I have scheduled an update for Infinite Campus for Tuesday,
December 06, 2011 at 11:00 PM. We will
go from version E. 1134.2 to E. 1146.1. This
update will give us a cool new feature that you may wish share with your
students and parents. After this update,
we will be able to use the Infinite Campus Parental Portal iPhone
mobile app. The app of the iPhone is available in the app store for free. Just search for “Infinite Campus” to find it. There's is also a link to the store at the bottom of the Portal page as well. Unfortunately, at this time, Campus does not have an app that will work for Android or Blackberry devices. There are several other minor
changes in this update. If you are
interest in learning more about what else is in this update and about how the
update process works in general, read on...
Infinite Campus provides several updates a year to their
product—about two a quarter. However, typically,
I only request an update two or three times during a school year. Campus is vital to our work, and sometimes
new updates radically change the product and sometime, because it’s such a
large and complex system, updates often mess up other systems that are
connected to Campus. For example, we’ve
had updates that seem to work great, but several days later we discover that
data is no longer flowing between Campus and Google – so student passwords and
accounts don’t update. Therefore, I’m
usually pretty cautious about tinkering with Campus.
We’ve been with Campus a long time, since 2000-2001. Campus has dramatically improved their update
process over this time frame. I can
remember when they would not even tell us if there was update. We would get the patch notes the morning
after it happened. Often in these cases
their quality assurance process wasn’t perfect either. So, sometimes after an update things within
Campus would be broken: great times... However,
Campus has gotten has gotten much, much better at orchestrating updates and
their QA process is vastly improved as well.
While I don’t ever look at updating as routine, it’s not the
white-knuckle experience it used to be.
As I referenced in an earlier post, the Campus Community is
a wonderful new tool. With the in the
Community site, everyone has access to the latest release information. These new releases are featured in news
stories on the Community site. I would
encourage anyone who is interested to look at the release notes for each
update. There might be feature or an enhancement
that would be very valuable to you listed there. If you
do happen to see a feature you would like to know more about, or you feel would
be very helpful to you in your work, let me know. I’ll do some looking, and we might initiate
an update request based upon a conversation like this. However, I need to warn you that these
release notes are rather daunting to look at, so here’s a quick primmer in how
to make sense of them.
Campus has divided their customer base into two groups –
districts that are on the “enhancement line” and those that are on the “maintenance
line.” The enhancement line schools get
new features much more quickly. The
maintenance line schools only get bug fixes and State reporting modifications. The
enhancement line is much more feature rich, while the maintenance line is much
more stable and less likely to break. We
are enrolled in the enhancement line.
You can see the current version of Campus on the login page right above
our school name. You’ll need to know
this in order to compare it to the available versions. The higher the number, the newer the
version.
To see the latest releases available, login to the Community
site. Click the “Knowledgebase” link in
the bar along the top of the screen. The
Knowledgebase page has the release info toward the bottom under the “Release
Information” header. Then click the “Release
Notes” link. This will display a page
with all of the available releases going down the left menu. You can compare our version, on our login
page, to what’s available. There might
be one or more new versions ready to go.
If you want to see what they included, click the update link. You’ll then need to click the knowledgebase
article for the update. Then scroll down
to read the update manifest. The
manifest will have a brief description and a case number associate with
it. If the brief description does not
give enough detail, you can click the case number to read a bit more. Because we are in the enhancement line, we’ll
get all of the features listed in the manifest.
At the very top of the page, there are a set of links that categorize
the updates. Sometimes it’s easier to
look at those rather than to browse the complete manifest list. You can almost always ignore any update item
that starts with “Localization.” These
items refer to items need by states or other large organizations. We will only get the Iowa localizations, and
usually these are for State reporting. Typically,
about 80% the entire update manifest will be localization updates that don’t
apply to us. So, again, when I look at
the list, I usually browse it by category.
Updates are inclusive. So, if there is a new feature in E. 1142.1, but
the latest release is E. 1146.2, you can assume that everything in 1142 is also
included in 1146.
Again, I don’t have the constitution to update Campus every
time they have new release available.
However, if you browse the update file and see something in there that
you really feel would help you out, let me know. I’m almost always willing to risk the update
if there is a strong need.
