SAVEDLISTS and HOLD files

AIS, with input from some of our Power Users, has established guidelines for deletion and retention of SAVEDLISTS and HOLD files.

SAVEDLISTS:  retained for 45 days. Any SAVEDLIST over 45 days old will be deleted on the 6th of each month, with exception of any savedlist that begins with "XSMC". 

HOLD files:  retained for 100 days, any HOLD file over 100 days old will be deleted on the 6th of each month. If you need to keep a file longer than 100 days, you may save to your PC, or contact AIS to have it moved to an archived Colleague folder. (HOLD files are created when you send a report to "HOLD" instead of a printer or email.)

How YOU Can Help Make Registration Easier for Students

October 18-21 is Jan Term registration for undergraduates

Students register for classes through GaelXpress, which connects them directly to the Colleague database. Because you, at your desktop, are also connecting to Colleague, the way that you work in Colleague can affect the student experience, either negatively or positively.

How can you help students register with fewer problems?

1.  Log out when you are not actively using Colleague. This is absolutely critical in the hours between 12:30 and 2:00PM, and again from 3:30 to the end of the work day. All  desktop logins use software licenses, and students registering also use software licenses. If administrative staff use up all the licenses, there won't be enough for students.  PLEASE LOG OUT. 

2.  Keep out of student records as much as possible. Adding information or changing a record actually locks up the records, so that others cannot change the record at the same time. When you lock the record of a student, the student cannot register (because the record is locked!).  If you need to work on a record, open it, do your work quickly, and finish out. While you are in the record, what the student sees is an hourglass, and they think "the system is down", when really, it is just that their record is in use.

These two modifications to the way you use Colleague during registration week can have a huge impact on how quickly students are able to register.



Questions?  Email AIS@stmarys-ca.edu

What is a FRIEND? A brief explanation of Source Codes

When looking up a PERSON in Colleague, you might occasionally see "Alumni", "Parent" or "Friend".  These are source codes, and are assigned by Development.  Below is an example of three people, each with a different source code. 

Source codes identify a primary relationship with the college, with the most common codes being

1 - Alumni - this indicates a person who is either a former student, or, at certain times of the year, an undergraduate senior who is about to graduate. 

2 - Parent - the parent of a current or former student 

3 - Friend - a person who is not an alum nor a parent

6 - Corporation

CS - Current Student

These codes are used for federal fundraising reporting. They should not be changed, except by Development.

If you have a question about a source code, or believe it might be wrong, contact Joan Goularte, goularte@stmarys-ca.edu (X4344) directly.

CORE Team forms Subcommittee

The CORE Committee has formed a subcommittee to look at addresses, address types, guidelines for maintenance of addresses, and any other issues that might relate to addresses for applicants, students, alumni, donors, vendors and employees. 

Members have been notified of the date of the first meeting. If you would like to be included, contact Joan Goularte at X4434, or call AIS at X4375.

Informer Conference, October 11-12, 2010

The first annual Informer conference, ICON, will be held October 11-12, 2010 in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Conference attendees with have an opportunity to enhance their Informer knowledge and learn about plans for the future of Informer. 

Interested in attending? Register at the conference website.  Registration is limited to 200 participants, so you will want to register soon.

For more information about our Informer report-writing tool, go to http://www.entrinsik.com - and, feel free to call AIS if you have questions.

Uppercase / Lowercase -- How does Colleague work?

In the name and address forms (as well as some others), Colleague will re-format the text that you key in, according to some rules. First of all, in a name, or an address, it will capitalizethe first letter of each word (characters separated by spaces). So, if you type in 15 main street, Colleague will automatically translate it to 15 Main Street 

However, Saint Mary's College has identified some exceptions to this basic rule: 

Converting to Upper Case

These words will always be translated to all uppercase:  PO, RR, NW, NE,  SW, SE, II, III, IV, V, APO, FPO, DVC

These words will NEVER be converted to uppercase:  and, in, the, by, for, of, a, an, on, de, la, to -- e.g. "corner of 4th and main" will convert to "Corner of 4th and Main" -- the words "of" and "and" will not be capitalized

The word following these words will be converted to uppercase:  Apartment, Apt, Box, Room, Rm, Suite, Ste -- therefore "box a" will become "Box A"

These character strings will be considered prefixes and the next letter will be converted to uppercase:  Mc, Mac, O', D' -- example: mcdonald will be converted to McDonald. 

Letters following these characters will be converted to upper case:  the period (.), the hyphen (-), the forward slash (/) -- e.g. smith-jones will be converted to Smith-Jones, the "J" capitalized because it follows a hyphen. 

And that's not all... 

Not converted to Upper Case

If these strings of characters follow a NUMBER, they will not be converted to upper case: th, st, nd, rd -- e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd

And then there are the EXCEPTIONS to the upper case rules:  Macon, Machine,  Macroeconomics, Mack, Machado -- if the upper case rules were invoked, Macon would become MacOn and Machine would become MacHine.  We have attempted to identify the words most often causing capitalization problems and placed them in the exceptions list. 

What to do if the rules are not working for a specific name or address? 

To override the uppercase rules in a name or address, begin with an equals sign (=) and then key in the characters exactly as they should appear.   For example, Machiavelli would normally convert to MacHiavelli. To keep this from happening, key in =Machiavelli. 

Questions??  Contact AIS@stmarys-ca.edu

Web Interface to Colleague

We have had Web U.I. available for Colleague for close to a year now. Check it out - we think you will find it convenient, and maybe a little faster than the PC based interface you might be currently using. Also, with the web-based interface, the scripts never update!! ya-hoo!

To access Web U.I., open your browser, and go to http://datatel.stmarys-ca.edu. Note that 1) A message saying the digital signature has an error will appear. Click the box that says "Always trust content from this publisher" and then click "RUN", 2) an SSL Certificate check will come up, and you can click "YES".
A new login page will pop up - choose "Colleague" or "live" for your Environment.