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The following transcript of the webinar may include some errors.
Ronan Quirke: Hi everybody. My name is Ronan Quirke. I'm a product manager here at Orah. And also on the webinar this morning in New Zealand is Tiago. Tiago, do you want to introduce yourself?
Tiago Penteado: Hey, yeah, I'm Tiago. I'm the marketing manager here at Orah. I'll just be here to field questions from you guys. Make sure you use the Q and A down the bottom of the, your window there and I'll put those to Ronan this call.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Thanks, Tiago. All right. We have 35 minutes today. So I appreciate your time. So I'm going to move to this relatively quickly, but yeah, as Tiago said, if you've got any questions please do pop them in there. Just to recap, and this is a good segue because most of the audience today is existing customers, but just to recap in terms of what ORA has been working on for the last couple of years is building out our kind of core tenets of the student life platform around attendance student care and communications is our most recent product, but underpinning that As many of is the actual overall platform and how you manage that.
And that's what we want to focus on today is the Orah platform. And some recent updates on that as well. So even if you are already familiar With Orah and the admin functions, what I wanted to do today is just take you through some of the, what's changed essentially, and some of the things that we've been working on improving for you over the last year or so, but particularly some recent last, since the start of 2024 some new things that we've brought out for you.
And yeah, so that's really the focus. Thank you very much. Today platform introduction session, it's really going to cover staff management and some of the new features and capabilities and problems we've been solving for you around that as part of that, I'm also going to weave in integrations and help give you a refresher on what we've been doing there.
In particular, showing you some of the more recent developments that we've done in that space as well that does tie into staff management in particular. I'm also going to touch on workflows. Some of you use workflows quite extensively. Some of you may not be very familiar with workflows. I'll touch on it a little bit.
I'm not going to do a deep dive today. That's probably going to be a full session in itself. I'm also going to just cover some of the things that that you've been asking for and that we we'll be working on next. Yeah, so I'll probably weave in a little bit of that as I take you through things.
So to do all that, And to make it as interesting as possible and fun for you is oh sorry, before I get into that I also did want to just briefly talk about sort of future sessions. Tiago, so we've just started this kind of this webinar series. For customers do you want to give a little bit of background in terms of what we're planning in terms of how regular or how often?
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, for sure. So we've launched recently two, two webinars series. So this is the Orah training series. So this will be run on a four week cycle. So the next one we're looking at is doing a one with Veracross and going into the integration in depth. But I've also put in the webinar promotions, a little form to fill out that you can suggest topics you want us to cover as well.
So make sure you make use of that. And then every other in two weeks time we'll be doing kind of product updates. So sharing what's new as well.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Thanks. Yes. So some ideas that we have is I think the next session we want to go through Veracross, one of our more recent integrations in depth for some of you who are either existing Veracross customers or are looking at Veracross as an option, understanding how that would work with Orah.
Student accounts and access. So today we're really looking at staff but student accounts and access, I know, is something that is very important to all of you as well and family accounts and access. So parents and other trusted contacts of students looking at the setup and access management for that.
And some of the options that we have, the recent developments there too. So yeah but absolutely these sessions are all about giving you the information and support that you need. So by all means, let us know if that, if you've got any other ideas for topics. This session also is aimed primarily at the admins that are looking setting up and managing the school.
Maybe you would love to first to run a session to to take your frontline staff, your teaching staff and that kind of thing through, through how to use various elements of Orah. We're very interested in what sort of topics you would like to hear from, because we know that we have added a lot to the, to different products in the platform itself over the last couple of years.
And it's important that we help you get the most out of that. So with that I'm going to switch over and do a little bit of a live demonstration, starting from probably a bit before most of your accounts would be out. I certainly hope they would be a little bit more advanced than this school St.
Bart's, that I set up this morning. This is completely empty. There's no students, as you can see nothing in this account. And so what I thought I would do is run through the ideal setup. And by doing that, even though none of you are starting from scratch you'll see a few different bits and pieces that we've added to the platform that will be of relevance and might give you some ideas about how you could maybe reorganize things for better access and management of your Orah account in the future.
The kind of the ideal scenario for a school is to start with a blank account and if at all possible, then jump into the app directory. And integrations and find an integration that we have for your school. In this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a Blackbaud run through.
A couple of reasons for that. One is that it's we have a sort of a test account with Blackbaud that's very easy for us to set up and and run through. Some of the other systems, we need to request credentials, or you need to request credentials and set them up. Relatively straightforward setting up most integrations but there are a few steps involved.
And, but this one is a fast and easy way for us to give you, show you what an integration looks like without having to pull in an actual school's account data. Awesome. So I'm just going to go ahead. I have already read the instructions since I wrote most of them. So I'm just going to go ahead and connect to Orah here.
And because this isn't my first webinar, I've already signed into Blackbaud. So I don't have to do the sign in process. So which you would normally do. And I'm just going to go ahead and authorize access to our test website. Blackbaud environment, and that'll return me to Orah nice and fast and that's successfully connected me with Blackbaud.
And now I have the option to select and activate a bunch of different what we call sync objects. There's different pieces of data that you would have access to. If you've been using ORA for a few years, you might not be familiar with this sort of UI in the past. We didn't really give you the choice of different sync objects.
We just had an integration setup screen that kind of would integrate everything. This is the new UI that you'll see across a number of recently updated integrations. And that's, this is how we manage things in future. So obviously students is a very important one. I'm just going to very quickly show you some options that we have in terms of if you are, for example, a boarding school and you only want to sync your boarding students, that's how you might do that.
Or maybe Another example, which is common is you've just started on our student care module, but you're starting with the higher grades first as your tests. So you only really want to sync grades 12 and 11 initially this year before you roll it out to others. So then you might want to limit access to those student records.
In this case, I'm just going to sync everybody over just to make it easier. So I'm going to activate students. I'm also going to activate. Contacts and houses, and staff, which is, holds in all the staff records, and I'll show you that in a moment. I'm going to leave roles and passes for now Kurt at Orah has done a really good webinar looking at showing the supervised attendance capabilities, which does involve roles and passes.
So I'm not going to get into that today. I'm just going to focus on the basics as it were. Awesome. That just shows me the different fields that we'll be expecting to come across as a result of that integration. And I'll hit done. So that has Successfully connected the Blackbaud integration that's going to go ahead and automatically sync for the first time now.
Now, while I'm doing that, so that's going to be working away in the background for just a few minutes, and that is going to sync all of these different types of records. It'll populate my students contacts, houses, my staff list, and also my groups list as well. So while I do that, I'm going to go to the the favorite place of all administrators, which is the admin console, and I'm going to go into staff.
Now, at the moment, while the sync is running, there's just one staff account set up here, which is the one that I'm logged in as and we're just going to go to roles. Roles are, I find very useful in terms of managing the the test accounts that I have, and I know a number of you who've been using roles find this very useful as well.
So I've already set up two roles. I've got my IT team role, which is the one that my account is under, and that's essentially an administrator role. But I don't have access to any student records, so I can do lots of config things but as a rule, I don't actually have any access to any of the students themselves.
I've also set up another, uh, role for a student life team. So this is the team in this particular school that are managing pretty much everything. They have access to all students. They can see all passes. They can view student profiles. They can do roles. They can approve passes and manage past settings and everything like that.
So these are the kind of the people who in the school will be running everything day to day. The IT person might set everything up like I'm doing today. But maybe the student life team are able to manage everything. They just don't have the administrator privilege to tinker with any kind of the core settings.
That's one way to do it. Now, in addition to that, I'm going to have some teaching staff. So I'm just going to create a teaching staff
If you already had your your users imported or set up, then you'd be able to assign them while you're creating the role. This is the non administrator role. And in this case, I'm going to go ahead and say that the staff can only access The students to which they relate to through groups.
So for example, if I'm the English teacher, I can see all the students that are in my English academic class that's coming through from Blackbaud but I'm not going to be able to see students that aren't in any of my teams or academics or advisories and things like that. I will be able to view student profile I'm not going to be able edit student information, but I'll be able to edit passes, locations, and role records.
I'll just leave everything kind of simple. I do want to mark roles and role settings. And that's pretty much all I'm going to do today. I'm also going to give access to Nurture for the same SIS groups and they'll be able to see mood check records and student surveys. Read pastoral notes and view pastoral notes.
And that should be enough. I won't go into all those settings in detail. Aside from the core kind of platform ones, it's really each product has their own settings, as you can see that you might want to configure.
Perfect. So that is my teaching staff role. Now so that I'm not confused as to why I can't see any student records while everything is coming in. I'm going to go ahead and assign the student life role to myself as well. As you could see, there's two ways you can assign roles. There's actually three ways, but I'll show you.
The first one is by assigning once when you are creating or editing the role, um, so I can go student life
and just add myself to that. Perfect. And that saves. I click on users, click on my role here and see, I've got those two user roles there. There is also additional permissions. Additional permissions are used. If you want to have something that doesn't fit into a role is just for a specific user.
In this case, I do have additional permission set because when I was initially signed up, this is the default access that is given to the first kind of admin user. So that is that. Aha, now I've got a whole bunch of new users that have come in but before I get to that, just give the sync another second to run.
I did also want to show you another trick that I find quite useful if you're using roles, which is by standard, you can see this list view. You'll see just a summary of the role type, what sort of access it has, and what sort of products are configured for access as well. And just a quick summary of who has access.
If you wanted a more in depth view, just click on the top left here. And this matrix view, which we added recently, I'm just going to collapse my slide navigation. This thing really needs as big a screen as you have to see it for best effect. So these are my three roles, and this is a good way of just comparing the features that each one of those different roles has.
So that I can say, okay, yeah, I'm happy with how everything is configured in terms of these roles. It shows the count of assigned staff, but if you click on this you will see which staff have been assigned as well. Perfect. Now As we just saw, we have now 94 users that have come in and those have been imported, as you can see here, and they've got an imported account status, and that's because they've been imported, in this case via the Blackbaud integration sync you also have these new status tabs at the top So you can see everybody who's just imported.
You can also see the active users, which is just the account that I'm working under right now. So all of these users are in this imported status. And what we can do with those users is you can select one or many or even all of them. And you can do this action here, which is configure account.
And by configuring the account, you're essentially, if you're familiar with the existing invite process, very similar to that generally what I'm doing here is I'm assigning a role to these, which might be teaching staff. If I want to add any houses, I can do looks like we don't have any houses set up just yet.
Now this is a test Blackbaud account, which is used by a bunch of different developers around the world. I'm not going to confuse some other users who might have been set up on the system by inviting them to access Orah. So just in case some of those those users are other developers using the same test Blackbaud account.
What I am going to do though is I'm just going to import some users as well. So the other way, if you don't have an integration that imports stuff, then you can actually import a CSV. You can download the CSV template but you can also, if you have, like me, one that you have prepared earlier I have one here.
I'm just going to go ahead and import my CSV of stuff.
Also now I have 98 rather than 93 imported stuff. And these are these user, these users here that I've added to Orah via the import process. I'm going to select those ones. I'm going to configure those. They all get emailed to me, so I don't mind emailing myself. I'm going to assign the teaching staff role for a start to those users and nothing else.
I'm not going to add any additional permissions. Those aren't needed. I'm happy with just providing the permissions via the role itself and hit configure. So I'm about to configure these four users. I'll confirm that.
Perfect. Awesome. Now, just to and I can see on my phone, I've got some emails, which is no surprise. Now, to show you some of the linkage of groups in an SIS back into Orah, I'm just going to go ahead and swap around some links between Blackbaud and Orah for demo purposes, given that this is a test account.
So I'm going to find A user called Shane Barry, which is, and I disconnect them from Blackbaud. I'm also going to disconnect
the teacher, Louise Walker.
Perfect. And now I'm going to then manually link the Orah accounts that I set up just now which are the configured status to those. So this one I'm gonna, this is the manual way of linking Orah accounts to an SIS staff account. If you have the staff sync object, as I demoed earlier then that linkage automatically happens.
I'm just overriding that so I can just run it. Run some tests with some additional accounts that are brought in. And I'm also going to do this with our maths teacher account. And I'm going to link that to the available Shane Perry account in Blackbaud.
Perfect. Okay. So now that I've done that one thing to bear in mind with integrations and the SIS groups is that. Essentially when you have the link between an Orah staff account and an account in the SIS itself the groups is what kind of has the mapping of what classes and things that they are assigned to.
And that's the kind of the connection and if you do make any changes to the linkages between Orah and your SIS in terms of the staff accounts, you're going to have to rerun the RoopSync object to to move over that assignment of classes and groups to the correct staff account in Orah.
So while that is running I'm just going to go ahead and, um, jump into my admin console and check if any houses came across. Yes, some houses did. I'm just going to assign myself to some of those. Yes, now has assignments. Um, you might see that those staff that I configured for access are already available for things like assigning houses, even though I didn't assign them to the houses in the initial configuration process.
And the reason for that Is that we got some feedback about the previous invite process. That was a little bit tricky because you had to wait for the invite to be accepted and for the user to log in for the first time before you could do anything else with that user. Whereas with the.
Import status, importing users. As soon as they're configured, they're available in the system for access. So you can pretty much do anything you want to with those users. You can assign them to houses, you can assign them to workflows add them to pastoral records, anything like that.
So anything that you can do with a live account, you can do with a configured account. Even before that user has logged in for the first time. So that really helps solve that pain point about waiting for users to accept the invite and log in for the first time before you can do any of those tasks.
So that's essentially the kind of import process either through SIS or through the the manual CSV upload. And then configuring the accounts it's really helpful. This is I suppose the ideal scenario for a bulk operation if you're doing it at the start of the year. Or if you have a bunch of new staff to add to the system at some other point, then the import process is is, it's probably the easiest way to to do that.
The existing invite process where you essentially just put in an email address like rondon. Orah. com. And then select your roles and select houses and things like that. And then just hit invite or add emails via CSV that still exists. That's similar to exactly how it was before that's available for you.
If you just want to do, say, for example, just want to you've just got one person that needs to be added to Orah right now, then perhaps the invite process is quicker and easier from that point of view. . But yeah both of those are available to you. For the time being one other thing, which you did not see easily before was was the invited users.
I'm just going to go ahead and do a quick invite then, ronanplustest22
at Orah. com. Perfect. Do teaching staff and give them access to East Wing by default and hit invite.
Perfect. That invite has been sent. And now on to the invited status. Then you can see that this user here, the invited user has got the invited status. If I went back in and I was like, Oh gosh, I forgot to add them to West Wing which is one of my favorite TV shows, by the way That user is available, but you don't see their name, it's just the email address that you're going to see for that for that invited user and they're not going to be available in some of the other screens.
Perfect. Just another way to show you, um, this is part of the Orah Attendance platform. These are the teachers that I configured for access. I'm just going to have a look at their schedule and yes, their classes are all coming through in the schedule. I'm in the New Zealand time zone. And this is a U. S. based school, which explains why the class is happening at 1am. But yes, you can see that I can see the schedule of the English algebra teacher that I imported and linked to Blackbaud, and also the maths and science teacher. We can see their schedule too. So that is all working. Perfect. Just go back into integrations.
I can see the sync is running again the students and contacts possibly as a result of me running the group sync but I can also see the last sync time of all my sync objects as well. One other thing to show you which you may or may not be aware of exists in all our integrations is this Debugger screen.
This is quite useful if you have any unmatched records between your student information system and Orah. For example, sometimes a student record is created in But it doesn't exist in the SIS itself, and that will be shown on the screen, and you have the opportunity to try and match if you've got, for example, an extra record on your SIS side, and some other slightly differently named student in ORA that can't be matched automatically, then you can manually do that matching from the debugger screen under student sync object set up.
And the integrations. Perfect. So that is a run through of staff management and staff access. So I've still got my 93 imported users. I could just configure those all at once. If I had, if I wanted them to all have the same role. If I, for example, had a bunch of teaching staff, you might want to go through and select all your different.
Teaching staff members and configure them. And give them the teaching staff role and send, configure them and then you might then go through and do a different operation for your student life team. That's probably the easiest way to move them from the imported status into configured in as imported users they're not showing in the system.
They don't have any access until you go ahead and configure them. So that is, config setup and invites, um, so next thing I wanted to just take you to very quickly just conscious of time is just a quick run through some new things that we've added to workflows.
So now I need to be in a couple of different schools at the same time here. So I'm just going to show you the school that I set up And Workflows. If you're not familiar with Workflows, Workflows are, as you might guess from the name, just a way of initiating different operations as a result of data that is triggered in the system.
And I have two different workflows that I set up the earlier today phone use and attendance advisory. So my phone use workflow So it has a trigger which is relating to conduct or pastoral pastoral records. You can see the different pastoral or conduct records that I have. I've set up a a conduct type of phone use. I'll add that again. And quantity of notes recorded for a given student will trigger this. So start a workflow when three notes are recorded within a nine month period.
What's new here so this is already existing. What's new here is the ability to send notifications, not just to staff, but to the student themselves. And unfortunately, I'm sorry students, but also we are going to be able to send this to your parents as well. So in this scenario once you go over two conduct notes, then you get a final warning saying your phone is going to be confiscated.
And this also goes to specific contacts, which are the approved contacts of of the students. And I'll just very quickly show you what I mean by approved contacts as well. In this case, This scenario, the workflow is just ended and archived as soon as those notifications go to the student and their family.
And if I go into workflows there is already one that I triggered this morning from my student, Bonnie Goodman. We, so thank you for some of you so heavy workflow users. You wanted us to show you the name of the student up front in the workflows that relate to a student. So we did that here and we also added the name of the student here.
So you can see it much more easily than it was available before. Conduct warning has been sent. I, so that is all good for that one. And if I go back into my admin console and workflows, I also have an attendance. Advisory one, which is for late infractions. So just recently we added the ability for workflows to be triggered based on role records as well.
So start a workflow when a student has been marked late 3 times in total. within a month. And that will start your late infraction. This is one that kind of sends some notifications, but it also initiates a conference to head that late person off at the past before things get even worse.
And in this situation, again, it's my troublemaker Bonnie Goodman it just so happens he's been laid a couple of times already. If I run another roll right now,
I'm going to mark him laid yet again. Everybody else is doing a great job of getting there on time.
Complete that roll check. Awesome. And if I did my prep work correctly, yes, there is now a new workflow for attendance advisory. So the notifications have been sent and it's now been assigned to a member of staff the attendance manager in this case, to ensure that their tutor has that.
Has that conference with them to correct their their late behavior. Yeah, so that is just a quick way of showing you what's new in workflows, which is very much the yeah, that the ability to send notifications and the ability to use attendance data to trigger those as well.
Thank you. Awesome. So just zipping back then to the deck just to take you through a few other things I wanted to tell you about as well. Another thing which we've been asked about for workflows and is the ability to essentially Have workflows that are triggered for the entire academic year.
And that's a little tricky at the moment. I know some of you have been using months, like some 11 month period, but that is a rolling period and that's not quite the same as your academic year. So we have added the ability for you to set a specific date range for workflow. So you could start it, for example at the end of August If you're in the Northern Hemisphere and that's your school year right through to the end of May and so you can have that workflow running for that period.
And the problem with months is that sort of, you can pick up old data from last year and maybe that's not what the school policy would like. So yeah, fixed periods are coming very shortly for workflows as well. For Blackbaud integration some of you have been asking for the ability to customize the source of particularly the first name that shows up in Orah.
So you have the ability to either use first name, nickname, or default if that's what you want. If the nickname or alternative name is set, then we can use that, otherwise we'll default to first name. And then another thing, which I did show you a little bit about SIS groups and how they link. There is also some SIS systems don't bring in all the staff that you need into those groups.
Or you might have a year ahead, or something like that, who needs to be manually added to a group. And so we're going to be providing you with the ability to add those two groups as well. The kind of the existing mappings and all that kind of stuff comes through from the SIS, but if you need to add additional staff to a group to extend or enhance what's coming through from your system, then you can do so as well and that'll really help you with some of those.
tricky situations where, for example, as I said, a year ahead doesn't have access to everybody in the English he's head of the English department, but doesn't come through in the mappings or already from your SIS, then you can add those manually if you need to. So yeah, so thank you for that.
That's just a quick run through. I just wanted to call out that Most of the features that, that you've seen today are coming from feedback that you've given us either recently or in the last few years, we record all of that in Orah and we go through that quite regularly.
We do really value everything that you feedback. I wish we could do everything instantly for you but it's tricky to balance these things. And sometimes you've got to bundle up a few different requests and then do a piece of work fixing or improving a specific area of Orah.
But yeah, so thank you for all the feedback and just learning and understanding what's, what could be working better for you is hugely valuable. So really appreciate that. Tiago, maybe there's a couple of things that have come up while I've been rattling through that.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, there are, I'll go through them in order of when they've been asked. So Sharifa has asked firstly, can we send bulk reminders to staff to change their login method?
Ronan Quirke: There is what we did recently, maybe about three months ago, is that there is already an automatic reminder that goes out to staff three days after the first invite.
So if you're changing login method, then by doing so you get an email and then another three days after that, then there should be another email that gets triggered automatically now. Certainly for invites, I'll, I'm pretty sure it works for change login method as well, but if it doesn't, then that sounds like a good idea to add in.
Tiago Penteado: Okay, awesome and then he's got another question as well. Can parents see the child's timetable and attendance? And that was asked when you were walking through that.
Ronan Quirke: Got it. Yes. Not at the moment. No we don't have that ability. But yeah, certainly keen to understand what you'd like to see there.
Tiago Penteado: And we've got someone asking, so they said they've got a workflow that sends a reminder out to their boarding house staff notifying them that a specific student needs to receive their daily medication. So this flow is set up to go automatically at 9pm every evening, so the staff member gets a notification.
Now the question is there any way for the student to get an automatic push email or SMS as part of that?
Ronan Quirke: Yes, with what we've done recently we support Email and SMS. We haven't added in push yet to the workflow notifications. But yeah that that notification ability is there for students now that's just and you're not crazy if you didn't have that before.
It's only happened in the last sort of month or two that we added that in. So that should be available for you. Let me know if that isn't working for you or if you can't find it and we'll jump on and figure that one out, but that should definitely be there for you now.
Tiago Penteado: And then I've got one from James here as well, he said "Are the integrations with ISAMS at a similar level to Blackbaud, specifically getting registrations to be pushed through from Orah and into the SIS".
Ronan Quirke: So none at the moment but that is one of the, and I, it was one thing James, thanks for reminding me that I was meant to cover, which is mention what's next in terms of integrations. And doing a similar style of refresh for ISAMS is next on the list. Yeah, definitely keen to maybe connect with you after this and just double check what you need in terms of that, because yeah, that is probably the next big integration that we want to do a refresh on.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, that's all the questions I've got here. Unless anyone else has got anything else.
Ronan Quirke: Yep. If you do, then please drop us a line. I think if you've seen anything here that you want to use and you're not quite sure how, then what we'd love to do is just drop a line to support@orah.com and I and the rest of the team are available through that.
And probably just setting up a little bit of a setup review for you would be a good thing to do. If there's something you saw there that you'd like to incorporate, but not sure how that would be a good idea. Also if you've already raised a feature request, then we absolutely have recorded that don't feel like it hasn't been heard, but if you do want to follow up on a feature request, or if you've got some other ideas please do let us know what is super useful to me and the rest of the team is just a little bit of background.
What you're trying to do here. Why do you need this? Because that really helps us get the light bulbs going and trying to figure out a good way to solve that problem as well. So love to hear those. The, those stories and hear what's working for you and what's not working for you. So really want to help make sure that everything works as best we can for you.
Yeah. So thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. And yeah, look forward to seeing you on another one soon.
Tiago Penteado: Thanks everyone.
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