Version 53 Beta Showcase Webinar FAQ

August 12th, 2020 - Questions and Answers from the v53 BETA Showcase Webinar.

What if TASS is not your HR/Payroll source of truth - is there a roadmap for the API to create employees?

We have endpoints in the Employee/HR and Data Upload Utility APIs that allow reading, creating, and updating employee details.

With IDM and communications - is there a roadmap for SDS expansion to send guardian details and to receive GradeSync from Office 365?

At the moment, the School Data Sync API only supports teacher, student, and subject class. We would be interested to hear more about your use case for the additional data – please post this on our community forum.

Can we also add the ability to update Kiosk Signature based on name and job title from data that is already defined in TASS? Alternatively via this new Identity Management API?

There is currently no endpoint for this so staff would need to maintain this manually. Some other schools solve this problem by using a mail signature service that integrates with your SMTP server to apply signatures to all emails that are sent. Clinton at St Joseph’s Gregory Terrace could tell you more.

Is there any scope for the self-registration to be extended to other areas of the school?

We have expanded for illness (sickbay) records because there was existing functionality in TASS that we could build upon. We are aware that customers are very interested in expanding this to music lessons and counselling sessions, and we are considering this for a future release.

With email now becoming a non-urgent platform for communications to teachers - for late and sickbay slips is there an integration coming to send a Teams message etc?

TASS does not currently support sending notifications using Microsoft Teams. If this is a feature of interest to your school, please post this in the enhancements area of our community forum.

Have the government returns been considered when developing gender fluidity? I recall we had to use an X for Indeterminate/Intersex/Unspecified in some reports.

For the government returns that require specific gender configuration, we allow you to map genders in TASS to the government-specified genders at runtime.

Do long text messages currently get truncated?

If you are entering the SMS message via the interface, it will not let you enter more than the specified maximum number of characters (which is 160 by default unless you enable multipart messaging). We have seen some issues occur with keyword substitutions (e.g. If a student has a very long name) in the Attendance SMS.

Do you need two persons on a parent record? or can you just have one?

You only need one person on a parent record.

Is there a limit to the number of genders you can define?

There is no practical limit (we estimate a minimum of ~46,000).

Can you run a report or identify students who have signed up and the parents have not approved the activity? Is there any way to identify these students?

At this time there is no report to identify which students have signed up to activity though Student Café and are awaiting acceptance in Parent Lounge. We are reviewing this one further.

Hub looks great and is a welcome enhancement - well done :-)

Thanks for the feedback!