We’ve all heard that training is directly related to employee performance and retention, but how many of us are taking the time to make sure our employees really have the training they need to be successful? It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “I don’t have time to train my staff” or “I can’t afford to train my staff right now.” However, I would counter that you’re probably wasting more productive time as your staff uses trial and error to figure things out on their own. Additionally, you may be missing out on major time saving functions that your staff doesn’t know how to use – or maybe doesn’t know exists. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, you can’t afford NOT to train your staff. Plus, knowledgeable employees are happy employees! Let’s face it, the old adage is right…knowledge IS power. So where do you start?

It was nice to see many of you in person at last month’s conference.  All three reporting sessions were well attended and you all brought excellent questions and feedback…thanks!  Anyone interested in downloading the PowerPoint slides used during the presentations can find them on our client portal.  Search Knowledge for “2012 Users’ Conference Presentations.”  If you do not have a client account, please contact us.

The How to Train Users session at the Users’ Conference had overwhelmingly great attendance! Next year, we will be sure to book a bigger room. I think this is a testament to how important it is to ensure our users receive training to be successful with the application. I would like to give a big thank you to Austin Walden from Texas Tech University and Rachel Erkkila and Heidi Heilskov from Des Moines Area Community College. They shared great tips and tricks about how they are efficiently training their campus users. You can access the PPT presentation here.

The 2012 Users' Conference was full of lots of energy surrounding both Ad Astra clients and Ad Astra staff alike.  There was lots of buzz around 7.5 and the new Dashboards, Cloud and Strategic Offerings.   It was a huge success!  A big thank you to our clients for a great turn out and being so engaged and partnering with us to help transform higher education. 

Can you believe it’s October already?  October means one thing at Astra, our annual Users’ Conference!  We are busy planning, prepping, and organizing for this year’s big event.  For those of you joining us, we can’t wait to see you!  The Users’ Conference is a great time to meet people you work with all year round and finally put a face to the name.  It’s also a great time for Astra users to get to know one another, share stories, and exchange tricks of the trade.

It is that time of year, when we magically sense the coming of cooler weather, the leaves begin to change, and college freshmen desperately look for ways to explore your campus. It is confusing enough… what do I wear, how do I fit in, and where do I go? Give incoming freshmen (and tenured faculty for that matter) an easy way to investigate your campus - give them a one-stop-shop for finding campus happenings, with Astra Schedule’s new Activity Calendars.

Be nice everybody. This time of year can be rough on schedulers.

If you haven’t done it, you don’t know what I’m talking about. But anyone who has done it knows: creating a fall schedule, even for the smallest private school, can be hard (or insert another four-letter word here). Even if you can get all of the classes at the right times and in (what you hope is) the right room, you know that your “final” schedule is going to be picked apart by things like late registration, cancelled classes, or an old professor with an axe to grind. And this year, you’re supposed to do it “better”—whatever that means.

The 2012 Ad Astra Users’ Conference is poised to be our best yet in terms of session content and client presentations. We are changing the format of many of our presentations to panel discussions or town hall formats in order to foster more open conversation. Make sure you check out the most updated session list on our conference website.

We’re thrilled to announce the following client presenters, many of whom are Ad Astra Client Advisory Board (CAB) members.

That’s right…the Astra Slide has trumped the Electric Slide as event schedulers’ favorite move. The slide tool isn’t the latest and greatest dance move, but it might make you want to do a little happy dance once you realize how easy it is to move multiple event meetings simultaneously.

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve been planning Spirit Week on your campus for months. You’ve booked spaces and resources for all different kinds of great events – from ice cream socials on the quad to a pep rally in the football stadium. Everything is ready.

Hi All!  I am back and as promised I have a short blurb on the season ender of “Pysch”…WHAT!?! They can’t do that!  Luckily, since my blog entries are soooo far apart, I don’t have long to wait for the new fall season.  Anywho, back to Academic scheduling.  It is about that time of year again, where most of us will be too busy with the fall semester and the wave of students to get much else working.  It is both an exciting time on campus and a stressful one, so I know that most of you are in full preparation mode.  Once you are through the mass hysteria, I have a couple of areas that I would recommend reviewing and refining.  Both in process and technical configuration.   

Cloud computing is all the rage in the IT world these days and Ad Astra is right in the middle of this emerging technology. During Q2 of 2012 Ad Astra Information Systems launched the Astra Cloud, which is a cloud based hosting solution for both Platinum Analytics and Astra Schedule.

Hello, my name is Sarah, and I’m a scheduling-aholic. Having worked at Ad Astra for nearly 2 years after spending many years in higher ed, I now know I’m not the only one! Our company has a unique passion (some call it geekery) for scheduling, and we share this love across all facets of the industry. Amongst other things, we specialize in creating automated and optimized schedules for career and technical colleges, and I have the pleasure of consulting with these institutions as they implement our tools. The for-profit camp has faced varying degrees of challenges over the last few years, and we continue to support innovative solutions to help them achieve compliance, efficiency and student success.

Ad Astra is always a fun place to work, but it’s extra exciting when we’re on the brink of a new software release. There’s a buzz around the office and excitement to show off the new functionality that we know our clients are going to love. With the 7.5 general release just around the corner, I wanted to give you a sneak peak of what’s to come.

Change is always stressful, but we at Ad Astra are constantly working to make the transition to Astra Schedule VII painless and even harness some of the excitement that comes with using a new technology. Once a customer has decided to upgrade to web-based architecture, they make a commitment to emerging systems that are changing the workplace.  They are also committing to a process that helps them usher in the next stage in academic and event scheduling. While every implementation is customized to the needs of the organization, there are standard steps that need to be followed to ensure that the experience will be as painless as possible, and an Astra Schedule Implementation Consultant will work with the customer team to support the entire process. The basic steps include:

I really wanted to start out this blog post by telling a funny joke about analysis reporting.  And then I realized there is no such thing as a funny joke about analysis reporting.

But what I can tell you is that development of the new dashboard module for Astra Schedule, Platinum Analytics, and KPI measurements is well underway.  Almost daily I am working with our new dashboard tools and creating visualization dashboards based on our analysis data, and it’s actually pretty fun (well, it’s fun for the type of person that thinks interactive pie charts and bar graphs are fun).