Getting your stats lodged: onCourse and AVETMISS   18 Jan 2010   more

We have lots of new customers using the free version of onCourse you can download from our website purely to manage their government funding submissions. While we have embedded AVETMISS data collection within onCourse to make it compliant, we believe that it shouldn’t drive the way you do business. onCourse is an RTO Management tool, and lots of things RTOs need to do, like schedule rooms and tutors, market and sell courses, handle student payments, transfers and refunds have nothing to do with government statistical lodgement.

Support and service level agreements   9 Oct 2009   more

In the previous article we wrote about some ways to choose software. In this, I’m going to talk about one specific thing: support.

How crucial is your student software to your business operations? Can you cope if it is down for a day or two? Would a few minutes of down time during peak enrolments cause a massive loss in sales? Somewhere along that continuum you will find yourself a happy medium, between the service and stability you need and the cost of that reliability.

Evaluating software in the cloud   8 Oct 2009   more

The decision to migrate to a new core business tool is not one to be taken lightly. We get new enquiries every day, and many people spend months (and sometimes years!) researching the functions and features of different tools on the market. We are asked lots of questions: can it handle my reporting requirements? Will it streamline my administrative processes? Is it easy for my staff to use?

The wonders of 'xargs'   21 Sep 2009   more

xargs has become one of my favourite unix commands. Since I have discovered it, I have continued to use it as often as possible because it can make so many long and difficult tasks quick and easy. Simply put xargs can take a list of input and place each line of the list as an argument to the specified utility. So:

$ <list> | xargs <cmd> <Line #1 of list>

This would then continue to iterate through the complete list.

onCourse 1.7.11 released   18 Aug 2009   more

Quite a few bug fixes over the six weeks have gone into 1.7.11. We skipped a few version numbers since we’ve been sending out specific fixes to customers on support agreements who had particular urgent requirements. The complete list of fixes can be found here.

We recommend all users of onCourse update to this version. Unless something important comes up, this is likely to be the final 1.7 release before our next major version codenamed Dingo.