Jenzabar SONIS 2024 Release Index, June 2024

Students who are waitlisted for a course can be automatically added when a space in the course opens up using the new Auto Waitlist notifier and the accompanying timed task. The notifier follows all prerequisite and corequisite requirements and skips students who have registration holds.

In addition to the letter grade import utility, administrators can now import numeric grades using a CSV or XLS file.

This new Systems utility allows administrators to import bulk data to users' Waivers record. The data must be imported using a spreadsheet in XLSX format.

A new utility was added to help system administrators and Jenzabar SONIS Support staff quickly access files and settings used in the integration between SONIS and Jenzabar Financial Aid. JFA Insight is a dashboard that collects all of the settings, info, and files needed to troubleshoot potential JFA issues in one place.

Administrators can now import submitted data from Jotform, a web application that allows users to build custom forms. The user's name, email address, and date of birth are all required for import.

Because system messages can be overlooked if they are displayed in an area of the page the administrator may not be viewing, toast messages that will pop-up and display in the lower right corner of any page with the status of the activity taken.

Transact, formerly known as CashNet, is an online payment gateway that allows customers to link their bank accounts to send and receive money in a quick and secure manner. This integration allows member institutions to use Transact for payment plans, eBills, and credit balance refunds. Functionality has been added to allow administrators to create and send eRefund and eBill files. Real time processes are now included to keep up to date on payment plans and refunds, as well as functionality that integrates with the Transact Dynamic Billing module.

The AmeriaBank Payment Gateway was modified to allow user entry of custom text in the description field on transaction initiation, send the SONIS ID, receive and store the payment authorization code, and added a column for the authorization code in the transaction register report.

Clients can now use email variables to add a student's first name and their application term to the applicant acceptance letter that appears in the Applicant portal. This is in addition to the two email variables that were already available for this function, program name and delta days.

A new checkbox added to the Attendance by Student Report build page can be used to exclude withdrawn students from the report. When the box is checked, withdrawn students will be filtered out.

The Batch Folder File Download utility, now renamed the Batch Folder File Retrieval, has been enhanced for easier management of large sets of files. Administrators can now select the number of files to view instead of the page displaying everything automatically. Additionally, files can be archived or deleted to remove them from the active list.

When emailing a user through the Bulk Email/Text Message utility or through either Query Builder, administrators can now choose to send the email to the user's secondary email, if one is on file, in addition to their primary email. This is intended to help schools better reach students who forget to check their school email address.

Schools can now choose to export each student's email address to Canvas as the User ID in addition to the previous options, SONIS ID and LDAP ID. The SONIS ID will replace the email address in the export file if the student does not have an email address on file.

By default, the Canvas system can only be accessed between the start date and end date of each course. Some schools may wish to provide their Canvas users with access outside of these dates for setup or other purposes. When Canvas is set as the active LMS on the Learning Management System Setup page, each Section edit page now includes a Canvas Start Date field and a Canvas End Date field. Administrators can enter dates in this field to replace the course start and end dates that are exported to Canvas and extend the access window.

The email that is automatically sent out to students when they create a CE Registration account is now available to be edited from the CE Registration Email Setup utility. Previously, this email could only be edited through the Page Instructions/Buttons utility.

Schools can now designate an address type as for constituents that will tie address records of this type to the Constituent Contact page. Updating either record will update the other record, allowing any other address records without the constituent flag to be retained separately.

The Course/Degree/Program page has been redesigned with a more functional table structure and now allows bulk updates.

Many schools offer courses that are not eligible for Title IV financial aid. Previously, all course hours were used to calculate financial aid eligibility for students, including these courses. To ensure that eligibility is calculated correctly going forward, every home institution course now has a Financial Aid Eligible checkbox on the Course Add/Edit page. This box is checked by default. Administrators should uncheck it on any courses that are not Title IV eligible to ensure that these courses are not included in student aid eligibility calculations for export to the Jenzabar Financial Aid product.

The Course Section Creation Wizard was updated to warn the user of potential scheduling conflicts and allow the user to decide to ignore the warning or not.

Logos uploaded through the custom logo tool in System Variables will now appear on all degree audit reports. If no custom logo has been added, the report will appear as before with no logo.

The standard Jenzabar SONIS email variables used to add custom text to emails have been added as an option for administrators sending emails through both Query Builders. They can now be used to add the specific user's prefix, first name, last name, middle name, last name, suffix, SONIS ID number, and/or PIN to any email sent through these utilities.

To provide support for meeting Gainful Employment reporting requirements, SONIS has been enhanced to fully support the data necessary for reporting through the NSC. The Programs table now provides additional program classification details. A new utility, COA By Program and Year, allows the entry and update of program cost of attendance in bulk and individually and

A user's GPA could only be calculated to two decimal places. Now, GPAs can be calculated and displayed with up to four decimal places. Contact Jenzabar SONIS Support to change your GPA truncation setting if you'd like to use additional decimal places.

The EDExpress disbursement file is delivered with a P for both Grad Plus and Parent Plus loans. To prevent possible misinterpretation of this code, the process was improved to use both the graduate student indicator in the Education record and the Import T-Codes Graduate Plus Loan award identifier to match and disburse against an existing award.

The Twilio integration was improved in a number of areas, to include: specifying additional numbers for a user, sending texts to a group of users from Administration and the Faculty/Advisor portal, sending texts automatically using activities and scheduled tasks, sending and receiving real-time responses to a specific user from within Administration and the Faculty/Advisor portal, and ability for administrators to view the text history for all users.

The 12-Month Enrollment: Enrollment Unduplicated Headcount and 12-Month Unduplicated Distance Learning reports were enhanced to utilize course start dates to determine if a student should be included in the reports. This replaces the enrollment date as a determination of inclusion because this date may be well before the reporting year, depending on admittance and/or registration timing, and students were not always appropriately included.

The latest 1098-T form includes a checkbox that designates whether the student has a social security number value in their record. This box will be automatically checked if the student has a social security number in SONIS and left unchecked if they do not. The corresponding export file will also honor this.

Once an administrator has been given this new User Security privilege, they can delete unprocessed JFA Anticipated Award and Disbursement batches that were imported to SONIS mistakenly.

The JFA Level field attached to a SONIS level is used to send grade level information to Jenzabar Financial Aid. Previously, this field did not allow a null value. Now clients who use JFA can create a SONIS level with a blank/null JFA Level value to designate students who are not financial aid eligible and this level will be sent to JFA.

A field was added to the Levels table that allows schools to control the order in which levels display in menus throughout the Jenzabar SONIS system. By default, this field will match the level number designation so menus will not change until intentional updates are made.

To assess a fee to defray the costs of offering users the convenience of paying their charges online using PayPal, functionality has been added to Business: Credit Card Processing. The fee amount will be calculated by SONIS to be a percentage of the balance due. The percentage amount is determined by the institution and added to the balance before the payment due amount is sent to PayPal.

Changes were made to meet Department of Education requirements for 2024 - 2025 Pell Grant processing.

The PowerFAIDS Anticipated Award Utility has been updated to allow filtering of records by school year and semester. When filtered results are displayed, the summary values will only include the records that match the selected filters. The paginated display can be also be searched.

The PowerFAIDS Cloud Users CSV Export Utility was improved with more error resolution messaging and process reminder messages.

The Prospect Import Summary page now includes the date that the interest card was submitted and the desired program code.

The Regent Award integration data export has been improved to allow a student's housing status to be transferred to Regent. This supports award and package management and is critical due to the removal of the housing plans question from the FAFSA. Additionally, five other elements have been added that may be configured for export in the two user-defined fields provided by Regent.

Two new System Variables checkboxes allow schools to require an explanation whenever a course is removed using the Registration page in the Administration system, the Student Portal, or the Faculty portal. These memos and other useful data can be accessed through a Registration History link that can also be turned on from System Variables.

The Reports pages were improved so that the look and feel is more modern, and the user experience was improved with new form designs.

Previously, when users and administrators logged into SONIS with SSO Cert x509, the process used the SONIS PIN and password to validate the user. With this update, the process will no longer use the PIN/Password, and will instead use variables that are determined by client settings, such as two factor authentication.

Based on focus group feedback, the Student Schedule Changes Notification Assignment was changed to provide distinction between students who are enrolled but have dropped to 0 credits and students who have withdrawn.

Trust Commerce was acquired by Sphere Commerce and the existing SONIS interface for credit card payments was discontinued by Sphere. SONIS was upgraded to utilize Sphere's preferred payment integration: Premier Hosted Payments for eCommerce. To provide clarity in this transition, the existing TrustCommerce integration has been renamed TrustCommerce-Sphere, and modified as necessary. Some setup may need to be completed by the institution and Sphere to work with this new payment process.

The non-API Element451 import has been improved to allow the user to change the default module status from Student to other options during an import.

Throughout the SONIS database, many fields in tables were improved to accommodate more characters.

The Administrative and Faculty portals have been enhanced to allow copy/paste of formatted text from Word documents, as well as formatting inside the Grade Notes text box. The way the text is entered and formatted in one portal is the same way it will display in the other portal.

A CAPTCHA was added for new PIN or password requests and the URL was hidden from outside access, preventing bots and other malicious software from sending multiple reset requests. Additionally, rather than resetting the password or PIN immediately, the system now sends the user an email with a link to the password/PIN reset page. This link expires 24 hours after the email is delivered.

Transfer courses that have been accepted can now be viewed within the Applicant portal on the Bio page. This feature is turned on from the Portal Menu Utility using the Display Options.

The CE Registration process was modified to include checking for completed prerequisites. Users will be alerted of missing prerequisites when selecting a course for registration and will not be able to enroll for courses they have not met the prerequisite(s) for.

A new web option gives instructors the ability to see the at-risk status for their students when viewing a course roster. Another web option gives advisors the option to see the at-risk status of their advisees when viewing the advisee listing and accessing student records.

The Select Advisee function within the Faculty portal was improved, providing new search, filter, and display options, as well as status indicators.

By default, a user's preferred name displays after the user's first and last names within a portal. To replace the first name with the preferred name in the Faculty & Advisor portal, a setting is provided in Portal Menu Utility. When this setting is enabled, the preferred name displays in place of the first name in the Course Roster and other Course Management pages.

Two new System Variables checkboxes allow schools to require an explanation whenever a course is removed using the Registration page in the Administration system, the Student Portal, or the Faculty portal. These memos and other useful data can be accessed through a Registration History link that can also be turned on from System Variables.

Some applicants were confused when they were unable to return to their submitted application since they were unaware that they had gained access to the Applicant Portal. To make the process more clear, schools can choose to add an Applicant Portal login button to the Apply Online page. The option to turn this on is located in the Login Page setup utility.

A checkbox was added in System Variables that allows administrators to turn on/off the ability to choose a default campus for each entry in Business: Credit Card Processing. When turned on, each entry will have a campus drop-down, allowing the administrator to designate which campus is associated with an online application submission transaction.

The Apply Online process was improved to allow a selected language to remain selected, even if the applicant encounters an error or switches applications.

Previously, direct ethnicity reporting was available in the Online Application, but many schools prefer not to ask for ethnicity in the application to avoid the appearance of bias. Now, students can add or update their ethnicity through the Update Bio page, making it easier to collect this data.

Prior to this release, users who were navigating from the SONIS Student portal to the Jenzabar Financial Aid Student portal had to sign in again. With this release, single sign-on has been added and users will no longer need to enter their credentials when navigating between portals.

By default, a user's preferred name displays after the user's first and last names within the Student portal. An optional setting was added to replace the first name with the preferred name throughout the portal. This setting must be defined in Portal Menu Utility.

Two new System Variables checkboxes allow schools to require an explanation whenever a course is removed using the Registration page in the Administration system, the Student Portal, or the Faculty portal. These memos and other useful data can be accessed through a Registration History link that can also be turned on from System Variables.

An option was added that allows status indicators to be shown within the Student portal.