Officially launched in September 2013, TES (the Transfer Evaluation System) Version 3.0 featured date range equivalencies, duplicate equivalency removals, and other user-requested enhancements. There weren’t many changes in the overall appearance of TES, but rather a new set of powerful tools were released along with robust changes behind the scenes. I still love the picture that was used at the time of launch; TES 3.0 certainly provided college advisors and transfer specialists with transfer solution superpowers.
Blast from the past: An ad for TES 3.0 from its launch in 2013
TES 3.0 hailed over 60,800,000 million courses and 72,000 catalogs, with about 22,160 active users. In 2013, I was one of those users. At the time, I had been working for a college in the Midwest that had somewhere over 1 million course equivalencies built in TES. It was something we were extremely proud of, and the president of our college even mentioned it in the state of the college address. This number was dramatically reduced once we were able to utilize the new date range fields, a feature that drastically made maintenance easier. Comically, as our numbers were efficiently reduced, we could no longer brag to others about having over 1 million course equivalencies anymore—but for good reason!
TES has seen amazing growth in its time leading up to today. Just in terms of the data that it hosts, TES has grown to include over 94,500,000 million course descriptions and 112,000 catalogs. The number of active users has grown close to 32,000. It has seen the ability to add PDF Attachments, batch edit established equivalencies, provide better account maintenance, along with many other enhancements over the years. It even received a fresh facelift when we rebranded our product lines this last year. However, in order to stay current and to be able to provide additional functionality for our users, it’s time to sunset TES 3.0.
In October 2017, CollegeSource officially launched TES 4.0. To ease the adjustment for users, we moved the 3.0 version of TES to another accessible site and ran the two interfaces concurrently, though we stopped development and enhancements for v3.0. Our focus has been on addressing the feedback from users to improving TES 4.0. Now that you all have had months to submit issues and we have addressed a majority of concerns and requests, we feel it is time to officially retire TES 3.0. On March 22, 2018, we will be saying fond farewell and shutting down the 3.0 site. If you try to access it at tes3.collegesource.com, you will automatically be redirected to the 4.0 site.
If your institution utilizes the public view feature in TES, don’t worry. It will still function properly so long as you did not update it to have a tes3.collegesource.com link. We have started to reach out to clients that we’ve found to be referencing the older public view links and are in the process letting them know that an update is needed to take advantage of the new public view format.
I know I share the sentiments of many of our TES users. We are all going to miss TES 3.0. During its life span, I personally went from implementing the product at my institution to now actually working on the product for CollegeSource. Not to mention a move half-way across the country. Take it from me: while change is sometimes scary, it can lead to great things if you give it a chance.
If you discover any functional items that do not work for you in TES 4.0, please reach out to us. We have been actively working to address concerns via training and feature development. We also have many new enhancements planned, so it’s going to be an exciting future for TES 4.0.
Please join us on March 22, 2018, at 7PM PST as we raise a glass (and shed a bittersweet tear) to TES 3.0 in its glorious retirement. Not to fret, though, as the new TES 4.0 is here, and it’s only going to get better every day.
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