News and Blog
September 2008

New Salary Matrix Report!
Dateline: Roseville - September 2008 - Susan Dickinson

In our upcoming release of Escape Online, we are including the new Salary Matrix (Pos10) report for tracking movement on salary schedules, projecting COLA increases, etc.

We had a chance to preview this report with a customer and he said he LOVED it. He really liked how the user can choose the different info that can be included in the report.

Both Budget and Personnel department staff will love it too. They can select which rows they want to see, including: employee count, FTE, salary rate, salary schedule cell id, salary total. They can select one, two, all of them. They can also include row/column totals, or filter on job category/class and bargaining unit.


This is the report criteria for the following report. Pretty easy, huh?


Click on the report above to view the full size PDF.

Having been an independent consultant supporting school finance and payroll systems before becoming a developer here at Escape, I feel this is a powerful tool to evaluate and project labor costs. It can be very helpful during bargaining unit negotiations, at least as far as salary goes, and during the distribution of COLA monies and raises.

The Salary Matrix report can also be used as a data source for the California State J90 form. Every year the California Department of Education collects information using the "Salary and Benefit Schedule for the Certificated Bargaining Unit (Form J-90)." The J-90 requests salary schedule information from each district, including employee placement by FTE.

The CDE summarizes and publishes the information for districts and counties, employee bargaining units and school consulting agencies. It also uses the information for the School Accountability Report Cards.

Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.

Kickoff for Sonoma County Office of Education
Dateline: Roseville - September 2008 - Ramona Marshall

This week was another important “Milestone Meeting” for Escape Technology. We attended the Project Kickoff meeting at Sonoma County Office of Education, along with business staff from nearly 50 of their districts. Also attending from Escape were Bob Towery, CEO, and Carole Williams, On Site Consultant.

The planning performed by the SCOE team is really impressive. They have produced a project plan that is a result of their own experiences, plus experience gained at our other large COE implementations. I’m particularly enamored with how they have scheduled their "go live phases." They will be taking the finance module live first in four phases, breaking down the nearly 60 districts into four groups. And then they will take HR/Payroll live over four phases.

We have been working with two of their Business Systems Support Analysts, Tina Rodriquez and Rosalie Sulgit-Shay for quite some time. Recently they added a new team member, Kimberly Williams, to ensure proper coverage for all the districts during the implementation. All three will share responsibility for different portions of the implementation, all while continuing to support their legacy application.

But here’s the part that I really like: For the first finance phase going live, our Carole Williams will conduct the end user training with the Business Systems Support Analysts in attendance. Then, each of them will become responsible for all the training of the subsequent phases. Then, the process will be repeated for the four Payroll groups. This gives us a lot of confidence that the three of them will be highly trained across the spectrum of Escape Online 5 software.

My feeling that the SCOE team has given a great deal of thought to the implementation, and no doubt that is going to help it succeed.

As most of you know, I have been at Escape Technology for one year. The RFP response for SCOE was provided early in 2006, long before I arrived. There are some impressive details regarding Escape’s response and subsequent development that were explained during the meeting:

Here’s my version of the narrative that Dan Bienkowski, IT Director, shared:

The SCOE RFP covered 605 functional requests. At the time of Escape's response, The Escape Online 5 system met 515 of those (85%). By the time Escape was selected as the vendor, Escape had completed another 26, bringing the total to 541 (89%). 37 of these requirements were itemized in a contract addendum, scheduled for completion during 2009. 27 RFP items were judged to be no longer necessary. Since contract signing, Escape has completed 3 of the 37 contract items.

At this point there are 578 requirements, of which 544 have been met (94%).

My take is that Dan and his team feels Escape is being quite responsive (I would like to mention to our other customers that the three items completed are requirements for all customers. Other than items such as Sonoma County Treasurer interfaces, nearly all of the 37 items are beneficial to all customers, and many have been mentioned previously).

Escape CEO Bob Towery was also given a chance to address the group, and besides thanking them for their faith in our product and company, he had his own interesting angle, which I'll paraphrase:

When we received this RFP back in 2006, my thought was "this is the business system California school districts need! I hope that someday our system could live up to these requirements."

To then be selected after a fair, thoughtful and rigorous process is very rewarding. We have very much enjoyed working with the SCOE team as well as the districts, and are looking forward to the implementation.

Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.

Release v08.08
Dateline: Roseville - September 2008

This release is full of bonus features: favorites, quick links, a new workflow for leave transactions and a report so amazing that words will not suffice: you simply must see the screen capture of the Budget Summary Analysis report.

And, that is only three of the 79 change requests programmed and tested for this release. Completely. Yes, all change requests have been completely tested before we built the release for distribution to customers.

Performance Improvements

Every release contains performance improvements. This release includes significant improvements in the processing of the Payment Register (ReqPay05), the Check Payment Register (ReqPay03) and the Position Assignments (Pos03) reports. Not only do all three reports run faster, much faster!, they also include new summaries and additional sort options.

The register reports now include a SACS fund summary, and a sort option for grouping checks by check batch Id.

The position report has new search criteria and a sort option that includes accounts, groups by position number and sorts by a user-defined specification. While we applied major performance improvements in the last release, we discovered additional improvements when designing the new functionality.

In fact, the improvement was substantial. Our testing shows that the sort option without accounts now takes less than a minute, instead of over 15. And, the sort option with accounts takes about four and half minutes, whereas it used to take almost 23!

Favorites

In Escape Online you can practically search on any field. And, we keep adding more fields for searching. As of this release, the Vendor Requisition Search gives you over 30 fields to choose from. The Employee Search gives you over 70!

What you need is a way to "save" your frequently used search criteria. Introducing Favorites! Now, every search in Escape Online allows you to save 20 "favorites."

Simply enter the search criteria and then save it using the new Favorites menu. You can name your searches to fit your needs. When you hover over a favorite search, the status bar shows you the criteria. You can add, remove, replace and rename.

You can even set it to "auto go." That means when you choose the favorite from the menu, the search automatically launches. Or, you can set it to "wait" for you to enter more criteria.

Quick Links

When people see a web address they expect to be able to click on it and launch their web browser directly to that site. Escape Online now includes Quick Links! With quick links, users can click on web sites, addresses and email to immediately use that information.

Each of the following fields, throughout Escape Online, now include an icon that users can click on to quick link:

  • Web address - Opens your web browser to that web site.
  • Address - Opens Google Maps for that address.
  • Email Address - Launches your email program with the address in the TO field.

A Graphic Snapshot of Your Budget

The new Budget Summary Analysis report is unlike anything you have ever seen in an integrated software package dedicated to school business.

Click on the report to see a PDF. It is a sight to behold. The easy-to-read pie charts are designed to "explain" your budget to board members and the general public.

This report was requested by a superintendent in Placer County. We thought it was great idea. This is our first version, which included feedback from six organizations. We also had a request for a version that details restricted vs. unrestricted. We are open to suggestions and would like to create more reports in this theme. Contact us if you have any feedback.

Having Sites Enter Leave Transactions

This has been a dream for many districts. Wouldn't it be great to get rid of all that paper and have the schools enter leave transactions directly? The question is how do you create a workflow that is easy for the school administrators and incorporates the necessary oversight of HR.

The answer is templates! Now school administrators can create templates for their location, including all employees. Once a month, they copy the template, enter the appropriate leaves and submit for approval. Only those employees with transactions are submitted, all others are ignored.

HR can then review (and modify) the transactions before they are posted to an employee's record!

New Reports

Much of school business involves reporting. As it stands right now, Escape Online has over 300 report variations. But that is not enough! So every release, we introduce new reports.

Along with four new sort options for existing reports, this release includes three brand new reports:

  • Budget Summary Analysis Report (Budget07) - This four-page report has already been well-received in our beta tests.
  • Vendor Labels (ReqVendorLabel01) - Now you can print vendor labels from Escape Online for Avery #5160 and #5960.
  • Leave Liability (Leave04) - Districts can use this report for financial statements to value the balance of certain leaves (usually vacation).

Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.

Questions and Answers from Release v08.08
Dateline: Roseville - September 2008 - Sue Vroomman

Our recent Webinar was very well attended.  This was the biggest audience so far.  Thank you to everyone who attended. 

Terri reviewed more than 18 CR's including 3 new reports, enhancements to the AR Receipts Activity, and many fixes and modifications to the software.  Our new Favorites, Google Map, E-mail and URL links were also a part of this release.

Here are the questions from this release:

Q:  In the new search by user option in Print Invoices, where do the names come from on the drop-down?  Are they available to all types of users?
A:  The lookup shows the user names as defined in the User Setup Records. The lookup will only display users that belong to your organization.  If you are an all-org user, you will see a list of all Escape Online users.

Q:  How do we export the new Budget07 for our Board Packets?
A:  Escape Online reports can be exported to a variety of file types (PDF for Adobe Acrobat Reader, RTF for rich text format in Microsoft Word, and XLS for Microsoft Excel). To export a report, view the report (either when running the report or from My Reports) and press the export button.  You will be presented with a dialog box, where you can select the file type you would like to save.

Q:  Is there a "help" for the new Favorites option?
A:  Favorites are described in detail in Escape Basics. In the software, go to the "Help" menu, select any User Guide, under "Bookmarks" on the left side of your screen, click on "Escape Online Basics", click on "Searching for Records", click on "Saving Favorite Searches "and "create a favorite".  You could also use the "search" at the top of the PDF document and search on the word "favorites".

Q:  Is there a way to watch the Release Reviews at anytime?
A:  Yes!  We have created an archive of Release Reviews.  You can download them from our web site and listen at your leisure.  Just point your browser at http://www.escapetech.com/customercare/webinararchive.php.

Q:  What were the two patches released with version 1.08.08?  How do we get them installed?
A:  The first one we discussed in the release review is CR7443 - Clear Encumbrance, which is a patch to clear out outstanding encumbrances for year-end closing.  The second one was CR7595 - Correcting Starting Balance JE's.  You will need to contact your Escape Customer Care Representative or Project Manager to install these patches.
 

It must be hard to develop software....
Dateline: Roseville - September 2008 - Bob Towery

As many friends of Escape know I'm an avid photographer.  About 12 months ago I converted from using Photoshop to Adobe's wonderful Lightroom program.  Over the past few months the program has just gotten too slow on my 3 year old Dell 9100, which is my personal machine at home.

So I bought a new Dell high end desktop.  Fast Xeon duo core processor. 4 gigs of memory.  Three 15,000 rpm drives.  Windows Vista Ultimate.  It's such a hassle to switch computers that when I do I try to get the most performance I can, so that it can last several years.

So I get everything moved over to the new computer, and my Adobe software installed.  It's pretty fast.  I thought it would be faster, but then I'm pretty impatient ;> 

So I was a bit shocked when Lightroom locked up and refused to respond.  I was able to bring up the task manager, and I could see that Lightroom at this point had consumed 850 mb of memory:




Zooming in on this part of the screen, you can see that when Lightroom died it tried to push one last gasp onto the screen "out of memory" but it did this upside down and backward!



As everyone that uses Escape Online 5 knows, we have wrestled with memory usage due to the poor memory management employed by the version of Microsoft .Net that we are on.   We did as much as we could, and are now well into our .Net upgrade which should resolve the one remaining memory issue.

But as I stared at this frozen application, I thought "hmmmm.  Here we have Microsoft and Vista.  Their penultimate operating system.  Billions invested.  How many developers? Surely many hundred, maybe thousands?  And we have Adobe.  One of the world's largest software applicaiton companies.  This is a flagship product.  It's not new, there have been public releases of .9, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4.  All running on a very state of the art Intel based machine from Dell."

And we have two multi-billion dollar premier software companies, that can't get it right, can they?

It is comforting to know we are not the only developer facing these issues.



Students on strike over funding
Dateline: Roseville - September 2008 - Bob Towery

Sorry we have been so quiet in our blog and www.escapetech.com NEWS areas. The truth is we are very busy with our implementations and haven't taken time to update these areas.

But this story caught my eye:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26515276/

Check out the funding levels these little darlings are striking over!