April 2014 News
Welcome to the April 2014 Edition of the Engineerica Newsletter!
This month's Engineerica monthly update re-announces beta testing open for the AccuTrack and AccuSQL Advisor/Tutor Quick Panel, provides an Accudemia User Tip showing how to setup Tutor Schedules, has an interesting article about the AccuTrack Appointment Reminders, and much more!
- Engineerica welcomes some new faces at our offices
- Creative Consultations with an Accomplished Advisor
- New Conference Tracker update and enhancements
- Accudemia Tech Tip: Setting up Tutor's Schedules
- Advisors! Tryout the AccuTrack Advisor Quick Panel!
- Get AccuTrack Appointment Reminders in Outlook!
- Check out our new AccuTrack/AccuSQL Ideas Blog
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Engineerica welcomes some new faces at our Orlando Office
NICK ARMSTRONGAPR.1, 2014
Please join us at Engineerica in welcoming our new representatives at the Orlando office.
 Laura Alvarez |
 Mark Martino |
 Sara Moretz |
 Aliyah Ashrafally |
If you call in for product sales and support you may get a chance to speak to them. Here's to a successful start at Engineerica and welcome aboard!
Creative Consultations with an Accomplished Advisor
NICK ARMSTRONGAPR. 8, 2014
In this atmosphere of ever increasing pressure to be accountable in higher education, AccuTrack has emerged as one of the most versatile tracking systems available. In the past, larger databases dominated campus record keeping. These systems are large, costly, and very often unfriendly. Even still, these databases hold on to what is often viewed as the more important data such as enrollment and financial records of students. However, as educators have begun to realize the importance of how students spend their time in relation to their success, time tracking has now become essential. In the midst of the data giants are many database solutions to choose from yet, none offer the much needed time stamp which paints a foot print picture of where and how long a student has made use of campus resources. In all honesty, most of the data giants will never be able to paint this picture as they are simply not built for that type of data storage. Supplemental databases, such as AccuTrack, are now essential to data-driven decision making in regards to student success.
As more and more educators discover the power of AccuTrack, Engineerica’s support staff has found itself presented with challenging implementation requests. Once customers are past the initial set-up and configuring, the Engineerica support group is often asked such questions as…
- How do I measure the effectiveness of Center Staff based on grades, center attendance, and other factors?
- What model of tracking best suites the needs for requirements of tracking certain grants or sports programs?
- When does the use of this tracking method develop to show true growth of knowledge at my center?
Realizing the needs of the customers have matured and have become more focused on student success, Engineerica has decided to begin offering creative consultations. These consultations are designed to assist users in developing a process which will support retention and persistence of students. Laura Alvarez joined Engineerica in order to provide this essential need. With nearly a decade of experience in higher education student success, Laura is able to fashion a creative plan for nearly any student success challenge. Laura envisions using AccuTrack in order to relieve staff and tutors from record keeping burdens and therefore allowing them to be more available to students. Availability for face time with students is a known factor in increasing persistence and retention regardless of the barriers the students face. AccuTrack is uniquely structured so that this can be achieved in any center, department or even institution. Armed with these tools and 8 years of AccuTrack implementation experience, Laura is ready to assist institutions with the ever important task of improving upon student success.
Look for creative implementation packages soon.
New Conference Tracker updates and enhancements
APR. 7, 2014
In our efforts to continually meet the needs of our conferences we have implemented certain updates and enhancements that will help to keep conference organizers focused on the needs of the conference and not the software. Most of these enhancements were requested by Conference Tracker users. The following are the lists of these changes:
Updates:
- Sign-out settings (Requires Sign-Out and Required Presence %) can be defined on each workshop. Before this modification these settings were defined for the whole conference. This means individual workshops can be set to determine the amount of time needed to be present by the attendee to receive credit if requiring sign-out.
Accessing the sessions editing screen you can edit these settings regardless of the other sessions.
Under Advanced Options > Settings, be able to overwrite these settings for all workshops by checking the setting in the image below:
If you leave it unchecked then workshops’ sign-out settings won’t be overwritten and only the ones without these settings specified will have the values defined here.
Work
shops’ sign-out settings can also be imported if you know in advance what you want set. - E-mail all badges for those users that have been modified after a specified date or since the last e-mail sending.
- Confirmation messages have been added to the delete functions on every item to prevent accidental deletion of everything from users to workshops to logs and more!
- Other bug fixes that were found and reported.
Enhancements:
- Bulk Sign-in/out Correction where Conference Admins can correct operator errors where they were signing-in/out to the wrong workshop, if a device ran out of battery and could not get a replacement Apple device to sign-out attendees, etc.
- Enhanced exports now include all the fields imported as well as the calculated ones like Company, Position, Address, etc.
Enjoy these awesome new updates and many more features by scheduling a free demo. Remember when planning your next conference... Conference Tracker.™
Accudemia Tech Tip: Setting up Tutor's Schedules
APR. 3, 2014
Today we wanted to show you how you can quickly set up tutor schedules. It only takes a few steps and you can use this setup to also restrict the course availability based on the tutors' availability. Here's how:
1. Go to Tutors Schedule on the left-side navigation menu under Center Attendance and enter the information (Tutor Name, center, etc).
2. Click the Apply button.
3. Next click and drag the mouse to create a block in the calendar.
4. Enter the information for the selected time.
Note: When assigning a schedule to a Tutor you have Availability Statuses such as Available (Green), Not Available (Red), Not Working (Gray/shaded), Working in Another Center (Maroon) and Cleared (White/clear).
5. Click the Save button.
Hope it helps!
Advisors! Tryout the AccuTrack Quick Panel
We have been working hard on a new program especially designed for tutors and advisors we are calling the "Quick Panel". This new program integrates directly with the AccuTrack or AccuSQL database you are using and provides a powerful tool for tutors and advisors to access all of the features they typically use on a daily basis all in one place and all in one screen. In order to release this software in the next few months, we need you!
If this sounds like something that might be helpful in your center please let us know that you would like to help beta-test this software for either AccuTrack or AccuSQL 2014. This can be done by sending an e-mail to support@accutrack.org. Note: The Quick Panel is used with AccuTrack and AccuSQL version 2014 only and beta testing is only available for those versions.
Based on feedback received during the beta testing here is the updated conceptual layout:
While this new interface is currently in its development and testing phase, we plan to roll it out in the next few months. Please take a moment to let us know what you think about it, or if you have any feedback at support@accutrack.org.
Get AccuTrack Appointment Reminders in Outlook!
An exciting feature in AccuTrack and AccuSQL is the ability to have appointment notifications come in as an invite to your Outlook calendar. Essentially this means staff and tutors only need to be specific with their calendars in AccuTrack leaving their Outlook with general openings.
With careful settings to keep students from scheduling /canceling appointments at the last minute, tutors and staff can rest assured that their Outlook calendar, often viewed remotely on their smart phone, is accurate.
However, there is a chance a tutor or staff member could schedule a private appointment like a doctor’s visit during a time that AccuTrack views as open while forgetting to set this time off in AccuTrack.
If an appointment is made by a student that conflicts with the private appointment, the tutor or staff member can simply decline the appointment keeping it from showing on their Outlook calendar.
They just need to be sure to go into AccuTrack and cancel the appointment there as well so the student is properly notified.
Be sure to visit the AccuTrack / AccuSQL Blog for more tips like this on how to make the best of your tracking and management software.
New AccuTrack/AccuSQL Ideas Blog
MON NASSERAPR.1, 2014
Throughout the years we have seen some very creative use of AccuTrack and AccuSQL in academic centers. For example:
- How a client used the software to track mandatory use of the center by at-risk students and athletes.
- How a client used the software to track TRIO programs information and send that to their Student Access software.
- How a client used the software to track graduation cap and gown distributions.
- How a client used the software for a mandatory test registrations.
- How a client used the software to schedule appointment reservations at the campus PC repair shop.
- How a client used the software to control students visiting the health center.
We would like to share these creative and clever implementations ideas with all users. The ‘blog’ format seems perfect for this. We set up a site for this purpose here:
We plan to post a lot of implementation and usage ideas there, so make sure to visit often. Also, if you have your own clever implementation, we would love to learn about it and share with other users. Of course you will get full credit for the submission. Simply email or call us.