News

9/21/2020 – 10/2/2020

I use this blog space to share updates to the college databases. This post is a little light in that area since we’ve committed a substantial amount of time supporting our Axiom implementation. This will be a 3rd party system to provide robust budget planning and reporting tools. Our part in this process is providing institutional data that will stand up the Axiom instance.

We are also continuing to build the Faculty Effort tool in the budgets database. This system will provide simpler tools for the fiscal office to track budget allocations for faculty pay and provide tools for generating snapshot reports and getting review and approvals.

Work Complete

Budgets

• (50% Complete) Work continues on Faculty Effort feature. Initial implementation of Approval system with automatic assignment based on budgets. Added logic for “payroll home budget” automatically being assigned to unallocated amounts. Refine display of previous reports to pick the “current” report for any given faculty + time period.

Student

• (Complete) Fixed previous advisor field. This field is displayed when looking at the record for a student that completed their program. However when student’s record included their majors from other UW units, we didn’t have a complete record which was mistakenly hiding the previous advisor field.

TREQ Travel & Requisitions

• (Complete) Add message to Not Authorized page with instructions about requesting access through edfiscal@uw.edu.
• (Complete) Add counts for specific buckets in Pending Tasks section. Break down this list by Department Approvals, Budget Approvals, and Tasks. For each count breakdown, we’ve added a report of the specific orders.

8/24/2020 – 9/18/2020

Work Complete

Apply Portal

• (Complete) Add new essay questions for the ECFS and ECO applications. Reworked the applicant view of the application forms to make the steps prettier and clearer. Improve the help pages. Restructured the faculty/reviewer view in Appreview for undergraduate applications to better display important application material, including the new essay questions. Improved the Apply Portal configuration tool, clearly label Apply steps that are related to specific programs.

Appreview

• (Fixed) Changing an application’s decision now refreshes the icon and color coding in the workflow bar right away.

Budgets

• (40% Complete) Work continues on new Budgets database feature to provide Faculty Effort reporting with a review and approval workflow. Budget Allocation forms are created and views added to see those Allocations in the context of a faculty or in the context of a budget. Started system to snapshot allocations for a specific report.

NARF

• (Complete) Add a front page indicator that says when an Appointment Requests has notes. These frequently are requests that are held up or need special handling. The indicator is a yellow badge at the right edge with the number of notes.
• (Complete) Change quarter logic to payroll dates. The “Other Requests” section that shows on an Appointment Request detail page assumed the upcoming quarter was the “current quarter” too soon, especially between Summer and Autumn. This lets other appointments for a worker stay visible longer.

Student

• (Complete) Remove student search suggestions. This was meant to be a helpful suggest-as-you-type, but poor suggestion results and cursor trapping caused it to hide actual full search results.
• (Complete) Add validation to forms with file upload fields to avoid the form being submitted before user selected a file.
• (Complete) Add file validation to handle unexpected errors using the student Husky Card photos.

TREQ

• (? LAUNCHED!) The college’s new Travel & Requisitions went live on September 1.
• (Complete) TREQ now has an “Advanced Search” that allows users to target specific fields, similar to search in Purchase Path.
• (Complete) Added a front page indicator that an Order is in the “On Call” queue. These are shared responsibilities, brought to the groups attention or handle by next available support resource.
• (Complete) Added a report of Orders by user. This view will show Creating, Complete, Canceled as well as Orders still in progress. This is largely a support tool used by the fiscal team.
• (Complete) Add Pending Email report and log. TREQ sends email notifications on a delay to reduce unneeded emails. This report allows fiscal team to see status of the notification system.
• (Complete) Add reports that show projects ready to be closed and OneDrive folders ready to be deleted. Used by fiscal team to manage TREQ order lifecycle.

8/10/2020 – 8/21/2020

Work Complete

Budgets

• (Complete) The college Budgets database has been extracted to its own project. This allows for easier upgrade and deployment without impacting other systems. We have taken advantage of this to upgrade its UI framework and form handling subsystem. This also opens our path toward development on new Budget/Fiscal features.

NARF (Hiring)

• (Complete) Improve search bar, slide-down-dialog, behavior. The search used to cause browser recent suggestions to appear on top of the search input and it hid itself automatically when it lost focus. These behaviors have been cleaned up.

TREQ (Travel & Requisitions)

(99% Complete) TREQ is on schedule to go live September 1, when it will replace Purchase Path as the college’s fiscal request tracking system.

• Fixed Sent Back orders were displayed as “Creating” on home page report.
• Added “Items” as a step in order creation for the “Pay an Invoice” order type.
• Removed “Ariba” label on the external Reference # input. We will use this field to track Ariba references, but also ProCard, ITC, etc.
• Add Tax Helper for items. This tools automatically subtotals all other items and multiplies that subtotal by the Seattle sales tax rate. But both the subtotal and tax rate can be modified or the tax amount entered directly.
• Added page that provides additional explanation of the Order Types including expanded definition and common examples of each type.
• Add report of all Orders with Gift Cards.
• Add report of all Orders with Food.
• Add report showing pending tasks / approvals by user the task is waiting for.
• Changed Gift Card prompt to “Research Subject Payment” (RSP). Gift Cards is one payment method for RSP, checks is the other.
• Add section jump links with counters at the top of the home page.
• Fixed hard coded dates appearing in Travel Items form.

Student

• (Fixed) It was possible to submit the Add Student to Group form without selecting a group which caused an uncaught error. The form is updated to validate and provide useful help message.

7/27/2020 – 8/7/2020

Work Complete

Courses

• (Complete) Add Asynchronous field to course offering plan record. This is an additional internal plan field to help the college understand and communicate how courses are operating during the COVID Recovery period. Provide admin edit page to explain and change this value.
• (Complete) Rework Review Plan tool. This tool helps instructors review and approve the plan for their course offerings and to enter Room Schedule Preferences. Moved this tool to its own page to keep focus on relevant information. Cleaned up presentation of course offerings to make it easier to read and fit better on various screen sizes. Re-implemented review forms so they appear in a single place in a readable linear layout. Added Asynchronous form as a step in Review Plan process. Removed the comment field (this was rarely used and didn’t have a well established workflow behind it), added instructions to send email for changes.

NARF

• (Complete) New Employee Feature. Add flags to home page view, highlight appointment requests where worker is new employee or rehire. Add New Employee Report showing workers with new employee flag that are starting in the current time frame.  Add New Hire Orientation to HR Processes section, allow date to be entered when this step was resolved.

Test Scores

• (Fixed) SAT basic skills scores were showing up without pass/fail evaluation. Review ACT/SAT pass/fail evaluation system. Add new UW score coding to our system.

In Development

These projects are being worked on, but are not yet in systems of record in production. If you have interest in these projects let me know and we can set up and demo and/or requirements gathering meeting.

TREQ – Travel & Requisitions

(97% To Release) Demos, training, testing continues on the new Travel & Requisitions application. The fiscal team is working on support material. We are on track for a general release in early September.

• (Complete) Reorder Per Diem links. The more useful link is now first and has a simple label. The link to the UW Travel Policy document is moved to end and has a more specific label.
• (Complete) Reorder the folder name suggestion, TREQ00099, and OneDrive button. Change labels on these elements so it is easier for user to understand they should copy folder name before going to OneDrive.
• (Complete) Clean up user permissions on Tasks. Some buttons were made available at wrong times.
• (Complete) Close Project button now updates when Tasks are modified. Interacting with Tasks can cause the Order to be Complete, at which point the Close Project button becomes usable without needing to refresh page.
• (Complete) Change application menu to display as single vertical stack. Add menu items for Home page and About so the menu is not empty, regardless of user permissions.

Budgets

(50% To Release) We have new projects coming to help the fiscal team provide you more accessible information. To facilitate this we are moving the “Budgets” college database into its own project (it currently lives within our large general college EDUC database). Making Budgets its own project simplifies our development and deployment processes and gives us a good space to build new tools.

• (Complete) Migrate Budget related concepts to their own database schema.
• (Complete) Get existing Budget database pages working in the new system. Migrate routes, controllers, views.
• (Complete) Remodel Person (an EDUC database concept) to Budget Contact. Implemented system where Budget Contact can be updated from EDUC, indirectly from UW institutional person records.
• (Complete) Get nightly maintenance updates
• (Complete) Convert to Bootstrap 4.

On Course

(2% To Release) We are working on a refresh of the Courses college database. Goals of the refresh:

1. Modernize the code base so it is easier to work on and more reliable.
2. Fix the data structure to make enhancements possible (e.g. Courses, Joint Sections).
3. Move to standard terminology and use that consistently. (e.g. Section instead of Offering)
4. Make the user interface prettier, easier to understand and easier to use.
5. Provide more action oriented interfaces (this needs review, follow up). Do more to facilitate communication between actors in the course planning and time schedule construction process.

Work completed this cycle.

• (Complete) Implement new model for course curriculum that gives us a place for grouping comparable sections (e.g. Wildcards) while correctly attaching UW Curriculum data (which changes over time).
• (Complete) Build a maintenance process that imports official UW Curriculum data and updates the On Course data model. Run this update from the UW EDW instead of the Student Web Service. This process runs in seconds on On Course, takes several minutes in Courses, and has access to new useful fields.

July 13 – 24, 2020

Work Complete

Appreview

• (Complete) Revise the header and review progress bar that appears at the top of the application detail page. This revision makes the page tidier and highlights important properties and the overall status of the application at a glance.
• (Complete) Email templates can be archived. Email templates, used to send email to applicants, have built up over the years of system use. Administrative users may now mark templates as archived which removes them from most views, but allows then to be recovered or viewed if needed.
• (Complete) When a user creates a new Rubric as a copy of an existing Rubric they are listed as the Creator of the new Rubric (previously it would copy the source’s creator).
• (Complete) Remove old comment implementation. Recent features in Appreview and Student have implement subject specific Notes fields. The shared comment store is no longer used and the related database schema and code has been deleted from the project.

Recruitment

• (Complete) Fix minor error that was causing debug messages to appear on administrative web page. Software upgrade caused a previously silenced warning to generate visible warnings.

Student

• (Complete) Fix the tool to add faculty as Advisors in Student. Removed the appointment type field, this supported a report no longer provide and the field is better sourced from UW institutional data.

TREQ – Travel & Requisitions

(95% Complete) Progress continues polishing TREQ and moving toward a launch. Thank you to faculty and staff who have helped us test the system and provided invaluable feedback: Lynn D, Michael L, Paul M, plus the team in the fiscal office!

• Suggest the Department Approver based on Business Contact in the college Budgets Database.
• Reformat Create Project / Trip page so that help can be displayed side by side with form.
• Assign Project’s OneDrive folder during order creation. Make Upload Files an order creation step for every order type.
• Add a copy button to the suggested folder name, make it easier to create the right folder in OneDrive.
• The “Travel Reimbursement” button on the home page checks if the user has any existing trips with Pre-Authorization that are still open and suggests adding new reimbursement request to those existing trips.
• Add Help to the budget entry tool.

Infrastructure

• (Complete) Fix a life cycle problem in our HTML Form handling library that appeared when using the form as a back end for API requests. Form error messages failed to be cleared.
• (Complete) Upgrade the college techwiki to current version of its software. Remove the coewiki, this content has now been migrated to other systems, generally the main college website.
• (Complete) Set up GitHub Organization for COE Technology. GitHub is now UW’s preferred vendor for remote version control repositories and UW maintains a site license and creates delegated Organizations helping with branding and ownership issues. We have done the administrative and technical setup of our GitHub organization and will being migrating repositories.
• (Complete) Additional package upgrades in multiple projects, following upgrade to PHP 7.4.

Work Complete

7/6/2020 – 7/17/2020

Applicant Review

• (Complete) Fixed an administrative tool for configuring prerequisites per teacher certification endorsement subject. Clicking an existing item was not properly loading it into the Edit/Delete form.

Test Scores

• (Complete) Fixed an administrative tool for configuring test scores as evidence of proficiency for teacher certification. Clicking an existing requirement failed to provide access to that requirement’s evidence rules.

TREQ

• (90% to launch) Our major college database project the last few months has been a new system we are branding TREQ (Travel + Requisitions). Our goal is to provide a streamlined tool for approval and service requests with the college’s fiscal team. A major workflow this system will support is Travel Pre-Authorization and Reimbursement. We expect to have TREQ generally available for college faculty and staff by the end of July.

Infrastructure

• (Complete) Upgraded EDUC project (Appreview, Student, Budgets) to Laravel 7. Upgraded dependencies. Applied updates to all server environments.
• (Complete) Fix several bugs with our internal library for HTML form support. Fixes for changing input labels, marking and validating required fields.
• (Complete) Upgraded college web servers to PHP 7.4.
• (Complete) Reviewed version control systems and select a provider and organizational strategy going forward. This was instigated by UW site license with GitHub and technology team changes.