Here’s a pic of the new Invoice Pending Fees dialog box. You’ll notice a bunch of things. First, that Populi will soon let you invoice individual pending charges on a student’s profile (as opposed to invoicing all of them at once). We’ve heard about this from many of our customers, and it’s a good, sensible feature to build in. So, that one’s in the queue.
You’ll also notice some cosmetic changes. This doesn’t look like one of our normal dialog boxes, now does it? That’s because we’ve re-styled them to make them cleaner and easier to read… and, we think, better-looking.
And maybe you’re wondering about those tabs—Registration, Admissions, Financial… what’s going on there? Well, the quick version: we’re working on a pretty comprehensive re-design of the Profile. Beyond the cosmetic changes, we’re improving the way the Profile presents and organizes a student’s (or anyone’s) information. We’re gonna post more on that in the next few weeks because the new design will affect many common workflows—for the better, we trust—and we want our customers to be ready for it.
We’re hard at work on a lot of stuff over here. We’ll be trickling out previews and longer posts about some of the changes—new features, improved features, integrations, and so on—in the coming days and weeks. But for now, here’s a work-in-progress pic that’ll tell you part of the story…
Unless you’ve been living on a boat in the middle of the Pacific with a broken radio, you’re most likely aware of Apple’s new iPad, which—as of last Saturday (April 3)—is now available to the public. One first-day-adopter, a new customer of ours, told us this morning that “Populi (like everything else) is GORGEOUS on the iPad.”
This one’s interesting to us because Washington State University is only about ten miles away from the Populi office… and because the numbers are so huge. According to this storyin WSU’s Daily Evergreen (the campus newspaper), the University is about to embark on a two-year, $15 million project to upgrade the “core information systems” to make things like the course catalog and student accounts accessible to students. One Michael Corwin, formerly of the University of Texas, will pull down $140,000 a year overseeing the project. Previously, the University had requested $1 million to “study their options”.
We looked at our pricing page and roughed out some numbers for the 25,000+ student University. Figuring they’d go for the “Large” pricing plan, WSU could have Populi for about $1.3 million a year, and in 11 years, they would have spent what they’re spending just to get their new system set up.
Now, we’re not exactly aiming Populi at the State University market, but we did want to share our “same-planet-different-worlds” moment with y’all… especially that request for a million bucks just to study the options. We’re sure Mr. Corwin’s gonna earn his salary, and we’re willing to admit that $15 million will get you some software… but 1,000,000 clams just to see what’s out there? Astonishing.
This one didn’t quite make it in with our most recent release, but here it is now: we just released Attendance Reporting! Now you can view summaries of attendance stats for all your courses in a given term. Go to Academics, and under Term, click Attendance. Drawing on the attendance records taken in individual courses, the table shows you each student and how many presents, tardies, absents, etc. they’ve accumulated that term. Filter the table down to see students who fit particular criteria (over a certain number of absences, for instance), and export them to a spreadsheet or email them all with one click. We’ve found that a lot of schools needed this sort of tool, and we’re pleased to get it out there to them.
We’re pleased to announce the release of a whole new section of Populi: the Bookstore. And hand-in-hand with Bookstore: Credit Card Processing!
Bookstore gives you all the tools to run your college bookstore, online and at the counter. Anyone can shop at your online storefront; Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s an article from Infoworld that outlines the top 5 reasons “Why businesses still hate enterprise software“. What are they? According to the Infoworld survey: High cost of ownership, difficult upgrades, poor cross-functional processes, unmet business requirements, and inflexibility. The article’s links are worth following… if only to see what a nightmare giant, jargon-choked ERP software deployments can be.
This article brings to our minds 37signals’ advice to software providers that want to do things differently—have an enemy. If we have an enemy here at Populi, it’s the academic version of the bloated ERP so castigated in the survey. Massive and labor-intensive—and way too expensive for small colleges—it gives us our raison d’etre. As we see it, our job is to keep our customers happy so you’ll have better things to say about us than the Infoworld respondents did about their ERP’s.
Nick Holloway and Joseph Schoolland are at the Association for Biblical Higher Education’s63rd Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. If you’re there, too, drop by Booth 705 in the Exhibitor’s Hall. Say hello, grab some fliers (including this bit on Accreditation), and maybe drop off a business card for a shot at an iTunes gift card.
After that, they’ll be tooling around in the Southeastern U.S., visiting friends and colleges, and finally making their way back to Atlanta, Georgia for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities‘ International Forum on Christian Higher Education. The International Forum meets every four years; this one’s called Critical Breakthroughs. You’ll find Nick and Joseph (and some more iTunes cards) in the Exhibitor’s Hall in Booth 200.
