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RISC and
OASIS with ERN:
This information is
relevant to any NSW Public School currently running a version of RISC
for Windows, prior to v8.
With the implementation of the ERN (unique Student ID
Numbers) by the NSW Education Department in all NSW Public Schools
on March 17,
we felt it was important to alert you to an issue your school will now have
with your RISC software. If your school is currently licenced to run a
version of our Register of Individual Student Contact (RISC) software
for tracking welfare, discipline and merit which is older than v8, you
must read this. Your current version will not be compatible with ERN and
once ERN is released, as your existing RISC database will lose its
connectors to the enrolment database (as exported from OASIS). This
means your currently saved RISC data, as well as your archived RISC
data, may be rendered inaccessible.
Marillion Designs has released RISC v8 which introduces some remarkable
new features requested by schools as well as full ERN compatibility. And
even though RISC has had a major upgrade, v8 still works with your old
data, so no that ERN is implemented, your RISC system will continue to
function correctly.
NOTE: When you have upgraded to RISC v8, it is
important to complete the RISC-ERN conversion process as detailed
here. Also note that if you had student photos in RISC, you will
need to re-import them using the RISC Photo Import Tool as found in the
Utilities menu in the RISC Admin program.
UPGRADE to RISC v8 TODAY and get the upgrade TOMORROW. Details
below.
Current
Release of RISC - Quick Details:
The current release of RISC for Windows
is v8.201AU, released 15 March 2008. Existing RISC v8.0x users
will be
entitled to free downloadable upgrades to v8. The Help menu in
RISC v8 has an option to Find and Download Updates as they are
released. The new features included from v7 to RISC v8.200AU include:
- The Print This Form button has been
split into two separate buttons: "Print Form on A4 Page" and "Print Form
on A5 Page". The first button is the same as the original button,
producing the output on a single A4 page. The new button allows the user
to cut A4 pages in half (to A5 size) and put them into the laser printer
tray to print the form in reduced size, saving paper. This format is
perfect for using RISC to produce Late Notes. The A5 pages should be
inserted as if you were printing in Landscape format. Thanks to
Moorebank High School for this suggestion
- You can now Mail Merge directly from
the RISC Table View and all students listed in the table view will have
a user-selected customised form letter merged and printed with record of
the form letter automatically added to the Contact Action field
- The Set Date Range function can now
optionally use the Actual Contact Date OR the Updated Contact Date.
- The Print Table View function now
produces a more neat Table View printout in landscape and includes the
Contact Category 2 field.
- Includes an updated OASIS Export
Report to export Mother's Mobile Phone instead of Emergency Contact
- Includes the RISC Batch Photo Import
Tool
- New View Saved Letter button wherever
a contact record is displayed where a form letter was sent and a copy
saved in the RISC database This button opens the letter in MS Word for
viewing/editing/printing
- Reintroduces the minimize button on
the main RISC form (this has been missing since v5)
- New "RISC Quick History" window to
quickly show the last 25 records of the selected student on the screen
- The RISC Quick History panel now
shows the Type column in colour, dependent on the
"Smiley" value set for each record. eg. A Negative (sad) smiley will
show the Type field in RED, which a
Positive (Happy) smiley will display in GREEN
text. This gives the Quick History even more instant value
because the user can quickly see whether most previous entries for a
student were positive or negative.
- A new "Spell Check Text Fields..."
button has been introduced to the main RISC form. This uses the spelling
checker from Microsoft Word to check the spelling in the two large text
fields on the RISC form. It uses whatever English language dictionary
you have set in Word - eg. Australian. Spell Check has not been in RISC
since v5, so this is a welcome (and better) return.
- The Student's Photo can now be merged
into a Form Letter, extending the use of the form letters module for
other purposes
- If a rebuild is required by RISC, it
will now perform one automatically
- New splash screens and new Marillion
Designs logo introduced
- New Privacy Note prominently displayed
on the RISC main form
- Updated HelpDesk and Virtual
Tour
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RISC
v8 for Windows - 2008:
RISC v8 for Windows
is now available. Here are some ideas we
have incorporated into version 8.0+:
- RISC Quick History - As
shown at the right of the screenshot below, the RISC Quick History
is exactly that - a quick way to find all records associated with a
student on the one screen. With intelligent rollovers to
display more information as well as a quick jump-to feature, you'll
wonder how you ever worked without it. With release 8.10, the Quick
History also includes "Colour-sense" - Green means a "positive"
record and Red means a "negative" record - reflecting the colour
"smiley" saved against each record.
- Create up to 200 Form Letters
- RISC v8 doubles the number of MS
Word Form Letters it can store from 100 to 200! You can
create, store, retrieve, merge and print twice as many letters,
merit certificates, late notes or anything else you can think of!
The extra form letters are perfect for...
- Multiple Mail Merging -
RISC already integrates well with MS Word 2000 and above to
produce form letters. Instead of printing one letter at a time per student, wouldn't it
be great to use RISC to produce all your personal mailings to
parents? Need to send a personalised letter to every parent of
a year 9 student? How about doing it with a few clicks of the
mouse? You already know how easy it is to build a form letter
in RISC? - it's actually EASIER than merging using Word alone! Let's
apply that to multiple mailings! That's the RISC MailMerge
Wizard. There is a sneak preview screen shot of this Wizard
below. With v8.20 and later, you can also Mail Merge dirctly
to the records shown in the RISC Table View!
- Student Photos - Wouldn't
it be great if you could see a small photo of each student when you
call them up in RISC? With the RISC PhotoCapture! tool, you can
do exactly that in just a few seconds! RISC PhotoCapture! lets
you take your own student photos using virtually any inexpensive
(less than $70) USB Web Camera. Using one of these cameras,
you could easily take two separate students' photos per minute and
have them immediately attached to the RISC database and displayed
whenever any student is selected in RISC. It is very handy for
putting faces to names and ensuring you are referring to the correct
student. And whenever you
need to update a student's photo, you can - just retake it!
And you can take student photos whenever it's convenient to do it as
the PhotoCapture! tool is available on-demand. The RISC Newsletter
at this site has a useful page
all about Web Cameras compatible with RISC PhotoCapture! Now you can
even mail merge the student's photo into a form letter!
- Import Student Photos -
If your school receives a CD full of photos from the school
photographers, you can now import those photos into RISC so that you
don't have to individually take the photos yourself! The
included RISC Photo Import Tool will not only import them, but
it will automatically resize them so they take no more than about
5KB each! Quick to load and light of server space!
- Import of Student ID Number
- RISC v8 will import the school's student ID number to avoid any
confusion with similar names. For NSW schools, it's
completely compatible with the new ERN student enrolment numbers.
- Import of Gender field, Parent
Mobile Phone and Date
of Birth -
RISC v8 imports the student's gender to allow for reporting by
gender. It also now imports the Parent's Mobile Phone and date
of birth.
- Additional User-Definable Field
- A New field called Contact Category 2 (defaults as "Action Type") has its own lookup table
and can be renamed to whatever you like. With four
totally-definable fields, RISC 8 is the most flexible student incident
tracking system available. Now you can quickly report on
Suspensions, Detentions, Parent Meetings and so on.
- New Contact Navigation Tools
- As well as the previous methods of navigating through
Contact records, you can also now use simple arrow tools to jump
from one contact to the next.
- Spell Check - RISC now
links directly to the MS Word spell checker to spell check the two
main data entry fields at the click of a button!
- Quick Contact Descriptor
- RISC v8 uses three simple "smiley" symbols to quickly describe
each contact - positive (Happy), negative (Sad) or not applicable
(Middle). You can then search/sort on all positives/negatives
quickly and easily
- A Neat Facelift - RISC
v8 has had a facelift. This professional management tool for
schools has just got a whole lot better. But it still keeps
its familiar structure so your existing skills will simply transfer
to the new version.
The image below
shows what the RISC 8 system looks like:
Here's a look at the
RISC MailMerge Wizard:
RISC v8 for Windows was released
at the start of February 2008. The price for new users is $550.00 inc GST for a school-wide licence. Upgrade pricing for users of RISC
v7.xx will be $99.00 including GST for a downloadable version of RISC. Upgrade pricing from
earlier versions can be found on the How to Order
RISC page.
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RISC
Batch Photo Import Tool:
Almost as soon as RISC v7 was released,
schools, in particular high schools, started asking whether it was
possible to import existing student photo files into RISC instead of
using the RISC PhotoCapture! utility. Of course, at the time, the
answer was no. So, we went to work on developing such a tool and
realised it was not such a simple thing to do because between them,
schools will use various different sizes for their source photos and
they will also be named in all sorts of strange ways. So this tool
needed to be quite clever. Here's what we came up with:
This tool will not only
transfer your existing photos into RISC, but it will resize them, rotate
them (if required) and rename them automatically, without disturbing the
original copies. And it will do it all for your whole school in a
few minutes! For v7 users, to get your free download of this great new tool,
just e-mail us and we'll point you right at it. Users of v8 have and
updated version of
this tool built directly into the RISC Admin program.
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New Optional
OASIS Export Diskette for v7:
The standard OASIS Export Report shipped
with RISC v7 includes the "Emergency Phone Number" as the second phone
number displayed next to the home phone. Many schools in NSW use
the Emergency Phone Number as the parent's mobile. But many other
schools use it as a "last resort" phone number when all other available
contact numbers have not been successful. In these cases, this is
clearly not the ideal number to have displayed on the RISC screen.
For these schools with v8.x of RISC, there is an alternate OASIS Export
Report diskette that can be created which will export the "Mother's
Mobile Phone" field instead of the Emergency Phone.
Version 7 users can download this
Alternate OASIS Export
Report and save it into the RISC folder on your server to overwrite
the one that is there already. Then run RISC Admin and create a new
OASIS Export Diskette using the Utilities menu and re-export from OASIS
then re-import into RISC following the normal instructions.
PLEASE NOTE that this will not
automatically change the phone numbers in already saved contact records,
but will ensure all future contact records display a more suitable
second phone number.
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OASIS Thin
Client and RISC (NSW Schools):
OASIS Thin Client was rolled
out to all New South Wales Public Schools during 2007. RISC v6 and
later are compatible with OASIS Thin Client, however there is a
completely new set of instructions that must be followed in order to
successfully export your enrolment data from RISC for importing into
Windows. Thankfully, the days of using a floppy diskette for OASIS
are over!
Full instructions for
OASIS Thin Client are available in our Helpdesk section at this webpage
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New
Single Page RISC Flyer!
Are you a "paper" person? Do you find
it easier to read a piece of paper than a website? Would you like
a single-page flyer about RISC to hand to other school staff?
We've got just what you're looking for:
Click on either of the above links and
the flyer will open in a new window with Acrobat Reader. You can
then print as many copies as you like!
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RISC Data
Analysis Package - FREE Download:
One of our long-time users of RISC, Mr
Peter South from Thomas Reddall High School in Sydney, has
developed an excellent add-on resource for the RISC v8 software.
The RISC Data Analysis Package utilises an Excel Spreadsheet
Template for analysing export data from RISC to produce additional
reports and closer analysis of RISC data for schools. The Excel
spreadsheet uses coded macros to automatically import RISC data and
carry out further calculations, sort, display and print data and graphs.
It is generic and will work for data from any school, requiring the user
only to enter their school name and to click a single button for each
import (once they have exported their data from RISC). It can be
used to assist schools with the analysis of trends. Please note
that the package is only designed for schools running RISC v8.x for
Windows. Open the comprehensive User Guide linked below and have a
closer look at what the RISC Data Analysis Package can offer your
school. Our many thanks go to Peter South and Thomas Reddall High
School for making this useful tool available to RISC users.
The Register of
Individual Student Contact (RISC) is developed & distributed
by Marillion Designs.
Copyright © 1995-2008 Marillion Designs. All rights reserved.
Information in this document is subject to change without notice.
Other products and companies referred to herein are trademarks
or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
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