V56 FEATURES

Take a look at what's coming to tass

TASS v56 is scheduled for General Release in mid-April. Here's a look into what new features and enhancements it's bringing to the platform.

Stay tuned for the Enhancement Videos to see these features in action - coming at the beginning of Term 2.

ACADEMIC REPORTING OVERHAUL

V56 marks the beginning of a multi-stage update to the functionality available in the Academic Reporting module, with an initial focus on setups and back-end maintenance.

We brought together representatives from 11 schools to form an advisory group that would help us prioritise the needs of schools in this area. With their guidance, we produced the following enhancements in this first round of development:

A new Assessment Setup program, including a new user interface and a consolidation of Result Periods, Result Formats, Objectives, Assessment Methods, Objective Groups and Comments programs.
New Upload functions
New editable grids with:

- the ability to add and delete records on the fly
- the ability to copy and paste directly into the software from a spreadsheet
- new status columns that identify new, deleted and modified records with 'rewind' functions
New 'Result Formats' user interface including:

- An editable grid supporting bulk actions and with filtering and dynamic searching options
- The ability to add objectives, objective groups and assessment methods on the fly
- Bulk delete functionality
- An enhanced cloning function
Introduction of Employee Signatures for future inclusion/display on Academic Reports
New Email templates and keywords for personalisation of communication when emailing reports to parents
Introduction of the Markbook 'Calculation Rules' program in TASS.web

In Phase 2 of this project, the webBook Markbook will be migrated into the Staff Portal, providing staff with the convenience of having all their tools in one place.

Employee/HR UD AREA Expansion

A User Definable (UD) Area is like a mini customisable database that you can create within TASS to capture school-specific information that TASS doesn’t capture natively.

User Definable Areas in Employee/HR have been expanded to accommodate up to 500 areas and support date and attachment type fields

Employee UD Areas can also be transformed into online forms to collect and gather new or updated information from employees in the Staff Portal such as COVID Vaccine certificates, or the date of last booster shot.

To further support this expansion, a new Employee Details Listing has been introduced, which includes standard filtering and export options for the Employee/HR module, and the ability to Generate Emails with new email templates and keywords.

Edstart Integration

Edstart provides simple, flexible payment plans for parents to pay back their child's school fees. When a parent signs up for Edstart, the burden of debt collection is taken off the finance team's shoulders - allowing schools to collect their money faster and more consistently.

With this new integration, parents using Edstart have a more seamless Parent Accounts experience.

Parents can apply for an Edstart payment plan and view the status of their application straight from the Parent Portal. Once they have been approved and Edstart has made the payment, the parent's account balance will be updated accordingly.

Calendar Sync

One of the most requested enhancements in the TASS enhancement voting forum is the ability to connect staff calendars to external calendars such as Outlook or Google.

V56 will introduce the ability to generate personalised links for each calendar feed, allowing you to add them directly into an external calendar, which automatically updates via API.

From an administrative perspective, a new 'Sync Date Range' option allows schools to select the date range for which events from the relevant calendar feed will be shared.

This functionality will allow staff to combine their school commitments and personal events, helping them better manage their time and keeping them organised across all platforms.

Student Appointments

Scheduled appointments, maintained in the Student Appointment Log are now available as a dynamic 'feed' in student eDiaires, giving students and parents complete visibility over daily activities.

Additional supporting enhancements include default appointment durations, cancellation flags and the ability to set visibility in the Parent Portal to maintain student privacy for appointments such as counselling sessions.

In a later v56 patch release, a new ‘Appointment Category’ field will be introduced to restrict specific student check-in terminals to specific appointment types.

Student MEDICAL enhancements

To increase the efficiency of capturing when a student needs to leave school due to medical reasons, a new workflow has been introduced to generate an attendance record when discharging students from sickbay.

The Student Medical (Lists/Emails) program within the Staff Portal has also been enhanced with a fresh new user interface, summary mode report, ability to export to excel and report scheduling functionality.

Enhancements in this area reduce the administrative burden on school nurses and admin staff, allowing them to focus on what matters.