ACE Award Winner Spotlight -
Martin Malpica | |
At the 2014 ACEware Annual Users' Conference four customers were awarded the ACEware Champion Educator (ACE) Award for their innovative and extensive use of Student Manager at their institution.
This month, we highlight award recipient Martin Malpica, the 18 year IT Director at the University of Central Florida (UCF) Continuing Education. Martin and his team have taken their ACEware software to a new level. The open architecture of the software allowed UCF to build a custom (UCF specific) wrapper around their Student Manager and the ACEweb system. The UCF system is highly customized, and yet it all is built around the core functionality of the Student Manager/ACEweb structure.
Chuck commented that "Martin brings great technical skills, a solid understanding of continuing higher education, and strong organizational skills to help leverage the services available from ACEware. He has been very willing to share advice and offer suggestions for helping us make your ACEware registration software faster, more functional and easier for students (and staff) to use."
Martin said that he was surprised to receive this award. The ACE recognition was shared with his team members - Marcos Kochmann who does most of the ACEweb maintenance and Ricardo Suarez who does most of the Student Manager maintenance. His colleagues, friends, and family found the recognition, "impressive, most impressive."
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Marcos Kochmann, Martin Malpica, and Ricardo Suarez
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The University of Central Florida Continuing Education provided 600 programs in fiscal year 14. From those programs, they had over 10,000 registrations.
Martin's for his advice to Student Manager users:
"Always attend the Webinars Aceware hosts, not only is it a great up-to-date training tool, but helps refresh your knowledge on functions you may not always use."
What he would share with professionals considering the use of Student Manager:
"We have been using Aceware since 1998 and the tech support and availability of advice on CE functions is unmatched."
The software feature most beneficial to UCR's operation:
"Aceweb has been the most beneficial in providing self-service options and online registration for our programs. Thanks to Matthew and Stein, we have been very successful in creating efficiencies in processes."
Martin had this to say about the future:
"We are really looking forward to the SQL upgrade as Aceweb/Aceware will be fundamental in our next Website re-design. We want to give as many self-service tools to our students as possible."
Comments from Matthew, Martin's tech support representative:
"Martin and his staff work hard to figure out the solutions to problems themselves. I think they try to only bring a problem to me if it is one that will stump me. I really enjoy the problems they bring to since I enjoy challenges!"
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| ACEware Wishes Chuck a Happy 40th Birthday (again) | 
The ACEware team and many CE professionals wished Chuck a Happy Birthday in August. Those of us in the cabin enjoyed brunch with him and his lovely wife, Barbara. He received many comments from friends, colleagues and CE units on Facebook, a tribute to him and the work he does.
Chuck developed the very first version of Student Manager to help him manage a certificate program that he was coordinating. This software met a niche in the industry, and over 25 years later we celebrate Student Manager 8.0, ACEweb 4.0, and look forward to the release of NxT (Saas version) in October. From the basement of his home, to the ACEware World Headquarters cabin, serving a handful of students to serving hundreds of thousands of students around the nation, we applaud Chuck's leadership in the CE industry.
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ACEware Developer Becomes Published Author
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ACEware's team is made up of very talented individuals. In addition to software developers and technicians we have artists, cooks, gardeners, golfers, musicians, photographers, and... writers! We were all excited for Matthew when he shared that he had a set of his short stories published! He continues to write in his spare time so we may see additional publications down the road. We congratulate him on this accomplishment!
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| ACEware on the road to NCCET - Sept 29 |
Chuck will be on the road the end of the month to exhibit at NCCET. If you will be attending this event in the mile high city, be sure to stop by to visit. |
SHARE at the 2015 Users' Conference
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 | 19th Annual Conference
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Why should you invest the time to plan a short, 30 minute talk/ conversation with colleagues and friends? Here are just a few of the many benefits of presenting:
Showcase your institution, your program, and yourself. Presenting at a national conference is great for the resume (and looks really good on that annual self evaluation), brings recognition to your institution and highlights your team!
Hone your processes. When you decide to share what you are doing with colleagues, you have an opportunity to focus on, and really examine that process or procedure. Improvement and mastery comes when we share with, and teach, others! Your workflow, your reports, and your service will actually improve as you plan your talk.
Add value for attendees and yourself! You receive personal value in the form of professional growth and you can offer financial value to your boss in the discounted registration fee you receive if you are selected to present.
Receive accolades and more ideas for the work you are doing. Ideas generate more ideas. You'll return home feeling good about what you do and inspired with new ideas.
Engage with colleagues. Your presentation will be attended by your CE peers with similar interests. Your workflow and/or student service practices will foster friendships and build your community of colleagues who can be a resource later.
Are you ready to SHARE at the 2015 Users' Conference? Submit your proposal here.
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Become wise and win a prize with ACEware!
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A new academic year brings excitement and fresh energy to university communities. Messages of, "Welcome back students!" are displayed on nearly every business billboard. Week-long activities fill the campus schedules. "Locals" add extra time to routine shopping trips and use extra caution when driving for a few weeks, while the newest of students learn to navigate their driving (and walking) routes.
In noncredit CE, you may not have had the summer break that students and some faculty enjoy! Many of you have spent the summer offering youth camps, professional development seminars for educators, conferences, or managing large numbers of registrations for fall programs. There is very little rest for those tough enough to work in the CE industry!
At ACEware, we welcome you back and are ready to support you as members of our community of users throughout this new academic year. We have a new syllabus of learning and community activities to help you use your software to its fullest capabilities. We're planning new webinars (did you notice Martin's comment above about attending webinars?), scheduling public trainings, designing conference sessions, going on the road to conferences, posting messages to the Forum, and much more! Plus, in honor of this new semester, we're going to give away a cool portable device charger to five lucky customers who choose to complete some optional homework assignment(s).
September assignments:
- Register for, and participate in, the ACEware Forum! You'll get information from techs and learn from each other! http://www.aceware.com/forum/ (1 ticket for registering and 2 tickets for each published post).
- Sign up for our listserv to be sure you receive all training notices and other notifications. To join, send a request to your tech (1 ticket for each new listserv request).
- Like us on Facebook (1 ticket for each new ACEware page like in September).
- Register for and attend a webinar (1 ticket for each webinar attended).
The drawing will be held on September 30. After the winners have been notified, we will share on Facebook and in the October newsletter. Will it be you?
Good luck, and here's to a great year! |
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MATTHEW'S CORNER (of the cabin) - Name Combine
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Accidents happen and people end up creating a second name record for themselves all the time. Having to these names can be frustrating, but luckily Student Manager has a couple of tools to help you get the job done quickly and easily.
The first tool is a bit manual and has been in the system for a long time: Replace the ID on the bad record with the one from the good record. It then asks if it is OK to change the SSN/ID#. Selecting Yes then warns you that you are entering an ID that already exists and gives you several options. If you say Combine Names, Student Manager makes sure that both records aren't enrolled in the same course. Assuming that everything checks out, it will then merge the two records, filling in the holes in the good record with data from the bad one. So registrations, interest codes, payments, and more come over from the bad record to the new one. Also, the good record's history is marked with a brief rundown of the bad record's ID, name, address, email, and who did the combination.
When Student Manager 8 came along and I had to figure out how to do this for the SQL Server version, I realized that the mass combine names in utilityw was not going to work. So I had to come up with something different.
Meet the new mass combine names inside of Student Manager 8. It can be found under Tools -> Data Cleanup. One of the powerful things about it is that it now utilizes the exact same routine as the manual routine. This way the history does get marked, which utilityw wasn't able to do. This new routine also has a similar report capability like utilityw used to have. Best of all, it has a preview that allows you uncheck records that you don't want combined giving you more control.
The one drawback is that it doesn't have too many standard options at the moment, but I'm sure that we will eventually add more in the future. In the meantime you can use the user defined search. If you need help creating one, please ask your technician.
Personally, I love how easy it is to use. I hope you'll love it too!
Until next time,
Matthew J. Olson
ACEware Systems
Programmer
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| About Aceware |  | |
Aceware provides easy to use registration software designed for non-credit programs.
Our goal is to provide you with the tools you need to run your program.
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| Contact Us | |
Phone
Voice: 800.925.2493 Fax: 785.537.6811
eMail
Mail
ACEware Systems, Inc. 7480 Dyer Road Manhattan, KS 66502 Questions or comments about this newsletter? Please contact [email protected] |
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