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College Database Updates 127

We’ve changed this blog post title to be clearer: “College Database Updates”. This post is a catch up, focusing on significant user facing changes over several months.

Applicant Review

  • Added Apply Portal question for current or transfering UW student.
  • Applicant can delete a school / institution when creating their Apply Portal application.
  • Applicant Intent (whether an admitted applicant intends to enroll) is available as a report filter.
  • Refine report filter for decisions, add “Final Decision Entered”.
  • Add report dashboards with funnel counts (applications > decisions > admits > enrolls) to home page and report pages. These dashboard can optionally display year-to-year comparisons.

CL OFEE (Effort)

  • New system launched that helps Cultivate Learning plan, review, and approve staff payroll allocations across various grant budgets. The tool is based on the college’s Faculty Effort tool, but has a different change and approval workflow.
  • Added support for cross unit (non-COE) budgets.

Budgets

  • Change user authorizations so faculty always have access to review their effort reports.
  • Add Approval All shortcut to effort reports for cases where small changes are made to a report and fiscal manager does not want to re-collect approvals.

NARF

  • Send email notifications when an appointment request is canceled.
  • Send email to HR/P administrator when a person is added as an Approver, but the system cannot automatically authorize them.
  • Add “Advanced Search” system to NARF which allows for multiple custom reporting workflows.
  • Add CSV download link to reports in NARF.
  • Approve on Behalf is disabled for HR Approvals. Only user with HR role can provide this approval.
  • Adding a Budget Number to a request causes the “Approver for No Budgets” to be removed.

OnCourse

  • Fix authorization checks for editing sections. Authorization checks were applied when deciding whether to show a user links and form, but also needed to be applied consistently to post update requests.

Students

  • People set as an advisor in Applicant Review will automatically be added as potential advisors in the Student Database.
  • Update all reports so that a count of records is included at the top of the data table.

TREQ

  • Added a link from My Orders labeled “Show More” that provides 2 years of the current user’s order history. My Orders on home page includes 90 days.
  • Added Project Owner as a search field in the Advanced Search tool.
  • Reference Numbers (e.g. Ariba reference) can be deleted.
  • Added validation of numeric values only to the Quantity field in Items form.
  • Current biennium is a setting managed by system administrator, affects budget suggestions.
  • Added CSV download to Pending Tasks report.

Infrastructure

  • All systems updated to use common error reporting system. This provides development team faster, proactive information about errors experienced by users.
  • Add input length validation to many fields across all systems. Older versions of our underlying databases would silently truncate input that was too long, our current database version now treats this as an error which is a safer response. We have gradually been moving this validation and error messages to our many existing forms.
  • Implement a logging system that automatically detects server environment and web request vs scheduled jobs and adjust logging strategies.

Technology Teaching Fellows Institute Online, June 20-August 5, 2022

Apply to become a Technology Teaching Fellow and join faculty colleagues, CTL consultants, and learning technologists at the 2022 Technology Teaching Fellows Institute! The UW Center for Teaching and Learning invites applications focused on:

  • Developing a new online/hybrid course
  • Creating an online version of an in-person course
  • Redesigning an existing online course
  • Developing interactive digital components for a hybrid or in-person course

Applications are due March 18. Learn more about the Institute, fellowship benefits, and the application procedure on our TTFI page.

New Zoom Feature

Spice up your slideshow presentations with a nice picture -in picture effect! Set your PowerPoint as your virtual background and place yourself on top of the PowerPoint. Easily move and resize your video to ensure you don’t block any crucial information. This feature will help you add an extra communication channel while people look at your slides. This feature is found under the “Advanced” tab in the “Share Screen” Zoom menu.

Better Email Spam Detection

All incoming email is automatically scanned in search of illegitimate messages (junk mail, phishing, etc.). UW IT has been working on finding a replacement for the current email filtering system. This new system will be rolled out during the month of March, and even though we do not anticipate any service interruption or negative impact, we certainly hope this will decrease undesired email messages. You can find more information about this change at the IT Connect website.

Login to Eduroam

Eduroam is a secure, encrypted Wi-Fi network available at the UW and the preferred Wi-Fi connection method for UW. As we return to our face-to-face activities, you may experience problems reconnecting with this network. This is due to recent changes in the technology used to authenticate your device. As of February 1, 2022, Connecting to eduroam via your UW NetID and password has been switched off and replaced with certificate-based authentication.

If you’re unsure if your device uses a UW NetID/password or a certificate, then we recommend you reconfigure it using our tool. Please visit our Eduroam Onboarding Guide for step-by-step instructions or click onboard.wifi.uw.edu to onboard right away.

College Database Updates 128

Work Complete 1/24/22 – 2/11/22

Applicant Review

  • (Complete) The Apply Committee tool (assign new committee members to existing applications) will not prune reviewers that have a reason other than “Committee”. For example, if you added a reviewer because they were “Mentioned by Applicant” they won’t be removed by Apply Committee.

OnCourse

  • (Complete) Student facing public view of course plan is available. The old courses database public URL now redirects to the new version.
  • (Complete) Add Meetings report that shows sections with meeting times displayed chronologically across a week.
  • (Complete) Add explanation for section letters like ?A. These are created when one section takes another section’s section id letter. When you view one of these sections an explanation is show under the header with links to help you fix it.
  • (Complete) Update Faculty Year report for Area Chairs to show a three-year view (previous academic year, current AY, next AY).
  • (Fixed) Accepting instructors in the UWTS comparison tool updates the instructor summary displayed in header and list views.
  • (Fixed) Don’t import Independent Study (IS) supervisors when updating from Student Web Service.
  • (Complete) Don’t add log messages when deleting a Note that was created from a previous log message. This is part of the Curriculum Manager’s notification and To-Do management process.

NARF

  • (Complete) Added max length attribute to section letters on Course entry form. Long values here were causing a cryptic error.

TREQ

  • (Complete) Provide system to mark users Inactive and replace them with another user on all pending orders. This system allows the fiscal team to swap out former employees in TREQ with their replacement.
  • (Complete) We no longer provide a Delete button on Department Approval cards. Functionally this was identical to Send Back (order goes back to creating and original submitter gets email, the Send Back button is still there and more clearly explains itself.
  • (Complete) Added max length attribute to item name input to keep users from adding long descriptions that don’t fit in the database field.
  • (Fixed) Returning to the project form and editing a field changed the owner to current users. This is fixed, now the original project owner is retained.

Infrastructure

  • (Complete) Update all college database user fields to support longer Shared NetIDs. New Shared UW NetIDs can be up to 20 characters long. NetIDs for people (students, faculty, staff) are still limited to 8 characters.
  • (Fixed) Corrected a redirect rule where adding a trailing slash to a URL would delete the app name (e.g. “/oncourse/”) from the URL.

College Database Updates 127

Work Complete 1/3/22 – 1/21/22

Applicant Review

  • Update report filters to follow current COE Areas. Keep TEP and Undergraduate as their own report filter group since these have their own distinct review process and timing.
  • Add “Reason” field to application Reviewers. The Reason field allows Office of Student Service to describe why a particular reviewer was added to an application. The default reason (reviewer is part of default Committee, is not displayed). Noted reviewer reasons are “Area of Interest”, “Faculty Mentioned by Applicant”, or “Referred by Other Faculty”.
  • Update to ECO application prompt.

Budgets / Effort

  • Add option to see and edit allocations that have ended. Effort module was built as a forward planning system, but real-world use cases require editing historical records.

OnCourse

  • Implement Public / Student view of course plan. This view shows limited parts of the OnCourse plan appropriate for COE students. It requires UW Login, but no specific authorization, anyone with a valid UW Login may view it.
  • Correct Joint Section representation in CSV file download.
  • Experimental report showing faculty year by area. (Area chairs would like this expanded to 3 year view.)
  • Fix “Full Term” sync with UWTS for Summer quarter.
  • Fix unexpected meeting time formats in SDB data.

TREQ

  • Gift Card acknowledgement page points users to documentation and spreadsheet template when their order includes Gift Card purchase.

College Database Updates 126

Updates deployed 12/20/2021 – 12/29/2021.

OnCourse

  • Course Variant names are displayed on report pages when section has a non-default Variant. Course Variant names are displayed in Italics with asterisk. Clicking Variant name will display the course curriculum title.
  • Removed Canceled sections from Instructor Review report.
  • Most table headers will stick at top of viewport when user scrolls through a long table.
  • Fixed table sort (by clicking headers) would stop working after changing report filters.
  • Course Fees added to detail view. Added report of sections with course fees.
  • Limit syllabus file upload types to PDF and MS Word.
  • Add Needs Room Preferences report, shows sections for an upcoming quarter where no instructor has provided room preferences. Also provides email contact list for instructors of those sections.
  • When user edits a section in a joint group the following properties are kept in sync across all sections in the joint group: instructors, meetings, section type, grading system, online code, modality, fees.
  • When a joint group has only one remaining section, the joint group record and joint status on that section is deleted.
  • Add instructor detail list to UWTS comparison page, this is useful information when resolving changes that must be entered in SDB.
  • Only update actual enrollment and SCH from UW data after SLNs have been assigned. Before SLNs this is bad data.
  • Fixed Merge Person, when multiple records for same person appear in UWTS data.
  • Update course shared data used by other college databases to use OnCourse, example: search links in NARF to resolve to OnCourse search.
  • Report OnCourse user authorization changes to college user audit tool.

Room Schedule

  • Update Room Schedule (MRBS) for School Psychology observation rooms.

Remember to Clean up Your Email Inbox

Email is considered a record containing evidence of official University business. As such, email (along with other kind of electronic records), can be part of Public Records Requests. Every UW employee is individually responsible for handling and managing these records in accordance with existing policies and procedures.

From this perspective, there are two kinds of email: Transitory and Substantive. Transitory emails can be deleted as soon as their purpose is met. Substantive must be retained following UW’s retention policies.

Substantive Content Examples Transitory Content Examples
Policy

Procedure

Approvals

Invoices/Receipts

Customized Responses

 Preliminary Draft

Routine requests

Meeting scheduling thread

Announcements, acknowledgments

Copies, automated notifications, etc

Resources

General Retention Schedule

Departmental Retention Schedule

Email Management Flowchart

Records Management Resources