Is anyone else wondering where the first half of 2019 went? Between the CollegeSource Annual Conference and the summer conference season, I feel like year has just flown by. The last enhancement release we had for TES was in November 2018, when we announced new enhancements to the equivalency export feature. That seems like a long time since without any news but, trust me, we have been busy. Here are some highlights of what’s been going on lately with TES.
TES Moved
In late 2018, we decided to move TES out of our own private cloud and “move in” with our buddies Transferology and uAchieve in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This was a giant undertaking and took until mid-April to get everything packed up and shipped to the new location. We are now happily running in an environment that easily allows us to increase performance based on the number of users in TES and has multiple levels of fail-over for uninterrupted service.
TES Dashboard
First introduced at our Annual Conference in June, we are excited to release the account dashboard in TES. The dashboard is a single screen where you can view information regarding your account. The dashboard consists of 5 parts which are highlighted below. Since June, our certified TES Administrators have been testing and providing feedback. This new feature is currently available as an option in User Preferences as a default home page, but we will be adding a direct link to the dashboard on the Manage tab on August 14.
Where are equivalencies distributed?
This section of the dashboard displays an infographic showing where you have equivalencies established across the United States. The larger the bubble, the more equivalencies you have to that institution/region. This can help your areas of focus in regards to building equivalencies and suggest places where you might want to proactivity build equivalencies to attract new out-of-state students with Transferology. There is also a list of the top 3 schools for which you have equivalencies established.
User Activity
User Activity is an overview of who is using your TES account. You can see the total number of users in your account, the number of users who are active when the page loads, the number of users who have logged in this week, the number of users who have not logged in for 30 days, and the number of users who haven’t logged in in the past year. Currently, you can not find out who these specific users are from the dashboard, but if you have a high number of users who haven’t logged in over a year, you might want to make sure they still require access. TES Administrators can see data for individuals using the Manage: Usage Statistics screen, and email all the users in their account at once using the email user(s) feature in User Management.
My Tasks
My Tasks gives some insight into the Evaluation Tracker workflow usage in your account. You get a quick look to see if you have any evaluation tasks to do. If you have evaluation tracker user rights, you can click the number next to the “Evaluations To-Do” and be taken to My Evaluations in the workflow. We also included some stats for your account. You can see the total number of evaluations in your account, the number of open tasks, and the total number of closed evaluations.
Account Activity
The account activity graph shows the number of actions taken by all TES users in your account and compares your own individual actions for a 1-year time period. For every action you take in TES (view a course, view a profile, create a task, create an eq, etc.), an activity is recorded for your user account. In the example shown, you can see that most of the usage in my account is from me, except in May when I switched which user I logged in with. Hopefully your account looks a little more diverse than mine.
New catalogs for schools to which we have equivalents.
This is a running list of schools with whom you already have at least one equivalency that recently had a new catalog added to TES. To get this information, TES checks against all the equivalencies in your account to see if a new catalog has been added for any of the schools associated with source courses. The dashboard report displays the 10 most recent institutions that have had catalog updates in TES. It does not check to see if those catalogs are the new “new” catalog just a new catalog for TES. So, if CollegeSource were to add a missing catalog form 1998 for an institution, it would show on this list even though it is older. If you click the name of the institution, you will be taken to that institution’s page in Course Finder. This is a running list, so if you want to stay on top of when new catalogs get added, check back often.
Course Change Explorer: Existing EQ Indicator
If you use Course Change Explorer to stay on top of changes at other institutions, you will love this new feature. Starting on August 14, you will be able to see which courses have an existing equivalency stored in TES on all three sections of Course Change Explorer. This means you can easily check and see which course equivalencies need updated, capped with an end date, or created. You can also directly edit the existing course equivalencies by clicking the check mark in the EQ column. Want to see all the courses that have an existing equivalency? Simply double-click the EQ column. This feature is only available for users with Equivalency Manager rights. All other users with access to Course Change Explorer will see a blank EQ column.
Updates Coming to Password Requirements
Beginning on August 14, TES will begin enforcing the case sensitivity of users’ passwords. This simply changes the fact that, previously, if your password was “Password123” you could use “password123” or “PASSWORD123” and still be able to log into TES. On August 14th you will only be able to log into TES using the correct casing of your password (e.g. “Password123”). If you are not sure what your password’s case setting is, but can still login to TES, you can change your password in User Preferences. If you are unable to login to TES, you can use the Forgot My Password feature to request an email with a reset link.
In addition to enforcing case sensitivity, TES will now require you to use at least one uppercase character and one lowercase character in your password. All new passwords will need to meet the following criteria.
- Passwords must be a minimum of eight characters
- Passwords must contain at least two letter characters and two number characters
- Passwords must contain at least one uppercase character and at least one lowercase character
- Passwords may contain special characters except for spaces, forward slashes, semi-colons, or sequential hyphens
Updated TES VPAT
We recently updated the TES Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) to version 2.3 which was released in April 2019. If you need a copy of this document for compliance purposes, you can view the TES VPAT here. The TES Accessibility Roadmap can be found here.
More to come
There are still a few new enhancements on their way in 2019! Keep following the newsletter and the enhancements feed for updates on the latest features for TES.
If you like these enhancements, let us know. Feel free to share any ideas you have regarding these using our contact form or in the comments below.
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