News and Blog
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Everybody knows I am a multi-tasker. This is an excellent trait to have, but sometimes it can get out of control. There I am working in Escape Online, and the next thing you know I have dozens of activities open. This is not very efficient. Regularly, I need to close a bunch of activities that I opened to see a single record (like using quick starts to review a vendor requisition!!). |
So, every once in awhile, I use Ctrl+F4 and Alt+right arrow (both universal Microsoft keyboard equivalents) to quickly close the activities that I am no longer using. The Ctrl+F4 closes the activity, but if I want to keep it open, I press Alt+right arrow to switch to the next activity. Close, switch, switch, close (Ctrl+F4, Alt+right arrow, Alt+ right arrow, Ctrl+F4): a very quick way to get a multi-tasker like me back on track.
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Only a month ago we announced the 10th County Office of Education that had joined the Escape Family: Shasta COE. Well things move quickly here at Escape and we are now moving along to our 11th! We are pleased to announce that Alpine COE has selected Escape Online 5 as their new integrated school business solution. Alpine joins Lake, Modoc, Tehama, Trinity, and Sierra as the newest member of Escape's XCOE, a cost-effective, hosted-environment that provides the proper hardware, software and application resources necessary for running Escape Online 5. I spoke with Janis Doyal about this new development and this is what she had to say.
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Alpine COE will be going live at the beginning of 2011!
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There have been many Friday Features that have lamented my lack of memory. When it comes to accounts numbers, well, there is just no help. What I like to do is use the account lookup to kind of jog my memory. When I am in an account field I only enter the fund and then whatever is the next component (usually resource or object). So, let’s say my structure is fund-object-resource-etc. I enter just the fund and object and then hit F4 for the lookup. Note that I must enter the entire component (4300, not just 43). However, I did not need to enter the dash (0104300 instead of 010-4300). The only reason I entered the dash was so that the screen capture would be easier to read. Check it out. |
When I hit F4 (or click the arrow at the end of the field), I get a lookup of only those accounts that have that fund and object and that match my account permissions. (See how the fund/object I entered is shown at the top of the screen capture below.)
Using F4 means I don’t have to keep all of those accounts in my limited memory. Fabulous!
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If you have been reading our News page for a while, you know we have quite a few articles on reports, report usage, and report performance. Reporting remains one of the highest priority areas for our users. Thus, even though we solved most of the Crystal errors causing frustration, and we were able to speed up report generation, there is more work to do.
We have numerous projects going that will be beneficial to our users running reports. In this post, I’m going to discuss a pretty big enhancement, coming in our 10.4 release, scheduled for mid-August.
We use the Crystal Reports engine to generate our reports. That is NOT changing. Once a report has been generated on the server, it is sent to the user’s computer for display in “the report viewer.” However, one of the issues with the Crystal viewer is that it does not display large reports very quickly. While the whole environment is super fast, as compared to nearly anything else we have seen, it can take 20-60 seconds to “render” a large report (i.e. hundreds of pages) on the user’s client computer.
Back in 2003 when we first started displaying reports, the only output format/viewer that was satisfactory was the Crystal viewer. And it makes sense that a “Crystal Report” has to be viewed with a Crystal Viewer.
Report in the Crystal Viewer
But that isn’t the case anymore. Now, the Crystal report engine is capable of producing the output in several different formats.
Doing some research recently, we found that if we had the Crystal report engine generate the report as a PDF and display it in the Adobe Reader, it is almost instantaneous. Let’s use an example. I asked for a Fiscal03 report that I knew would generate a lot of pages, over 900. This was generated on the server in roughly 20 seconds, and took about one second to send over the network to my computer. But then the Crystal viewer took a full minute to display the report. Now I know 80 seconds still seems blazing fast for a 924 page report. But 21 seconds or so would be that much better.
And that is what we found. Recently, we created new capabilities in the Report Service and the client Report Request page to ask for the report as a PDF, still displaying it in the Escape Online workspace. And the reports are displayed instantly on the client once they arrive there. No delay due to the Crystal viewer processing.
Report in the Adobe Acrobat Reader
Notice how you have icons for printing, saving, emailing, scrolling, paging down, and the "main report" tab goes away too, creating more vertical space for the report display. What's not to like? So we figured let’s switch the output of the reports from the native Crystal format to the PDF, saving everyone a bunch of time! A casual user would hardly notice the difference; the PDF viewer just has more options. But they will sure notice the speed difference.
But wait! Currently, our users can take a report being viewed in the Crystal report viewer, and export it to Excel. It’s great; everyone loves it. But could it be made much better? Yes it can. Let’s walk through the steps a user would take currently to generate a report, then export to Excel:
With this new report concept, though, we have a better method, using a new Excel button on the report request page. Here are the steps:
Yes, it is literally that easy. When the report arrives on my computer, it is already in the Excel format and we automatically start or switch to Excel and load it in. And it is fast!
Customers have been asking for quite some time for the ability to email reports directly from the report viewer. Up until now they have had to save the report as a file, switch to email, create a new email, and attach the file. Sure, great functionality, but definitely room for improvement.
How about one click and an email opens up with the file already attached? And we got this improvement free of charge because the PDF viewer already has it built in!
And, yet another bonus!
With this enhancement, the Crystal viewer is no longer needed in the client. So that means it doesn’t have to be installed on new computers (has been sometimes problematic). This also frees up memory & disk space. And there is no longer an opportunity for the dreaded “out of license” error to happen on a client computer (was pretty rare these days but still).
One of the best things we can do for our end users is save them time. Especially now with all of their staff cuts. This is one of “the little things” that really adds up. We project our users will run about 1 million reports in the second half of this year. About 50% are 1-3 page snapshots: they won’t be affected by this enhancement. But for the other half million reports, let’s say this saves them just 20 seconds each. That adds up to 347 workdays saved across our customer base. Pretty amazing. And there will be more time savings coming.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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This week one of my tasks was to update the tutorial for the Adjust Payroll activity. I got to know the new "detail window" up close and personal, and I love it. The detail window is like a line item editor for adjusting addons, contributions and deductions. (A detail window for assignments is currently in the works, too!) Here's how it works. Say you are working on entering the units for the pay cycle that includes all of the substitute teachers. You need to go into each employee's addon and enter the correct number of units. The detail window makes this really easy, just select Addon from the Detail menu. |
Your workspace magically transforms with the detail window appearing above the list, including a comprehensive banner with tons of information and all of the system-generated addons pre-loaded.
From here, you can edit addons, copy addons or even add more addons. When you are done, you can close the detail window. Or, even better, you can use F8 to go to the next employee on the list.
No matter what you do (close, next, run the snapshot, select another employee, select a different record type), Escape Online saves the changes, recomputes pay, and updates the gross and net amounts on the list.
With the pay detail window, you can keep working your list of addons (or contribs or deducts) without all of that opening and closing, and you gotta love that!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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This week’s “Your Turn” comes from one of our new customers! 
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“Just wanted to let you know that at the initial stages of our implementation, we really like what we see with the Escape Online 5 system. We are reading the documentation and using the helpful 'Sandbox' system to see how various types of setup tables are utilized. We are meeting with our districts to map out how we will do our setup and the conversions.
We are really looking forward to how Escape Online 5 handles payroll processing. We really like the payroll report warehouse and the vendor check processing. These should save us quite a bit of time compared to our current processes. Escape’s philosophy and focus on K-14’s needs shows up in the design of these processes. In other words, no changes are necessary because it already performs the way our organization wants it to.
I’m sure we will find many ways that the Escape Online 5 system is going to be saving all of us time in other areas as well. It is good to be on board and beginning our implementation. "
~ Kelli Roberts, Director Business Applications, Shasta County Office of Education
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I just LOVE doing our webinars. Almost every webinar we have held this year was attended by every customer. I am so glad that we are helping people learn how to use Escape. I want to help more! So when Ramona asked me to create a calendar of webinars for next year, my first thought was to ask you, our customers, what you want to learn.
Last month, we sent out a survey asking for suggestions for topics. We even included a drawing for a $25 gift certificate to Starbucks. (Congratulations to our winner: Gail Robinson of Ventura County Office of Education!!)
The first part of the survey, we asked which webinars do you attend. Not only do people attend our regularly scheduled webinars, but a lot of you are taking advantage of personalized webinars that are run by your support rep or other experts here at Escape.
Now comes the really interesting part!! We asked for your input, and here is what you said:
I will be working with Ramona and other Escape experts to put together a schedule of webinars for next year that include your suggestions. If you have any more ideas, please feel free to contact me directly!
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Year end processing is a very busy time; there are thousands of decisions to be made. Fortunately, Escape Online 5 has very sophisticated year end process that makes it super easy to process finance documents, no matter what their source: vendor requisition, stores requisition, department requisition or invoice. How easy? Just a drop-down list of documents in the Year End Closing activity gets you going. So easy that sometimes you might later change your mind about one you have already processed. We thought of that too, and it's once again super easy to change your mind. |
For example, if you carried forward a requisition (without a liability) when you meant to accrue, you can open the new year’s requisition (2010/2011) and retroactively add the liability account to accrue the requisition:
That was pretty quick. Let’s see it again, in slow motion. Here is the list of my accounts for the requisition I accidentally carried over.
You can see that there is no liability account for the requisition. I am going to add it using the New button.
The liability account is now in the requisition. This means that I can go back up to the Liability column for the previous fiscal year’s account and change it.
As soon as I press Enter, the amount is placed in the liability account for the current fiscal year. Now, all I have to do is save and close: Escape Online does the rest. Any payments made from this point forward will hit the liability account and come out of fiscal year 2010, as they should.
Maybe my year end processing wasn’t exactly ideal, but I was able to easily rectify my mistake and that always creates a happy ending. Perfect.
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Happy new year? Not quite, for this year, anyway. While we all look forward to seeing fireworks on the 4th of July, no one is looking forward to the tight budgets and staffing restrictions of the new year. There isn’t much to celebrate as many counties and districts with significant layoffs look for efficiency and productivity improvements to make the best of their resources in a tough year.
As many of our long-term customers and friends know, Escape went through our own “budget crunch” during the early part of this decade, while we were building Escape Online 5. Our customers were supportive as we redefined ourselves. We appreciate this partnership, and we kept this in mind as we designed Escape Online and as it evolves around our users’ needs.
We have been getting some great feedback from our end users, regarding time savings due to Escape Online 5. People are actually remarking that the system is a big factor in getting through the additional workload. We have compiled some of this feedback, presenting it “top ten style:”
We are also looking forward, adding more functionality that will help users be more efficient, including:
If you would like to see the entire list or comment about how we can help your organization, please feel free to contact me. Have a happy new year, and a safe and sane holiday!
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