Toronto, Ontario - December 2, 2005
Destiny Solutions today announced the release of a wealth of enhancements to their Destiny OneCE platform, demonstrating their ongoing leadership in the field of innovative business solutions exclusively for the Continuing Education industry. Drew Downard, VP Product remarked that, "This new release includes an abundance of features inspired by users and staff from Continuing Education and Extension Schools right across North America. While this is a very exciting release, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as the development of OneCE is an ongoing endeavor. We continue to listen to the industry's needs, add new and exciting features to our product roadmap, and are committed to continually evolve our product, so our customers can better serve their lifelong learners."
The new features span all functional areas of the system, and are summarized in the following sections.
Marketing
- Added course keyword field and search capability: Allows program or marketing users to associate "invisible" keywords with courses to enhance search capability on the Staff and Public Views. These keywords also appear as html page meta tags to improve search engine placement.
- Added description fields for OneCE marketing category entities: Editable description fields and internal notes fields were added to the Course Category, Program Area, Program Stream and Certificate entities; allowing users to manage content associated with these entities on the Public View.
- Changes to catalog export: Changes to the XML export function for generating print course catalogs including:
- Outputting the new Course Category, Program Area, Program Stream, and Certificate entity descriptions.
- Special handling for sections not assigned to entities and entities with identical names.
- Additional criteria allowing users to choose whether or not to filter the export to include only sections currently available for registration.
- Allows users to filter the export by course and section approval status.
- Allows users to filter the export to show a simple outline for catalog proofreading.
- Added student inquiry mailing label export: Allows users to generate an export of students and their mailing information, based on whether they have made an inquiry (by type or date), for the purpose of generating mailing labels.
- Added list generation by email newsletter interest: Allows marketing users to extract a list of students and their contact information that have expressed an interest in receiving email newsletters about school programs.
- Added style sheet upload: Allows users to upload XSLT style sheets and apply the transformation algorithm to the catalog and communication XML export files; formatting them for publication, or use by a mailing house.
- Enhanced marketing questions: Allows users greater flexibility and control over the placement (Public View or Staff View) of marketing questions as well as tracking the source of each individual registration and/or inquiry (i.e. Public View, phone, walk-in, etc.)
Program Management
- Enhanced Certificate Management Process:
- When students meet the minimum requirements for completion of an enrolled certificate, an automated process generates workflow tasks for assigned staff users.
- Added certificate status tracking showing when student certificates were completed, issued, and track which user made status changes.
- Allows batch printing of student certificates and corresponding mailing labels.
- New Certificate status list report allows users to query students progress towards certificate completion.
- Modification to list manager criteria allows querying of students by certificate status.
- Added certificate attributes: Allows users to associate certificates with a program office and costing unit. The corresponding program heads and program assistants, associated with the selected program office now appear on the certificate profile.
- Online enrollment Control Flag: Allows program users to specify that certain course sections are for internal enrollment only; preventing the section from appearing for registration on the Public View and flagging the "internal only" status to Staff View registration users.
- Added transcript title field: Allows user to specify an alternate name for a given course section to appear on student's official transcripts.
- Added additional instructor search criteria: Allows program users to search for instructor profiles by instructor credentials.
- Added formatting capability to instructor biographies: Allows users to use text formatting controls in publishing instructor biographies to the Public View.
- Added instructor payment method: Expanded Instructor contract payment options allow program users to pay instructors on a per-student basis.
- Added course comments and alert flag: Allows users to enter edit and remove internal comments on the course profile as well as set an alert so that other users viewing the course will check the comments. Display at top of page changed to indicate to user on any page associated with the course whether the course, section or both are flagged with an alert.
- Added section notes field: Allows program users to enter and format section specific information to appear on the Public View, enrollment receipt and in the catalog export.
- Mass email by class: Allows Staff View users to send mass emails to all of the students in a given class from the class list screen. Also, allows the users to view all emails sent (using the mass email function) to a given student on that student's profile.
Registration
- Additional credit card validation: Added CSC number validation to Staff and Public View credit card transactions.
- Added student group contact methods: Allows users to define administrative and marketing contact preferences for student groups.
- Added links to association and group details from student profile: Allows users to link to the accrediting association and student group details from a student's profile.
- Enhanced profile reports: Updated layout and additional information to increase usability and usefulness of the instructor, student, and group profile reports.
- Added candidate duplicate student report: New report allows users to query records and identify possible duplicate students using various matching criteria.
- Special request report: Allows users to query special request purchase transactions and order fulfillment status.
- Changes to LMS export: Expanded export functionality allows users to generate the export by a wider range of criteria and greater control in filtering export content.
- Changes to class grading report: Added columns allow program users to quickly identify "un-graded" students in class batches.
- Added email links on profiles: Icons on the student, group and instructor profiles allow users to easily send emails (via their local email client).
Public View
- Student View transfer and withdrawal requests: Allows students to request withdrawals and transfers from their portal and subsequently view the request status. Requests generate workflow tasks for assigned Staff View users to approve (or deny) the requests and complete the transactions.
- Public View purchasing of special requests: Allows students to purchase special requests, including: certificate & award applications, transcripts and other generic items via the Public View. Purchases generate workflow tasks for assigned Staff View users to fulfill the orders.
- Configurable Public View profile user name: Allow Public View users (students and instructors) to choose their own user ID (as opposed to a system assigned ID) for logging into the Student and Instructor Views; including a "forgot user ID" email function to allow users to retrieve their user ID via email.
- Capturing Duplicate Students: When creating a new profile on the Public View, students are prompted to confirm that they do not have an existing profile by providing some identifying information.
- Enhanced Public View "News" management: Expanded the categories and locations that can be assigned to a certain news item that is entered through the internal application and appears on the Public View.
- Dynamic sitemaps file generation and file upload: Files, called sitemaps, are automatically generated daily, to reflect the addition and removal of dynamic content on the Public View (i.e. changes in marketing categories, courses and certificates). Sitemap files can also be manually uploaded via the internal application. These files assist search engines (specifically Google) in indexing the Public View pages, especially dynamic pages that might not otherwise be crawled. The use of Sitemaps increases the coverage of pages in a site by Google.
- Enhanced Public View OneCE component integration: Improved integration of Public View components (course search and registration screens) into a school's existing web site. This new approach requires minimal changes to a school's existing web site and navigation.
Finance
- Enhanced ancillary item management: Allows users to better define, allocate and track ancillary items purchased from the school by students, which are then paid out to a third party by the school.
- Added Transaction Details by Basket Number report: Allows users (auditors) to view the details of transactions by date or transaction basket number range including all transaction basket numbers in sequence, including those that are not associated with actual processed transactions.
- Student tax refund information export: An export of relevant transaction information for a given time period to be sent to a third party processor for the purpose of generating federal tax receipts.
System Administration
- Dynamic permissioning: Allows the system administrator to define and assign roles to users and to assign permissions to view and use application components based on those roles.
- Login attempt tracking and access history report: Added database tables that track all system login attempts on the Staff and Public Views, and added a report showing system login attempts on the Staff and Public Views by date, entry point, etc.
- Added onscreen entity creation and update information: Allows users to view the time an entity was created and by which user as well as the time an entity was last modified and by which user on the respective profile of the most application entities (e.g. students, courses, certificates, etc.).
System Wide
- Added HTML help: Browser-based, context sensitive help allows users to quickly find answers to their questions.
- New HTML Text editor: A significant upgrade to the text formatting control used to edit and format certain application fields for display on the Public View. Enhanced or new features include:
- Search and replace function.
- Print and Print Preview.
- Spell checker.
- Paste from Word (Remove Word specific formatting).
- Enhanced hyperlink editing an control.
- Insert Image.
- Zoom.
- Toggle between preview, edit and html views.
- Special character library.
- Zip / Postal code lookup: Allows system administrator to define a zip / postal code lookup web site; linking to that site from all Staff View address entry forms.
- Added telephone and address types: Expanded user ability to add multiple home and foreign addresses, fax and phone numbers.
- Enhanced performance of personal and department task lists: Added time and status filters so that users can better manage their list of personal and departmental workflow tasks. The new default display shows only the most recent incomplete tasks requiring their attention.
- Added "jump-menu" and short-cut keys: Added expandable menus to provide easier access to page navigation, and added keyboard shortcuts for the most used actions. This will prevent users from having to switch between their keyboard and mouse.
About Destiny Solutions
Destiny Solutions develops higher education software to forge, manage and cultivate lifelong learning relationships. The company is revolutionizing continuing education and workforce development by providing next generation intelligence for the new knowledge economy.
Destiny OneCE™ is an education management platform that extends campus systems to empower and engage continuing education and workforce development. It extends campus systems by creating a two-way flow of information, connecting conventional education software systems with the unique business and learning requirements of continuing education and workforce development.
Our customers are leaders in continuing education and workforce development. To learn more about them, please visit us at www.destinysolutions.com.