News and Blog
September 2007

Escape Online Status Report
Dateline: Roseville - September 2007

September is the month for our annual report, and so we published this at the beginning of the month. We sent it out to quite a few people, but then realized we should announce it here on Beyond Escape as well.

It includes every activity (done, in programming, yet-to-be developed), listing any outstanding issues. It is intended to be an honest assessment of what we have completed and what remains to be completed, as of the last week in August 2007. The good news is how much of the system is DONE!

Get your own copy of the report...

If you would like to read this report, you can email us and request a copy. We are happy to share this information with our customers and prospects.

Once your request is received, we will quickly email a PDF to you. Please remember, this document is considered confidential and is not meant to be shared with other people except with our permission.

Placer COE Implementation -- A Day in the Life
Dateline: Roseville - September 2007 - Kathy Carlson

With the Escape HR implementation completed in early summer and all 24 districts now live on HR, the implementation team has moved on to Phase II - Payroll.

The Phase That Pays!!

The payroll system setup is complete and employee payroll setup has been imported. We are currently training large groups (30 or more users) to complete the verification and testing. All 21 districts are on the payroll and working together.

Users were thrilled to see all of the functionality Escape Online provides. Lora Sutherland, a Credentials Analyst, said, "We are very excited about the Escape implementation. The software has amazing capabilities to perform advanced credential tracking and auditing of assignments."

Check out what it is like to live a "day in the life of the Placer implementation."

In the morning we begin with a large group, nearly 50 people. Here I'm leading a walk-through of both system and employee payroll setup. We have plenty of time for questions and answers.

We work up a pretty good appetite learning the new Escape system. Placer COE uses a variety of caterers and really treats the users right!

In the afternoon, it is all "hands on training." We move over to the lab, where users login to their real database on the production system and begin working with payroll setup.

This is a fun time, seeing so many people using the Escape system. Several people from both Escape and Placer COE assist the district users.

There is a lot to like about this implementation, but one of my favorite aspects is how the County staff listens to the district users.

During Phase I, feedback was encouraged about the learning and data entry/verification process. Based on this feedback, we have changed the structure of our training, and it is paying off (pardon the pun).

It's great to be working with a customer that wants each part of the implementation to keep getting better.

140+ Ventura County Users Come to Escape Online Presentation
Dateline: Roseville - September 2007 - Carole Williams

This week we had an opportunity to demonstrate Escape Online 5 to groups of users at the Ventura COE. In the morning we had more than 70 finance/purchasing people. In the afternoon, about the same number of HR/Payroll staff. Our guests were from many of the districts in the county, as well as COE staff.

It was really great to be showing the system to so many end users, and as you can see by the picture below, the Finance group is giving us the thumbs up sign!

Three small County districts are now live, and plans are being developed to take the rest of the districts live on Escape Online 5 during the remainder of 2007 and 2008.

A Manager of Business Services from one of the districts that will go live in a later phase said, "Our district is very excited about Escape Online and we are anxiously awaiting installation so that we can begin to use it! Thanks for the demo... it was great!"

Brand new software for the business of education
Dateline: Roseville - September 2007 - Leslie Bailey

For the past several years, Escape Technology has been directing its development efforts toward Escape Online. If there was a request for new functionality from our Escape Classic customers, we put that suggestion forward to Escape Online.

So it is no surprise that many Escape Classic customers think that Escape Online is simply a "new release."

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Simply replacing Escape Classic functionality with a Windows front end would have been a very short term solution. What we did along the way was ask ourselves, "What does the very best school business system look like? How does it work?" Then, we asked, "Where do our users have trouble? How can we improve everything to make it simpler for the user?"

In a nutshell, we took the best and improved the rest!

Increase Productivity

A lot of the functionality is the same, because school business needs to complete the same tasks regardless of the program used.

The difference lies in how you complete those tasks. Implementing Escape Online is like going from a stick shift to an automatic. You still get to your destination, the gears still shift in the same order, but the drive is much smoother and much easier to learn.

For example, payroll processing in Escape Classic required 27 separate steps. In Escape Online, there are 7 steps. For year end processing, there were at least 11 required steps in Escape Classic. In Escape Online, it takes only 5.

But, reducing the number of steps was not enough. In much the same way Toyota created a completely new brand, Lexus, we decided to create something new, sleeker, more powerful, catering to the needs of our users.

Escape Online is a completely new program in a Windows environment with an SQL backend. It uses all of the latest features available in Windows via the .Net technology.

This Is Not an Upgrade

If this was an upgrade, we could simply give you a set of steps to follow and viola you would be ready to go. But, this is a new program, so it requires an implementation.

This means that there will be a contract, a plan, project management, site days, decisions at top-levels: all of the activities you would expect in an implementation of a brand new program.

Look to the Future

At this point, we have half a dozen implementations under our belt. And, users are loving it! They just cannot get over how much easier it is to do their job on a daily basis.

This has been a team effort. We are so thankful for those organizations that are LIVE! They were pioneers. They were good sports. We appreciate how patient and helpful they were as we worked together.

Now, we look forward to implementing all of our customers. We believe Escape Online is the best school business software on the market, and we expect it to get even better with every release.

Enjoy the ride!

Our employee self service kiosk
Dateline: Roseville - September 2007 - Bob Towery

We created this kiosk application last year, and will soon be working on implementing it to work with our system.

The impetus for the kiosk was a demo we did for a large Northern California district. They told us they had one FTE in HR/Payroll dedicated to answering queries from employees about sick leave, etc, and especially to find out how their net pay would be affected with changes to withholdings.

So working down from the top:

  • Ability for the employee to request that their address/phone be changed. This would route to HR who would approve the change and thus the fields would be updated.
  • The tax calculator. Note that we provide the information without showing any gross or net pay information!
  • Sick and vacation leave balances (not shown for this employee)
  • Benefit information, voluntary deduction information.

We foresee having a configuration screen where each of our customers can determine what information is available in the kiosk.

We already have fields in the employee record for Kiosk OptIn, Userid, Password. Only those employees that "Opt In" will have information available in the kiosk.

People that we have shown it to have also requested:

  • Ability to handle benefit open enrollment options for employees.
  • Ability to have duplicate pay stubs emailed to employees upon request in the kiosk.
  • In addition to sick/vacation balances, a listing of the last 5 usages.

We have more development to do in order to implement the kiosk.  Specifically we need to create a separate, stand alone kiosk database that contains only information that needs to be in the kiosk. We do not want to provide any web interface to our production SQL database.

Here's your chance to tell us if you like the kiosk idea, and if so, what features you would like to see available!

Just add a comment to this blog entry with your ideas, and thanks!