News and Blog
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There are lots and lots of people looking at lists of accounts right now. Some are like me, keyboard crazy. If I have my hands on the keys, I do not want to move one of them to a mouse! I am a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts, and Escape Online includes some very cool shortcuts for lists that keep you focused on the list instead of your hands. One of my favorite shortcuts for lists is SHIFT+RIGHT ARROW. This is particularly awesome for lists that have copious columns, like accounts, vendor requisitions, and especially employees. Let me show you how this shortcut works. If you are on the accounts list, you will probably want to scroll to the right to see the rest of the figures. |
Instead of using your mouse, you can press and hold the SHIFT key while you scroll to the right or left using your arrow keys. Each time you hit the SHIFT+RIGHT ARROW combination, Escape Online will scroll one column to the right. Of course, you can also use PageUp, PageDown, Home and End keys to move up and down the list.
Then there is always the ALT+F6 to toggle the activity tree view to show more of the list (or report!!).
There are lots of other keyboard shortcuts, and all of them are documented in the Escape Keys that is available off the Help menu or through the Online Resources module.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
On March 11th, I visited the Ventura County Office of Education to meet with County staff. The purpose of my visit was to insure we are doing a great job for them, and to show support as they implement Escape Online 5 in their districts. VCOE is Escape’s longest running County customer, starting with Classic more than ten years ago. And they were the pioneers of the very first released module of Escape Online 5, the Credentials functionality, which is now incorporated in the HR module.
Since that first Escape Online 5 project, we have been working toward the goal of delivering all module functionality to VCOE for implementation by their districts. This has been done in a phased approach.
Beginning with budget training in November of 2006, Escape and Ventura designed a complex inquiry/test/production environment that allowed organizations to make the switch from Classic to Escape Online 5 at their own pace. The first group (just a handful of organizations, including the county office) went live in 2007.
From that point forward, the project has been a joint effort, with Escape Technology leading some of the conversions (about a dozen organizations), and Ventura County staff taking over last summer to convert the rest. With over 130,000 ADA and 21,000 employees and 600 Escape Online users, coordination is extremely important, and the county staff has done a great job!
In fact, when I visited their offices last Thursday they were preparing to roll out seven of the remaining districts this week. That will leave just two districts to be converted in July!
To prepare district users for the new software, the County has been providing lab sessions managed by the County support staff. The lab allows district users who had been through training to practice using the software under supervision. This picture shows them hard at work.
It was fun to visit the County office during this great milestone in their project. There was much excitement and optimism from the staff there. We at Escape wish them all the best and thank the VCOE staff for their support and diligence during this project.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
On March 10th, I visited South Orange County Community College District as a follow up to their recent conversion from Escape Classic to Escape Online 5. The purpose of the meeting was to solicit feedback on the project and the new software, to insure that we were doing the best job possible for them.
The general feeling was that the conversion project went as well as could be expected, but the new software was a bit of a surprise. Predictably, they loved Classic! They were very proficient with the Classic software and used many of its great features. Although they had attempted to do thorough acceptance testing of Escape Online 5, upon rollout they were surprised at how “different” the software was from Classic.
This reaction is not unique in our experience. We often receive more critical feedback from Classic customers than from those converting from competing products. There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon. The users' high regard for Classic is the obvious one. They were proficient with the software, and as a text-based system it had unbeatable performance. As a Windows application, Escape Online 5’s user interface is completely different; therefore some business processes work differently. A period of adjustment is to be expected, and comparisons are inevitable. Once the period of adjustment has passed, users generally discover the many features of Escape Online 5 that can save them time.
Finally, there is product maturity. Classic had an incredible 20-year life span. But it wasn’t born great, it became great over time as a result of continuing development and customer feedback. Escape Online 5 is very early in its life cycle, so our development team is still fully engaged in enhancing the product to better meet customer needs. Six software releases are scheduled for this calendar year! (Our Product Roadmap discusses the general development plan for this year.)
Product enhancement is exactly why we make visits to customers like SOCCCD, why we continually foster dialog with the customer. Your ideas make our product great. Thanks to the South Orange staff for taking the time to meet with me, and for their candid feedback.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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As you may have noticed, most of the Friday Features have been about increasing your productivity. I like working fast: no extra clicks, no opening activities I don’t have to. One of Escape Online’s latest features fits this bill exactly. So, this week I am going to talk about quick links. Quick links are kind of like lookup windows, only a million times better. (I also like to exaggerate, but only slightly.) Instead of giving you just a little information, quick links actually OPEN the record as a tab in your current workspace. One of our new mantras here at Escape is “one click.” We want to make access to information available to users with one click, as often as we possibly can. Quick Links are a good example, reducing approximately 15 keystrokes/clicks to just one. |
Let me show you what I mean. Here is a screen capture of the Vendor record. You will notice that this vendor has several requisitions for 08/01/2009. You can see the amount and the description, but what if that isn’t enough information to know if this is the requisition you really need to know about? You can use the quick link (the icon at the beginning of each requisition record) to open the requisition.
All you have to do is click on that icon and the vendor requisition is opened in your same workspace as another tab. In the screen capture below, see how the workspace contains the Search/List/Form of the Vendor record, and then an EXTRA tab for the Vendor Requisition.
For those of you familiar with Escape Online, yes, we could have just opened the requisition from the list, but that would not have displayed the entire requisition – only the basic order information – definitely not accounts and line items.
Quick links are a great time saver when researching information.
Like I said earlier, quick links are currently available throughout Escape Online 5 now. We will continue to add more over the next couple of releases, and if you have a specific request, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
At our January 2010 quarterly User’s Group meeting some of the IT staff suggested a “system management” workshop at Escape’s office. We loved the idea and immediately started organizing the class. Many thanks to the Escape presenters, Mike Long, Stephanie Fury and Jennifer Kenney for working diligently to get all of the materials created and organized while maintaining their real full time jobs!
Their hard work came together on March 16th when the full-day class was held at our offices with 15 attendees from 6 organizations. The customers represented were Alameda County Office of Education, Sonoma County Office of Education, Placer County Office of Education, Sacramento City USD, Gateway Unified School District and Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District.
Our first feedback on the workshop is from Joe McCarty, the System Administrator/Technical Support at Sonoma County Office of Education. Joe said:
“This was a good day! There has been a lot of ‘connecting of dots’ that will be really helpful when I’m back at the office. It is also a real opportunity to help build the Escape community.”
For those customers who were not able to attend the class on March 16th, the agenda for the day is listed below. Please contact me if you are interested in attending a future session and I’ll work on getting it scheduled.
Thank you to all of our participants.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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In yesterday’s Release Review, one of the attendees asked about exporting to Microsoft Excel. There are many ways to do this and I thought it would be nice to have a quick review, especially for those working with employee pay and budget figures. Of course, there is always the Export button available on every list in Escape Online. You just click it and the list (and headings!) automatically opens in Microsoft Excel. Obviously, this works great for lists, but what about reports? |
Well, you can also export any Escape Online report to Microsoft Excel. You even get two options for Microsoft Excel, plus a whole lot more.
The Microsoft Excel option exports all of the headers and footers and may require some manual manipulation. The Microsoft Excel Data Only option eliminates headers and footers and gives you the raw data. Here is an example of Cash Transaction Detail (Fiscal07).
As you can see, the Data Only option (available in Version 3.xx.xx systems only) does a pretty good job of stripping out the formatting of the report and giving you just the data you want in a format that you can begin slicing and dicing right away, without too much manual manipulation.
However, there are some Escape Online reports that are very complex, for good reason! These reports do not translate well using the Data Only “save as,” so we built a special export option for those reports, including Budget History with Two Years (Budget02), SACS Extract (Fiscal51), Account Extract (Fiscal52), County Holders with Expiring Credentials (Cred92), Monthly Employment Development Department (Employee06), Vendor Detail (Pay17), and Position Assignments (Pos03).
So now you know, there are many ways to export your data to Microsoft Excel. The feature you use, depends upon what you plan to do with the data. Now let’s export!
Note: Remember, the Release Review is a free webinar that walks you through the features and fixes of a release. Any Escape Online customer can attend from the comfort of their own desk. After every release, we send out an invitation to all users signed up for our newsletter. If you aren’t already receiving an invitation, sign up today.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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I would like to introduce another new employee to Escape! That’s 3 new employees in 3 months! John Rhoadarmer joined the Customer Care team in January where he’ll be responsible for all technical aspects of Customer Care: troubleshooting data and installation issues, upgrading internal and customer systems, installing patches and maintaining our upcoming Forum software. John joins us from IQMS, located in Paso Robles, where he spent 6 years supporting EDI/ERP software and working as an implementation specialist. His expertise in EDI will be very helpful with some of our upcoming regulatory projects that require data interfaces. |
John received his MBA and B.S. in Business Administration with an emphasis in MIS from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He enjoys riding motorcycles, playing bass in an alternative country rock band, and loves spending time with family and friends.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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As we all know, the fiscal situation requires even more accuracy and emphasis on the budget. You want as many people to provide input and help out as possible. Escape Online has got your back. You can easily include principals and other administrators in the process, while the budget staff maintains complete control. You can “open” a budget model to Admin users (e.g., principals, program managers, project coordinators), giving them access to the budget model figures through the Budget Entry activity. Their access to accounts will be filtered by their user-based permissions. They can’t just see ANY account. And, when you think they are done, you can “lock” the budget model so that they can’t enter any more changes. |
This is all done through the Department field in the budget model. If you enter a department (business, for example), ONLY users with that department specified in their user record will be able to modify budget entries. They can still see the numbers, but they cannot edit. If you need to allow access again because of a shift in budgetary priorities, you can clear the Department field and they can edit again. Want to stop access? Re-enter the department.
You can do this as many times as necessary. Your only caveat is communicating this on/off switch with your users. Admin users will appreciate being involved in the process, and you will appreciate the help entering the figures. Isn’t that what we all need, a little more empowerment during these stressful budgeting times?
Note: Budget locking does not apply to Fiscal users because they automatically have access to ALL departments.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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