After some conversations with Tim, I have made some changes to the Roster creation tool for the sites.
Please read the following to understand these changes.
The front end of the tool has not changed, except for one additional checkbox: "Get Student Information Only (No Teachers / Period information)"
This option was added due to sites using a word mail merge at the beginning of the year to send the students their credentials in the mail, with the welcome packets. In addition, this option was added because I have changed the way the full export works, especially applying to the secondary schools:
In the original roster tool, when running a secondary school, the roster will export only one entry for each student, regardless of how many teachers they have. This was not too beneficial for creating lists of rosters for the specific teachers.
The change: Now, a secondary school export will export one separate entry in the file for each teacher / period that the student has. This will effectively create multiple entries for each student. In addition to the teacher, the "Period" is now also included in the export.
This change will allow the users to sort by teacher, by period, by student, by grade, or any of the other available fields in the export file.
Since this last method will take quite a bit more time to process than the student only information, I have made the "Get Student Information Only" checkbox, checked by default, and that will have to be UNchecked in order to get the full export information.
This will also probably be more useful for a teacher who needs an export of a the students, and doesn't necessarily care to see the teacher and period listings.
On that note, in attempting to limit the amount of exported data when teachers use the tool, I found a limitation in matching the teacher last name, with an accurate teacher last name in Aeries. Since we still haven't done the matching of Staff ID in Aeries to the employeeID in Active Directory. This feature will not be possible until Active Directory is organized to match Aeries.
In the meanwhile (Important, and feedback potentially required), any teacher that runs the tool, WILL get the listing of ALL the students in their school. That is not my personal preference, but I'll leave it for now, unless someone has a problem with it. My reasoning was that every teacher right now can use the User Maintenance application to retrieve any student credentials using their Perm ID number, so allowing them to retrieve the roster for these students in this manner is not much different than what they can do with the other tool.
Once I find to match staff/teachers in Active Directory to Aeries, and associate them with staff ID, I will have much more flexibility to tighten down security even more, and limit usage by roles in the organization.
For those of you who are in contact with teachers, I would appreciate if you can have them try it and provide me with feedback/bug reports etc..., since I am not able to run this as myself, given I don't have any students assigned to me in Aeries.
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