008

In a blog post early in January, Bob Towery wrote about the large number of opportunities and challenges we have in 2008.

To meet many of those challenges, Escape Technology is announcing the appointment of Ramona Marshall as our new COO.  This is the first time we have made an executive level appointment in an operational role.  It’s an important decision, and we want to share this information with our customers.

As a refresher, Ramona came to us last year with a huge amount of experience in Project Management at a large software company.  She started in a consulting position, introducing us to Project Office.  We immediately saw the potential and made her an Escapee.  Ramona did a great job with the projects we threw at her, and merged well with the people here, in other words, she bought into our culture!

For most of this decade, customers (and prospects) wondered “is Escape ever going to come through with a new system?”  Now that we have, and it is such a winner, people are wondering if we can meet our commitments?
The answer is YES.  With Ramona overseeing all our implementations, and coordinating the efforts of most of the people in the company, we expect a large leap toward the goal of doing quality work with more great customers. 

With seven years of hard work and a very large monetary investment in the Escape Online system, we believe the best way to “honor” our dedication is to make Escape Online available to as many users as possible.  So this means implementations at current and new customers alike.  It means we need to find more people to do support and implementations.  We will have to stretch resources, to be sure.  That’s life!  But we won’t commit to more than we can do professionally.

With my work running the development project day to day completed, I now have the opportunity to focus on two important roles.  First is the keeper of “the big vision” for the Escape Online system.  We have split Research and Development into two departments now, and I have a role in the new Research department.  Here is our new org chart:

My other role is to work with current and prospective customers on a more frequent basis.  There are a lot of people that I would like to spend some more time with, show them what we have been up to, and work toward their users being able to take advantage of this incredible system we have built.

Our VP of Customer Care, Barry Collins, is also looking at some new opportunities, and he’ll share them below.  In signing off now, I want customers, prospects and friends to know that we are taking a big step forward in our ability to perform quality implementations of our systems, and have our executive staff focus on what we can do most for our customers.

And now, here’s Barry:

About a year ago we started to plan for rolling out Escape Online to our customers, and we had “Escape for a Day” sessions to gauge the interest.  At the time we really had no idea how quickly customers would want to convert, and how that would fit with known commitments and new sales.  The response from all quarters was overwhelming, and we quickly realized that the addition of resources and the enhancement of processes were crucial to meeting those commitments. 

We began with structured project management and a project office within the company.  The result has been fabulous!  We can now manage projects better than ever, can do more projects, and can build a timeline well into the future to help our customers plan for implementation.  Our development and support efforts have also seen dramatic improvement, and everything we do at Escape is more cohesive and efficient.

This has allowed me to focus on my favorite part of the business: YOU, the customer.  My new role at Escape is to become an advocate for our customers within the company, and ensure that customer needs are being met. 
Over the next several months I plan to visit customers who have yet to convert, to discuss conversion and potential timelines.  I will also visit with customers that are LIVE on Escape Online, to observe their operation with an eye toward improving the product and enhancing future conversions.  These visits will also allow me to personally thank our customers for their valued business, and to share our plans with them.

I believe these visits will help us further refine our processes at Escape, so we always provide our customers with the best products and services.  And I’ll continue to spend time “on site” to keep the exchange going.  I will journal these visits on my Escape blog as well.

With Ramona’s help, we have reorganized not just Escape Customer Care but our entire company.  We have also hired, and continue to recruit, additional skilled staff to work in a structured project management environment.

So, let’s hear from Ramona:

At this time last year I found myself at a personal and professional crossroad and I left corporate America with no job prospect, in hopes of finding ‘something different’.  I wanted a position that was more meaningful and satisfying, that allowed me to have an effect on the overall operations of a company.  Ultimately, I wanted more responsibility and accountability for the operations I managed.

‘Something different’ found me via a phone call from a friend named Carole, which ultimately turned into the opportunity of a life time.  Although Escape is a much smaller company than any of my previous employers, it contains all the same disciplines and facets of the software development lifecycle that I have spent the past 15 years managing , so I immediately felt at home and got busy organizing.

I am confident that as COO, I can provide an organized and efficient approach to managing all of the work that lies before us in upgrading our customers to Escape Online and ensuring it happens in a timely fashion.  However, in order to do so, we have made some organizational changes to align the majority of our resources towards this effort.  

I am thrilled to be an Escapee and look forward to introducing the new organization in more detailed blogs over the next week, including the new structure for support/testing and IT.

 

Release v08.01
Dateline: Roseville - February 2008

Yes, every month Escape is delivering features and functions using our new release process, and the feedback has been fantastic:  implementations are getting what they need, when they need it; LIVE customers know when enhancement requests will be delivered; and everyone can rely on 60-70 improvements every month.

As you can imagine, this new process keeps us hopping!  With each release, we are looking for ways to be more efficient and provide better service.  This release, we are introducing a new delivery mechanism for release notes.

Got Questions?

With each release, we will post a blog entry, just like this one, that gives you quick links and a nice summary of the major enhancements.  If you have any questions about the release, like a clarification on how to use a new activity or a workflow change, post a comment and we will respond with an answer.

Our hope is to create a community atmosphere that will be helpful to all Escape users.

Quick Links

Here are some quick links for the release that went out earlier this week:

The release notes are now listed by activity.  We think this will make it much easier for users to read about new functionality.  In addition, we have added a "status" to the release notes to indicate if a change request has been fully tested and documented.  Our goal, of course, is to have all changes fully tested and documented but with 60-70 change requests a month, there will be a handful that may require more time to fully test.

The Known Issues have also been reorganized by activity and placed in a separate document.  Both the release notes and the known issues are delivered as a PDF. 

Summary of Major Enhancements

This release includes some impressive Finance and report enhancements:

  • Creating One-time and Employee Payments - Creating payments for one-time vendors and employees has always been a hassle.  It seems ripe for automation but how do you do it.  We have figured it out and implemented a bold new strategy to make these types of payments SIMPLE.  We took the easy-to-use Enter Payments activity, copied and modified it into two new activities: Enter Direct Payments and Enter Employee Payments.

    The Enter Direct Payments activity allows you to select a vendor from the database or type in a payee directly.  The Enter Employee Payments activity allows you to use lookup windows to select an employee, defaulting all of their address information.



  • Budgeting, Budgeting, Budgeting - Everyone knows how important and complex budget creation is, especially position control budgeting.  Once again, we have taken a formidable task and automated it. 

    For time card assignments, we developed a complex calculation to provide the most accurate figures. For mid-year changes, we changed the calculation to compute used and authorized FTE for each day to pick up the correct budget figures.   Finally, we modified the way position control is displayed in the system so that budget users can see what figures are "actual" and what are "projected."

  • Account Comparison Report - For our advanced fiscal users, get ready to create your own six-column account comparison report!  This report is truly incredible.  The new Comparative Account Summary by Object (Fiscal04) report allows you to create a custom six-column report, where you choose the account source and define the formula.  You can define sorts, page breaks and use account masks to get the exact report you need. 





  • Earnings History - This is sure to be a crowd pleaser.  The new Earnings History (Pay24) report shows earnings history for each employee, including check history by employee, in chronological order.  Columns include gross earnings, retirement, 125 Plans, other reductions, advanced EIC, Fed tax withheld, state tax withheld, OASDI (social security) withheld, Medicare withheld, SDI withheld, misc. deductions, summer pay deduction and net pay.

And much, much more.  Please feel free to post comments and questions about this release.  We are always interested in your feedback!

Sierra COE is LIVE!
Dateline: Roseville - February 2008 - Leslie Bailey

Sierra COE and Sierra-Plumas Unified School District went live on Escape Online 5 on February 01, 2008, migrating their data from Escape Classic to Escape Online 5 using the new XCOE server housed at Placer County Office of Education. 

Under the project management of Jeanette Thomas, all services are up and running on dedicated servers owned and maintained through Escape Technology's Project XCOE (a service that allows small counties to implement Escape Online in a hosted application environment). 

Jeanette joined Escape last year to head the Project XCOE.  "Having worked in a small COE, I know what it is like to wear a dozen hats and the struggle to meet all of the various legal requirements.  XCOE provides small COEs the opportunity to tap into the expertise of Escape Online 5 without the cost of having on-site application hardware and staff to support it, freeing up staff to do the things that are really important to the business of education."

Connectivity is excellent!  The COE Accountant was the first person to log in to the XCOE server from Sierra COE’s offices in Sierraville.  “Wow, this is so much faster!” was her initial response.  This sentiment was echoed by her co-workers after logging in to Escape Online 5.


Training at Ventura
Dateline: Roseville - February 2008 - Terri Hammond

Ventura County Office of Education is taking districts live on Escape Online using a phased approach.  Last month, I was delighted to meet and train Phase III finance users.

I spent two days training.  There were about 30 attendees each day.  In the morning, I would give them a brief overview and then in the afternoon, we would have a lab with hands-on exercises.  There were so many people, we had to split into two labs!

Lots of users were signing in for the first time, so it was very exciting to me to see how extremely enthusiastic new users can be.

As you can see from the picture, Ventura COE has excellent training facilities, and excellent users if I do say so myself!  It was my pleasure training them.  I look forward to more in-depth trainings.

On a Roll
Dateline: Roseville - February 2008 - Leslie Bailey

Sometimes the stars just seem to line up.  That’s how it feels at Escape now with Classic and brand new customers going live with Escape Online 5, and all the good feedback we get from our demos.  More features, reports and fixes every month.  Great new people in our company that are really working out.

It’s a great feeling.

So things seem to be going our way!  But it was still a surprise to be notified by our office supplier, www.givesomethingback.com, that we had won an HP sponsored contest!  We won $1,000 worth of HP products, and they would give $1,000 to the charity of our choice!  So we picked a deserving local charity, gave them the $1,000 from givesomethingback, and matched it with $1,000 of our own.

Which was another great feeling.  We have so much good fortune coming our way, it’s great to be able to share it with others.