Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Education Management Solutions for Higher Education (aka Blackbaud's Connected Campus)": To our product update briefing. This is the product management team's favorite time of year. We get to share a lot of excitement about what's been happening in the in the world of products. Today, we're specific specifically, we'll be talking about our Connected Campus, which is our higher education solution. If you're looking for k 12, that was actually done yesterday, and you can find the recording. So let's get started. I'm Paul Finch, one of the product managers here at Blackbaud. I am a Blackbaud Boomerang. This is my second tour of duty here. I'm a relatively new empty nester and enjoying all the things that come with that, and I must be dear to water. So here's the agenda that we're gonna tackle today. I'm gonna get us started with some housekeeping, then we're gonna go through each one of the areas. And as we go through these areas, we're gonna bring new speakers up to the virtual stage. So as the content changes, we'll bring in some some new speakers. So you will have the subject matter expert from each one of these, sessions, come up to the stage and talk about what they've been working on. Some housekeeping. I think the two things that I'd want you to take away from the side is one. If you have any technical problems, you'd find that a browser refresh is gonna solve most of them. So if you can't hear, you can't see, if something's frozen, let's start with a refresh. And questions. Bring them. We love them. But please provide as much context as possible. We're gonna be moving pretty quickly through a lot of content. So let's make sure when you ask a question, you do things like either name the slide deck, name the product, name the product manager, anything that you can do to help us figure out what part of the presentation you are asking a question about. So to help you orient yourself to the content, we are going to have stickers on the slides, and these are gonna tell you things like what part of the product are we talking about. So you might things see things like core or billing manage up in that top upper right hand corner. So if you get distracted and you come back and, like, oh, what are they talking about? Notice that sticker up top. Going down the bottom, we'll have some stickers that really show whether or not you're going to, achieve particular outcomes based on a piece of functionalities. You might see work more efficiently and securely. You might you might see, you know, other value anchors, but keep an eye on that. Then we'll see some things like everything today is gonna be US specific, so that one's not quite so germane. But whether or not something came from an idea bank, you guys putting things in the idea bank, whether or not this was manifest because of some ideas. And then the most important part is whether something is available now, meaning you can get value out of it today or whether it's a work in progress, which means this is something that's coming in the future. So keep an eye on those. Now why are we here? From Affiliate Alumni, you know, our goal as a company is to be a single vendor to solve problems around our customer's campus and around the student life cycle. So really the key takeaway here is that our core vision to provide a connected campus from admissions all the way to fundraising is really germane to everything we do. And lastly, we aim to be an open API first total connected campus with a broad partner network for Adelai. But don't take our word for it. Here we have Williams College of the Trade to see the technology investment payoff in their quest to execute on their strategic vision. It's always better to hear firsthand customers and from us. Now we're just gonna be focusing on some pieces of the connecting system really under the education umbrella. So if you're looking for other pieces, there are other product update briefings going on. Razer's Edge, which happened yesterday, so you can always sign up and get that recording. And then Financial Edge, another key component of the connecting system, is happening tomorrow. So sign up for those if you haven't or tell a friend. If you aren't aware, DBcon registration is open. We'll be in Philly this year in October, and the early bird pricing is still in effect. So if you plan on going, it's always good to go at a less expensive rate. So get out there and register. Alright. How many of you attended our BBDEV days? This is a good thing that you're marking your count calendar, particularly if you are responsible for any of the, tickling the APIs at at your at your institution. So there'll be partners who do development work on our product. There will be, customers that do development work on our product, and then there'll be us that do development work on our product. So anyone anyone who's interested in leveraging our APIs, this is a good spot to come and learn. So so these are some of our overall strategic themes. Now we consider ourselves an institution wide ERP that's the right size for your script and purpose. So with our folk our focus on the smaller college arena, we really believe that we bring, the best bang for the buck in terms of technology out there. Now as we're moving through the slides, you'll see these value anchors expressed on the slides as we talk about, the technology that we're bringing to you. These are the outcomes that we hope you achieve by using the new functionality or capability that we're bringing to market. And last but not least, pubs. We always wanna make sure you guys are aware that we are gonna be talking about things that are forward looking and coming in the future. We try to do our best to be very crisp on what we're able to deliver, but things do change. So the most important thing to take away from this is that if you are in this product update briefing as a prospect, so evaluating our software for purchase, please make sure that any of those purchase decisions are anchored in the things that are coming or not or things that are available now versus coming soon. So keep an eye on that that, sticker down the bottom because that'll always tell you. And each one of the product managers are gonna start with things that are available now and move on to things that are coming soon. So it should help you organize the content each week. And with that, I'm gonna bring my first speaker to the virtual stage, talk about things that are going on in Core. Jesse, take it away. Thanks, Paul. Hey, everyone. My name is Jesse Walters, and I am the product manager for Core in education management. I have been with Blackbaud for over six years now. But before coming to Blackbaud, I worked at a school in Oklahoma City where I lived at the time where I implemented education management before practically begging Blackbaud to give me a job because I fell in love. So here I am. As Paul mentioned, I'll start today by talking about things that are recently delivered in core before moving into things that were that are coming soon. So first up for core, we have the omnibar. So this, the gray bar that you see at the top of your screen now, if you are a platform manager, an admissions manager, or any of several other, administrative roles in the system, you have the Blackbaud omnibar across your system. And this enables you to navigate among the various Blackbaud solutions that you may have, whether it's Raiser's Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXT, education, Blackbaud merchant services. You can easily get to any of your Blackbaud solutions from a single product picker. And we want you to know that this is only the beginning of our omnibar adoption. So for now, in phase one, you just have that black box omnibar. But in the next phase, we are gonna be working to move all of our navigation up up into that omnibar, which is gonna return some of that, real estate at the top of the screen so that you have some additional space again, and you'll have a more consistent look and feel even more than today, to match what you see in Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT. Another area you may have noticed an update is in the user profile settings area. The core team has been hard at work bringing all of these pages that have that have existed since the beginning of of the software up to our new, Sky UX look and feel so that it matches your experiences that you have in other areas of the system and making it more modern. So as you go and you're updating your emergency contact settings, your ethnicity types, religion types, and other pages, you'll see a new updated experience that's much easier to manage. And with that, those recurring page uploads every time you click edit or save or or anything like that. So it's also responding more quickly as you're editing those. Specifically, in user profile settings in the area of user name formats, when we made this update, we wanted to add the ability for schools to customize the way that names are displayed in your system. And what we heard from organizations is that you need the ability to display names differently in, like, the admission office compared to, the way that a name is displayed to a faculty member or to a registrar. So what we did with the username format update is to make it possible to create as many different name formats as you'd like to have in the system and then apply those to each of your system locations. And we've added transparency so that under each of those system locations, you can see exactly where that that name format will be applied specifically so that if the name is not displaying that way, you know whether or not it should. We have also updated the custom text area. You may have noticed that custom labels are no longer there. And as we went into this area to look at at updating it, we realized most of those weren't even working anymore. So that page is gone, eliminating some confusion there. And we've also updated the way that you manage custom text slash messages and the browse groups text as well. We also knew that many of those text slash messages that were in the list were no longer available in the system, and they didn't do anything. So we've removed any of those that no longer work so that people aren't in there updating, messages that aren't gonna show anywhere. And we've also updated the descriptions of each of those messages so that you know when you're in there to edit, and configure that text, where that text is going to show up in the system, and how it will be displayed to users and under what conditions, making it much simpler for you to configure, the experience for your community. In the area of the education lists and, integration mappings, we have made a few minor enhancements to the way that we are streamlining your federal reporting. So based on feedback from people like you, we have made a few changes. So we've made it possible now, to map your race values to unknown and to two or more because what we learned is that many organizations just have unknown or two or more as actual race values. So we've added those as an option for you to map to rather than doing our own calculations, for those. We are still calculating if it if a race is unknown or when we find more than one race value, but we've also made it possible to just map directly to those if that's a value you have in your table. We have mapped the citizenship column in list so that whether or not a student is a US citizen is appropriately showing as yes or no. We've added descriptions for the columns in education list for columns where we are performing a logical calculation to match IPES requirements. We've added some preferred name columns in lists, and we also moved The US nonresident field from the citizenship moved it to the citizenship slash resident tile. It used to be under general information. That way, as you're editing, ethnicity, race, citizenship, and any of those, you can also mark that US nonresident field at the same time. It just makes more sense. So all of those are very minor enhancements, but they are extremely important for those who are doing your institutional reporting for federal reporting purposes. Now let's talk about things that are coming soon in the area of core. You asked and the BBID team listened. One of the things that the Blackbaud team is working on now is adding additional ways for users to log in. So coming soon, your users will be able to log in using Microsoft or using Facebook. Not that they'll actually connect to their Facebook account and be using Facebook, but that they'll be able to log in using, their authentication method for one of those and have fewer passwords to remember. And with all of these authentication methods, soon, it will be possible for you to configure which ones you want your organization and your community to be using most. So if you want to move SSO down from the top where it is today, you'll be able to move your preferred method up to the top and make your, authentication buttons match your organization's preference. This has got to be the most exciting thing that the core team is working on. It is now, possible well, now in EAP, possible for a faculty member, an adviser, or some kind of admins to view the system as a student in what is basically view only impersonation. So with view as student, someone who has the ability to view as that student will see a button on their profile and be able to navigate the student portal as though they are that student. And we've added that to a few roles. One of those is gonna be on the teacher or faculty role so that when a student is enrolled in a class with that faculty member, then that faculty can be given the the ability to view as any of the students who are in their sections. Same thing on the adviser roles. So if you have advisers of advisees, they can be empowered to view as the students who are their advisees. And then we've also made it possible to view any student for those who have a more administrative role, but you are also able to tailor that specifically to the level of the student, rather than giving them every student in the system. If you are interested to learn more and are considering participating in the early adopter program for US Student, please email me at jesse.walters@blackbody.com. There's that slide one more time with my email address. I would love to hear from you. The core team is also planning to make it possible to automatically format your phone numbers. In Razer's Edge NXT today, we have, this phone field editing ability, and we're going to match this in core as well so that you can we will be able to support country codes for phone numbers, further supporting iPads and NSLDS, phone country code requirements, one roster, and also just making it easier for you to keep your data clean as it's coming into the system. So when a phone number is entered, we'll update it then, but this is not going to automatically format phone numbers that are already in your database. The core team is also working to bring Blackbaud Copilot to education management. This is already available in an EAP in Razer's Edge NXT, but Copilot is an AI powered coach or assistant that allows you to interact with data in natural language, asking questions and and gaining insights, empowering you to do more with your data and faster. The core team is gonna first bring it into education management, and then it'll be able it'll be possible for other teams to also bring Copilot into their areas of the product to apply the AI technology to, the student information system and the enrollment management system and and so on. We are also going to be working to to support world language characters in name fields. Today, if you enter a world language character in first name or last name and then save, that name is gonna appear in in transcripts and in reports and in advanced list as a series of question marks rather than their actual name. So with this change, those characters will actually be supported, and you can see the characters as they're meant to be. Finally, the core team is also working to modernize the way that you manage your buildings and rooms. So this is gonna be a more accessible and convenient and simple, easy to use experience for managing buildings and rooms. And by popular demand in the Idea Bank, we're also gonna make it possible to export buildings and rooms as well. With that, I'm gonna hand it back to Paul who is presenting for Steven Boyle today. Hey. Thank you so much, Jesse. As Jesse mentioned, I'm covering for Steven today. He's having some much deserved time off with family. Well, I'm gonna cover the areas of API integration, which is, his area of expertise. And just like with, Jesse, we'll talk a little bit about things that are available now, things that you can take advantage of, and then we're gonna talk a little bit later about things that are coming soon. Most of this is gonna be under the themes of expanded API capabilities. So it could be a new endpoint, it could be depth and endpoints, as well as we'll talk a little bit about our common records engine project. So let's get started. So available now in API is some depth in two areas really to help drive your admission strategy. One is content. So you can imagine things like, news announcements and events. We have to grab those and put those on, for example, your website. And then expanded access in some depth and endpoints around inquiries, applications, and the candidate checklist. So if you haven't been out to the API recently, go out there and check out some of the the new goodies that are available. Some other miscellaneous API improvements include changing to the rostering endpoints. We're really trying to reduce API calls. There's some depth that was added to attendance, specifically the attendance taken status. And I think also been a big, big hit is the course custom fields were added to the API. So, again, just some expanded API depth for you all to take advantage of. And then common records engine, if you're not familiar with this project, this is the work that we're doing to modernize the way in which data flows between education management and RE NXT. We are currently in a client technical preview, and we've got a couple customers who are helping us work on the early stages of this. And we're working this we got two customers in the in the client tech preview now, and we're iterating our way forward and kinda learning and finding exactly what we need to to do here to before we bring it to general availability. But our next milestone for this is gonna be an early adopter program targeted later this year. Speaking of later this year, let's talk about the things that are coming down the pipe. We got, again, same kind of themes where we're gonna talk about some expanded capabilities within the API, some depth of things that we're adding, and then we'll touch base again on that common records engine that we're really hoping to get to an EAP later this year and then some aggressive goals to get to, general availability. So thematically, very similar to what you saw in available now. We've we've got a reorganization of the API that I I think is also something that you, may have noticed. We're gonna continue to deepen admission, seems like access to admission checklists and applications. We we plan on, adding some capabilities around physical attachments to the API. So you imagine you've got, you know, forms, test scores, pictures from outside systems, and you wanna be able to bring them into our system via the API. This is gonna unlock that capability. And I mentioned a little bit about the reorganization of the API. So you're gonna you're gonna look for that as the API increases in scope and depth, we're gonna reorganize it in ways to make it easier for you to find the endpoints that you're looking for. If you've used the API in the past, you know, there's really kind of a large API under the umbrella of school. So you're gonna start to see that breakdown into components that may look more like the products. So for example, we got that in in the we call enrollment management API that's that's coming to life. So I believe this is gonna help you find what you need a little easier. And then we're doing some innovation that I think is, important for you to know about. We're, working on a project we're calling add in tiles. So imagine you want to show data from another system within our system, but on one of those sky tiles that we call them. This is a capability that we're gonna introduce here relatively soon. And then the concept of webhooks, we're also working on, which is gonna provide some immediate notifications, for changes to data that you can take advantage of. And that last but not least, we'll continue to drive towards our early adopter milestone or common records of the project. We're we're constantly learning from our client tech preview participant, and we anticipate some things coming out of that, like expanding the scope of synchronized data. Like, we're constantly adding new data to the scope of what's being kept synchronized. We start with sort of the basic biographical. We believe we'll get some, education data added added to this, probably some business data by the time we get to the, early adopter program, and then targeting, you know, really a release of the later half of this year. So the punch line for that is if you are interested in the early adopter program, feel free to to email myself or Steven Boyle. So I'm paul.finch@blackblood.com and steven to steven.boyle@blackblood.com because we're gonna start, bringing together some early adopter participants later this year and really getting these systems talking back and forth to each other. We're really excited about it. With that, I will bring Kelsey to the virtual stage to talk about all things enrollment management. Hey, everyone. My name is Kelsey Haugen. I'm the product manager for our enrollment management system. I've been at Blackbaud for over fourteen years, been working in the education, part of Blackbaud for that entire time in various roles before taking over this role just a couple of years ago. I am going to start off by chatting about some of the things that we have available now for enrollment management, and I'll hop right into our first slide. So first up, we have updated our admissions, enrollment, and school forms, to use Blackbaud checkout for the payer experience. If you haven't heard of Blackbaud checkout, it's essentially the payer facing side of Blackbaud merchant services. So after submitting a form, Blackbaud checkout is what prompts the applicant or student or whomever is filling out that form to enter their payment details, and then the payment is processed through Blackbaud merchant services just as it had been before. So the overall workflow is the same, especially for you guys on the admin side and how that payment's processed and how it's gonna show up in Blackbaud merchant services. But the payer side is now going to be more mobile friendly, more modern, and also more secure as well. Last fall, we introduced a new tile on the candidate record for internal notes. These are very much true to their title and the fact that they are notes that are only available internally, meaning only admissions managers and admissions staff can see them. We received feedback right after releasing this that admissions folks would also like to be able to share these notes with their committee reviewers. So we added that as one of the options that you have when you're setting up your committee. You can choose to turn on internal notes. And since the internal notes have different types associated with them, you can choose to either share all types of notes or you can choose to share ones that should be shared with committee reviewers while still keeping some available just to your admissions managers and admissions staff. So this is available now. If you wanna check out your committee review, you can go ahead and turn it on and it'll turn it on for your reviewers right away. And then lastly for what's available now is the ability to generate contracts directly from a student's profile. Prior to this, if you needed to generate a one off contract, you'd have to add the contract type to the student's record, head over to manage contracts, open up that contract template, and then generate the contract from there. And that can be a lot of extra clicks if you just have those one off contracts that you need to get out. So now whenever you're on that student's profile, as soon as you've added that type, as long as the student is eligible for that contract, you'll see a generate button, and it allows you to generate the contract right from there, saving you those extra clicks having to go over to manage contracts. Moving over to what we have coming. First up, we have been working on a new official notes list. I've gotten a lot of feedback around the official notes inbox, and one of the things that I hear most commonly is that replies are getting lost in the shuffle with all the notes that are showing up in that inbox. We have limited options for what we can do with adding filters or adding sorting options in the inbox itself, so we wanted to think outside the inbox and give you a better way to manage those messages. And that's how we came up with the official notes list. The main goal here is to make sure that official note replies aren't getting lost. So what we're going to be doing is adding a notification to the review center that'll let you know if an unread reply is sitting out there, something that someone hasn't looked at quite yet. And if you click on it, it's gonna take you to a filtered list to see exactly what those notes are. You could review the history of the note just like you can with the inbox, and you can reply to it right from there. So, hopefully, that'll give you a better way of, having more visibility into the replies as they're coming in. You will also be able to use that official notes list to filter on notes by author or by date or last reply date. So it's gonna give you more options for shuffling through all of the notes that you have out there and giving you a different way of interacting with those notes and hopefully a way that's a little more convenient than what you have in the inbox itself. We are just about done with this work, and you will soon be able to opt in to using this over the summer with the goal of releasing it to everyone in the fall. So keep an eye out for a notification in the system once that's available and and instructions along with that for how you're able to opt in. Next up is a way to save a few clicks when you're processing inquiries, applications, and event registration forms. We're giving you the ability to choose which checklist and which staff member you'd like to assign to your applicants based on a variety of factors such as their, classification or the program that they're applying to. So within the checklist area under admission setup, that's where you're gonna be able to define your criteria and choose the different scenarios that might, come into play for your admission space and which checklist should be assigned to each of those groups as well as which staff member should be assigned. After that, those pieces will be preselected when you go to process any of these forms, saving you the extra clicks of needing to select those each and every time. And since these are preselected but not locked down, you'll be able to make changes to those if you need to. So that way, you're not kind of cornering yourself into something that might not be a good fit. One big note here is that you will still be able or you will still need to manually process these forms. So this isn't automatic processing for the form itself. It's really just preselecting the checklist to save you from having to, click through that. And then once you have confirmed everything looks good, you can just process the form like usual. We are also almost done with this work, and we are hoping to have this out in, early June for everyone to start using. Moving over to student checklist, we are planning on bringing student groups into the filters that you can use when you're selecting which groups of students to assign a checklist to. So if students in a certain class need to sign a waiver and fill out additional forms, you can use that class as a filter when determining which group of students to assign a checklist of items to. Or if one of your student clubs is going out on a missionary trip and they need to fill out a variety of forms to go along with that, you can use that club to find the right group to assign that checklist to. This is a great way to expand how you might be using student checklist today since we're making it a little easier to tap into what you're doing on the academics and extracurricular side when determining which students should see which steps. Next up is our revamp for visits and interview settings. We are remodeling these settings to give you a bit more control over self scheduling roles and notifications that go along with those visits and interviews. Right now, you're able to define one set of self scheduling schools and one set of notifications for visits, another one for interviews. And that was a way to keep the setup simple, but in practice, we found that admissions offices really needed more flexibility to define self scheduling and notifications based on each type instead of just an overall setting for visits and an overall setting for interviews. So in order to accommodate that, we are moving these settings out of the calendar and into admission setup. And once you're over there, you're going to have the ability to define all of these roles for each individual type that you've created. So you'll soon be able to allow self scheduling for one interview type but not another, and you'll be able to customize the notifications that are sent out by type so you can make sure that your applicants are receiving the right information based on why they're coming to your campus or why they're meeting with your staff. We're also giving you a couple of additional options if you're allowing self scheduling, so you can choose if you also want to allow applicants to self reschedule or self cancel. So that way, again, just a little bit more control over the process to make it work within your process. We are wrapping up the work on this right now and expect to have it available in the next couple of weeks. So, again, just keep an eye out on the release notes for when that is available. And then last on our list for today is something that we've been working on for a while, but we're getting really close to finishing it up, and that's going to be our candidate portal refresh. So we're in the final phases of this right now. We're gonna be updating it to Sky UX. That's gonna give the checkout or excuse me, the checklist a little face lift and make it more mobile friendly for your applicants as well. We'll also be adding in some conveniences like allowing applicants to hide completed steps so that they can truly focus on what needs to happen next and then giving them more visual cues so they can easily see what's been done, what hasn't been done, what's overdue, and so on. And since this portal is where you as an institution start your relationship with your prospective students, we're giving you the option to add a cover photo that'll show specifically on the candidate persona pages, and that's gonna allow you to bring a little bit of the branding that you have on your website into the portal to ease that transition for when your applicants go from your website into the logged in portion to fill out their application and complete those additional steps. We are going to start giving institutions the ability to opt in to using this feature starting next month. So we'll have the entire summer. If you wanna opt in to start using that, you can, and then we will be turning this on for everybody in the fall. And that is what we have for enrollment management. So I will go ahead and pass it over to the student side, for them to tell you what they have on their side. Thanks, Kelsey. Hi, everyone. I am Jacqueline Kosha, the product manager for the student information system. I've been with Blackbaud for over ten years working on our education products. And joining me today to walk through our student information and learning management updates is Mike. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Like Jacqueline mentioned, my name is Mike. I've been with Blackbaud for going on ten years now. And prior to coming to Blackbaud, I'm a former educator. So that's a little bit about me. Now I'm gonna go ahead and pass it back over to Jacqueline to talk through some of the features that we have now available for the student information system. System. Thanks. So our teams have been really focused on making your work more efficient and more secure in the student information system. And, of course, we always spend some time on student progress and ensuring that that is communicated well to users and students. So let's take a look. In December, we rolled out the new experience for departments and courses, and one of our initial goals here was to provide greater visibility into all aspects of course setup without having to dig through multiple areas of the product. So a key example of this is on the grading tab of the course, where you can now view detailed information that was previously only available by going to grading setup and viewing the setup for the related grade plan group for the year. We also added the ability to copy a course, reducing that overhead that's required when creating a new course or when having to make certain updates to existing courses. These changes also lay the groundwork for some future improvements planned around what information will be able to be controlled at the course level rather than a school wide level. This winter, we also completed our refresh of all the attendance setup screens. So this was primarily a UI update to bring all the pages in line with our modern experience, but of course, we always look to add some brand new improvements when we're doing those updates. We added the ability to assign attendance codes to specific school levels, which will reduce the noise of codes that show as faculty enter attendance for their classes. This can be really useful if there are certain codes you want to use to represent, maybe certain tasks or programs that your students have to go through, that may be different at a graduate level versus an undergraduate. And then our activity and advisory scheduling setup screens also completed a refresh this winter, with the final pages releasing within the past few weeks. This project was really focused on moving all the scheduling setup screens for both activities and advisories to a modern UI, making it quicker and easier to manage enrollments and add or edit activities and advisories. Along the way, we're including some quality of life improvements as well, really focusing on reducing the number of clicks and screens that you have to access to complete setup. Over to you, Mike, for our final feature. Of course. Thank you. So the last feature that's available now from the student information system is something that we're calling the learning center. Now this is a very specific area that is meant for you all to go and manage learning profiles. So students that have or need accommodations, if you are documenting that within our system, you can do all of your documentation needs all within the learning center itself. Now with this learning center, we wanted to really create a foundation. That way, we could build on the learning profile module more in the future. With this first implementation of the learning center, we've added in a number of graphs that you all can utilize to understand the learning profile landscape at your institution. Now something else that I wanna mention with this particular update, we've introduced a number of quality of life improvements. So for example, you can now edit learning profiles after they've been assigned to students. So if something changes with the students' accommodations for whatever reason, you don't have to create a brand new learning profile. You can instead go into their existing one and make any changes that are necessary. Additionally, within each of these graphs, you can actually click on the bar segments to load what data is populating that particular bar. Something else that's kind of neat with this feature is we took security, very seriously. We know that accommodations are a very private thing for students. So because of that, the only way to access that bar fly out is by actually being logged in as a learning profile manager or staff. If you simply impersonate a learning profile manager or staff, you will not be able to access that data. Similarly, impersonating a learning profile manager or staff will not allow you to edit existing learning profiles either. That is to ensure that the folks that need to be able to see this information can still see it without necessarily giving that information to other users who may not necessarily need to be privy to that learning profile data. Now there's more to come with this particular feature. In particular, we've recently added the ability to upload files on the individual student learning profiles. Those files are not yet shareable to faculty and staff. However, in a future update, we will have that shareability implemented. No timeline relay updates at that moment, but that is an enhancement that you can look forward to in the near future. Now keeping in line with updates coming to the Azure Information System, we have a slew of feature enhancements coming, that you all might be excited about. We're excited about it. The first of which is some updates to our grading setup area. We'll talk through managing grading settings and some of the enhancements that are coming to that experience, as well as some enhancements coming to both official notes and the enroll group function. Finally, we'll be taking a look at an at risk project, and talking through some of the updates that we're making in that area. First, I wanna talk through the grading setup. Grading is definitely one of the older areas in the product. We know that there is a lot of modernization that needs to occur to ensure that we are giving you all a grading module that meets your needs. Our first step in that particular process is taking a look and creating something that we are calling the grading hub. In the grading hub, we're gonna allow you to do some very sought after actions to ensure that you can manage your grading settings efficiently throughout the school year. For example, as you are working through your grade plans, if you need to elongate your grading period for whatever reason, we wanna give you a quick easy way of changing grading start and end dates in bulk. That way you don't have to go through grade plan by grade plan. In total, a single grade plan update for updating those, dates can take anywhere between five and seven clicks. With this update, we're gonna allow you to change however many grade plan start and end dates all within about five clicks. So that should save you a good amount of time. Again, not needing to go into each individual grade plan to update those slides. We're taking a look at some other options with this as well, things like changing how we call certain grading settings. What we've heard from a lot of folks is that when you take a look at our grading settings, it's hard to really understand which settings interplay with what other settings. So as part of this update, we're taking a look to see if we can change the naming convention of any of those settings to make it more intuitive for all of you when you're going through and updating your grading setup. We also are trying to ensure that you have a very specific workflow that you can work through. That way, you know which steps you need to take in order to create a new grading setup within your database. So a lot more to come with this. If you are interested in participating in a discovery session, we are actively talking to schools and institutions to better understand existing pain points and challenges of experience when using our grading setup, area. So, if you are interested in that, feel free to email me at michael.morzad@blackbot.com. Similarly, I'll be putting my email in the chat. Again, we'd love to hear from you and take your feedback into consideration as we flesh out this project more. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and pass it back over to Jacqueline to talk through some more features that we have coming for student information. Thanks, Mike. So while this next oops. Scooped one too many. There we go. So while this next feature is live for some schools, we are still in the process of rolling out this update for all institutions. So this project for official notes was a UI refresh of the manage official notes experience that was previously called approve official notes. In an effort to provide additional ease in reporting and review, the main page has been updated to a list allowing easier review of all official notes. And as a bonus, we added the ability to view and manage draft notes. Those were previously very difficult to clean up if needed. Additionally, the approval process received a facelift with a real focus on reducing the number of clicks and time spent on approvals. We expect to release this to the remaining schools in the next few weeks. A final refresh the team is working on for SIS, focuses on our scheduling area. So we are modernizing and simplifying the enroll group process. The existing functionality will be retained and moved into the new wizard. And, of course, we're adding some new functionality as well to make enrolling groups even easier. With this update, you will be able to paste a list of students to be enrolled, making it easier to enroll unrelated groups of students or to work with data from outside the system. We are currently aiming for this to be available in early summer. And then finally, I'm thrilled to share about our final student information system project, the at risk students or student outcomes. Our final name is still to be determined. This feature is going to allow institutions to define calculations to locate students who are at risk, whether failing class, completing the term, or graduating. Data points from across student information system and learning management system will initially be available to choose from when creating the calculations. Once calculated, institutions will be able to locate and focus on the students who need the most support. This feature will provide transparency and clarity into the data that factored into the student status, ensuring that you're able to make educated decisions about next steps for the students. We began our client technical preview for this feature earlier this year, and we're learning lots and expect many great improvements and changes as we continue development of this feature throughout the year. With that, I will hand back over to Mike. Yes. Thank you, Jesse. So to close things out, I just wanna talk through some of the updates that are coming to the learning management system. We'll talk about a couple of partnerships that we have in the works as well as some updates that are coming to the assignment experience for faculty. First, I wanna talk down or talk through LockDown Browser. LockDown Browser is an optional add on that you will have the ability, to utilize if you so choose, that prohibits students from being able to access outside resources while taking online high stakes exams. This particular partnership will allow students to download the Respondus browser and allow the assessment to open in that browser, given that the teacher has, created the assessments with that particular functionality in mind. We don't have an exact timeline to relay for this particular feature, but we're working very closely with Respondus to bring this to you all as quickly as possible. Keeping in line with a couple of other partner updates that we have, we're increasing our LTI 1.3 partner portfolio. For example, we're taking a look at Microsoft and some of the LTI connections that they leverage with things like Microsoft Teams assignments and Microsoft OneDrive. With Microsoft Teams assignments, teachers will be able to go into our learning management system and leverage the Teams UX to create their assignments. Once those assignments have been created in Teams, they can be linked back to our grade books and allow for grade syncing to occur. That way, whether you are updating the grades in Teams or in our learning management system, you can ensure that those values will always remain congruent between the two different value cases. Additionally, we're adding in the ability for faculty and students to manage their OneDrive files from the class page and while creating or submitting assignments. This is gonna be a really deep integration with Microsoft OneDrive through the LTI and the point through standard. So we have a lot more coming on those two, so be on the lookout. They're in very early phases right now, but we are very excited to announce our partnership with Microsoft. Additionally, we have two other learning tools that are being worked on, Turnitin and StoryboardMax. If you're familiar with either of those two, third parties, just know that their LTI 1.1 connections, will be expanded upon with the 1.3, implementation. So more to come on both of these. If you are interested in hearing about any other potential learning tools, feel free to reach out to me at michael.norse@blackcloud.com. We definitely wanna bring more and more tools into our portfolio next as time goes on. Finally, for the learning management system, we have one last update to announce, and that is an overhaul of our assignment experience for faculty. Every year, we release a survey into our database and try to understand challenges and pain points that faculty and teachers are experiencing while learning or while using our learning management system. Overwhelmingly, one piece of feedback that we hear is that our assignment experience, both from the creation standpoint and the evaluation standpoint, could use a little bit of work when it comes to the workflow itself. Oftentimes, the feature that we provide are more than sufficient for teachers' workflows, but the actual screens themselves and how we lay out those options, we don't have to be desired. So because of that, we're taking a look at both of these experiences and trying to streamline both of these processes for faculty. For example, when teachers are creating an assignment, we're going to allow them to set more default values. That way they can say, if I always do online submissions, I wanna ensure that every time that I create an assignment that the online submission option is marked by default. We wanna help teachers and faculty save as much time as humanly possible. And through those predetermined default values, that's one way in which we'll be doing so. Additionally, we wanna make sure that teachers don't have to scroll as much. We'll be servicing all required fields for the assignment creation process in one screen. That way faculty don't have to scroll nearly as much to find those required fields and ultimately create the assignments that they need. Like I mentioned, we are not just updating the creation screen. We're also updating how teachers go about evaluating assignments. So a couple of, things that we are taking a look at, again, all centered around saving faculty time where possible. We are giving them the ability to automatically load student submissions within the UX. No longer will teachers have to necessarily click on a link to load the student work. Additionally, we'll be loading the student work and the evaluation options side by side. So that way faculty can look at the grading material and what the student submitted, and compare and contrast in real time versus having to scroll up to go to the evaluation portion and having to scroll down to actually see what the student has submitted. We also wanted to take smaller screens in mind. We know that faculty typically are leveraging laptop screens or smaller devices like iPads when doing their evaluation. So because of that, we really wanted to make sure that this particular screen was as responsive as human possible. We really wanted to create a more ergonomic gradient experience even while using those smaller devices. So there's more to come with this particular update. Again, no timeline to relay as of this exact moment, but be on the lookout for further communications when it comes to this particular project. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and pass it over to Julia to talk through some updates that we have for billing management. Thanks, Mike. Hi, everyone. My name is Julia Messick, and I'm the product manager for Blackbaud Billing Management. I've been at Blackbaud for twenty one years, and I'm based in Charleston, South Carolina. The billing management team has been working on a lot of great enhancements that we'll cover. First, we'll talk about what we have recently delivered. If your school uses the generate late charges functionality, we recently made some enhancements. So before, it you see that the billing clerk would click on the option to generate late charges, and, a process would run and the late charges would generate or potentially they wouldn't, and we wouldn't give you a lot of details around what happened. So now what happens is you're able to have more of a wizard experience where you click on the option to generate late charges. We provide you with, options for how to calculate the late charge as of a specific date. We show you your option for how you have the late charge configured. And then most importantly, we give you a preview of which students would receive the late charge and then also a list of exceptions and the reason why the late charge couldn't be generated. For schools that are utilizing Blackbaud and the online payment form in the payer portal with, billing management, you've probably noticed the recent disbursements tab within billing management. This tab is actually pulling in the disbursement information from Blackbaud, saving you a trip, from going into Blackbaud to get all of that information. This is especially helpful for reconciliation. We are showing you all of the payments from, billing management grouped into the disbursements. You're not having to print out the, disbursement report, pull out your ruler, and, line up the payments from billing management matches up with those from the disbursement report. We're showing you all of that within billing management so you can create your journal entry within FE NXT. We recently released the ability for you to reverse some transactions. We have more on the way. You'll hear me talk about that in just a minute. So for posted charges and for posted payments, you now have the option to reverse those. Before, you would have had to create offsetting charges to create the reversing entries in your general ledger, which, of course, creates clutter and then confusion for students when they're looking at their statements. With the option to reverse, we handle that a lot more gracefully, so that those reverse entries no longer appear on student statements or get factored into balance calculations. For those of you who are using autopay and payment plans, you now have the option to have students enroll in autopay during the contract process. So on a payment plan within billing management, you have the option to mark whether or not payment plan autopay is required or optional. And then when students are going through the contract process, they can choose to, enroll in autopay. If it's optional, they'll be forced to enroll in autopay if it is required. Again, if your institution is using payment plans for students, you're now able to edit the individual due dates if a student needs a little more time making their payment. Before, you would have probably either just made a note that they need more time for their payment plan payment, or you would have probably deleted the payment plan, added it back with, an exception for the due date. Now you're able to just edit that due date, and that'll take care of that for the student. We have some endpoints available now in Sky API. They are in a tech preview mode. So if you have a developer account or if you are a Sky developer, these are there out in preview mode. This would allow, third parties to write integrations to billing management. Right now, it's to add charges to the system. So think point of sale or school store or any other, third party tool that you would want to use to get charges into the system. You can do that pretty easily today with add charges to group, but using the API, of course, cuts down on some steps, so those charges can come in automatically based on whatever interval works for you. Alright. Let's take a look at some changes that we are working on. So you might have noticed that out in the payer portal, we have been doing some changes to modernize the look and feel. We recently released a small update that used our latest version of, Sky UX just to give it the modern theme. We've got some changes that'll be coming soon that introduces this accounts tile so that students have a better idea of the breakdown of their activity so they can see a breakdown of tuition versus any incidental charges on their account. Speaking of incidentals, we're introducing another type of autopay. We've had payment plan autopay. We're gonna be introducing autopay for incidentals. So anything outside of the payment plan or tuition that you're billing for, students would be able to sign up for autopay and have that amount drafted from their account. We plan and have an early adopter program for incidental autopay, and I'm gonna drop an an EAP interest form into the chat now. So if that's something that your organization is interested in participating in, you can fill out that form, and we will be in touch. I mentioned earlier that we added the ability for users to reverse posted payments and posted charges. We're going to be giving the same treatment to credits and enrollment deposits coming up soon. So for those transactions that have been posted, you'll be able to reverse those as well. We give you a few places in the system to either bulk add or roll over payment plans. So we wanna give users the ability to bulk delete payment plans since we know mistakes happen. So soon from the payment plan list, users users will be able to delete payment plans from there as well. We're making some small changes, that will save a lot of time from the add payments to group and add credits to group feature. We're adding the ability to restrict what those transactions apply to. So you can have them apply like they do today, which would apply to the oldest charge first, or you can force the application to specific billing items. Or if the student's on a payment plan, you can force the application to, the payment plan installment. Our statement recipients tile is going to be getting a bit of a face lift. So, all of the functionality will remain the same. However, it'll get a little more clearer for situations where you have additional payers for student accounts. You'll be able to have today, we count those as third party payers, but in the future, you'll be able to mark them as additional payers. And then that option combined with this next feature actually, I combined it in here on the same slide. This option combined with the change that we're making in conjunction with the core team, you'll be able to give access to third party payers or additional payers. They'll have access to the payer portal without giving them either the student role or the parent role. You don't wanna, give access to everything for parents who are making payments on student accounts like you would have to do today. So you'd be able to put them in the payroll, which would give them access to only the billing area. And then finally, we have been working on our refunds project for quite some time. Later this year, we will be able to roll that out. Refunds will give the billing clerk a first class way to track refunds back to payers and to students. So in the case where you have, an excess of financial aid that you need to refund or maybe you had a student that withdrew and you need to track the refund there, today you would enter an offsetting transaction. In the future, you would be able to track that in a first class way with a refund record. And with that, I wanna thank you on behalf of the product management team for attending today's product update briefing and hearing about all of the things that our team has been working on. Have a good rest of your day.