Slate Spotlight on the Workflow Editor

Hello and welcome folks. You are here at the webinar or at the Slate Spotlight webinar on workflows. We'll give it another minute or so before we start with our content. Super fun to see all these participants streaming in. We're really excited about a big, big attend, a big attendance, a big audience today.

Louise.

We can't hear you.

Any luck?

You're back.

Yes.

Can you hear me alright?

Thank you. We'll just like splice that right out of the recording. You had to be here for to experience that um.

Yeah.

And just in case I missed part of this slide, um, we're first going to focus on understanding workflows conceptually, thinking about what you might use a workflow for. Next, we'll talk through how you can build an effective workflow and then I'll hand things over to Melissa. There are a lot of questions that came in about those of you who already have workflows that you've maybe built in a legacy tool. And we'll learn how we can migrate those effectively to the current tool, which is the one that I'll be focusing on in most of my demonstrations today finally.

Sending things off to questions? Um, so let's dive right in.

Just to get started, a workflow is a process to review, record data and record materials. Regardless of your familiarity with the workflow tool and the slate in general, we're hoping that this first exercise is an opportunity for you to learn a little bit more about how you can fit your process or processes into slate. A process has stages, and each stage may have opportunities for input. Each stage may have different potential next stages for the records. Moving through this workflow, though, we know that higher education.

Cyclical the process that your workflow captures has a beginning and an ending for each record, and you need to keep those things in mind. You should be thinking about the outcome of the review process as you're building it, and think of the workflow as the journey that a record takes, and the destination is really important in these circumstances as well.

Another layer of nuance to add to workflows. A workflow flows. Kind of like Alexander's hair and the Alexander's hair icon. If anybody's using this in your database, you get some extra credit. A workflow flows kind of like a river. But really I think the most helpful analogy to use is that a workflow flows like a flow chart flows rather records flow through a workflow. Records move throughout the stages of the process, and at each stage there's an opportunity for input and for routing.

Record onto one of many next possible steps. Um, there is more than one path from beginning to end, more than one way that a record can be assessed, and there can be multiple outcomes of the workflow.

Um, workflows are displayed in the slate reader. Here is a visual portrayal of the flow and how a single record might move through a workflow as displayed in the reader. I'll try to be careful to use the correct phrasing here. The reader is where your users, staff, faculty, and outside constituents can go in order to review record information and materials. I'll try to refer to these parties as reviewers from now on, and the reader is where they're interacting with your workflow. If it's helpful, you can think of your instance as containing.

As many iterations of the reader as there are workflows and there is a variable number of stages, as I said before, for each record as it moves through the workflow. So these might be the steps that a record takes moving through your process.

A different record might take this different order and, um, number of steps, but it is still being moved out at the end and having some action taken as a result of your review. As the person building your workflow, you're asking yourself the questions, what information needs to be displayed at each stage? What information needs to be gathered at which stage, and then where can the record move once it's complete or once this review is complete, the visual portrayals of the stages? The Gray boxes here are called bins, and they're the components that house your workflow review process.

We'll talk about where these are built and what they can do in just a moment.

But backing up a step, we saw one workflow on the previous screen, but Slate allows for multiple as many workflows as you have processes. So your user or reviewer can select a workflow within Slate by navigating to the reader tab on Slate's home screen. And you as an administrator can go here too to view all your active workflows or all their review processes in your slate instance. We showed an application review process on the previous screen as well and we'll be working with that application review example as this is a pretty widespread.

Use of the slate reader and the workflows that it can house. But workflows can be used to review any type of record in slate and can pull in related data and materials pertaining to any type of record. So an athletic recruiting process that may happen when a candidate becomes before a candidate becomes an official applicant, why not? You can put it in a workflow in slate. A grant proposal process for fund records in your advancement instance. Certainly you can put that in slate. A tour guide application process where each tour guide.

Candidate is a data set record, absolutely. You see here that there is a poster review record, an organization workflow on the organization base which is processing college fair requests, and slate can be used for all of these simultaneously. Workflows can be permissioned on the administrative side using realms, or for the end user or the reviewer themselves using permissions. And a record can be in multiple workflows at once, but can only be in a single workflow at one time.

In other words, it could only be at one stage of a single workflow. Um, so if you have concurrent review processes that you're trying to put the same record through, that's a sign that you might need to separate those out. And as this workflow example here shows, there are multiple workflows built on the application base. The same is true of all bases.

Before diving into the tool, here are some more overarching things to reiterate and to keep in mind. Workflows are active processes of record review. You want records to be moving forward into and eventually out of the workflow and intentionally moved into and out of the workflow.

Workflows are capable of displaying curated information about each record. You decide which data and materials are displayed for each record at each stage of the workflow. Does information accumulate as the record moves forward in the process? Is different record information useful at different stages of the process? We'll see how all of that is configured. And just a second. Workflows are also capable of gathering and inputting new information on records, and those reviewers can actually be rating entering some nuance and notes.

On each record as it moves through. At each stage in a workflow, there's an opportunity to use forms to gather this information. We'll also see how that is configured. And finally, workflows are fueled by a combination of manual and automatic movements of records. When I'm seeing automatic in Slate, I am referring to rules. Records can be moved from bin to bin based on user discretion, and a process that's documented outside of Slate has to do with reviewing, but they can also be moved automatically.

Workflows are not.

Reports. So going to the flip side of some of the items on the previous slide. Again, you want records to be moving forward, you want them to be moving into and out of the workflow intentionally. The workflow is dynamic, it's active, and though the reader can capture how many applications are currently at each stage, and does allow for an overview of your review process, it's meant to be engaged with. A report outside of the reader can show which applications, which person records which data set records are.

Which stage? But you shouldn't think of the reader and the workflow within it as the only place to kind of gauge your admission or record funnel. Workflows should not be moved only by manual movements. This would be a lot of work. You don't want to have to individually put or even batch move records into the workflow. This is a great use of rules and automations, which we'll get to in just a moment. Workflows are not fueled only by automated movements either, though you do want there to be some.

Multiple possibilities for records moving forward that are determined by user discretion in most cases. If automatic movements and just like pure record criteria is enough to move applications or person records or data set records forward, you might not need a workflow at all to house this process. Workflows are not record pages, this isn't a one stop shop to edit every piece of information on the student record, and though you might modify or add a couple of new data points or your reviewers might modify or add some new.

Data points to that record. Review is key here, not overhaul. Finally, workflows are not graveyards. You can batch move records out of the workflow and should batch move records out of the workflow or clear their bins using rules when the review is complete, revisit your workflow regularly to take away records for whom the outcome of the process has already been achieved.

So how do we configure these workflows? How do you actually picture the parts of the process that I have been highlighting today? You'll navigate first to your database tab. We'll do this together in a moment and just enter the simple workflows tool. Everything is centrally located here.

Once you open it, you can see a list of all your workflows, slightly different display than the one that the readers would see, and all of them should be appearing here. And then we'll click on the one that we are hoping to edit. We can also build a new one from this screen and we'll take a closer look.

I'm going to return first to the basic overview of records as they appear in the reader, so the external and then internal components of your workflow. There will be a quick pause here as I unshare and reshare my screen.

All right, and this should be familiar from earlier on in our demonstration, so I'm starting in the reader once again, where you can see the components of the workflows displayed as your reviewers will interact with them. Browse.

Over here is an overview of the workflow that displays the bins and thus visually captures your process on the highest level within the reader. As a pretty visual person myself, it's almost impossible for me to think of a workflow without this image. Clicking on a bin in browse will allow readers to see or reviewers to see all the files or all the records that are at this stage, and it will also allow users reviewers to search for individual records.

Using the search bar on the side, um, you can also in the search bar back out of the bin that you click on and you search as a more generic function. Let's now go a layer deeper.

To see how an individual record is viewed, selected, and ultimately reviewed. So starting from either browse or search, you can select a record by clicking it or.

Display a copy.

With that.

And now we are.

In just a moment in the record itself, we can see that now. There's a ton of associated information for review pertaining only to this record, and it's organized here in tabs on the left. Minor, also color-coded to help us see the parallels with the external and internal display, which we'll do in just a moment. To actually review the record, IE update or input information on it, and crucially to move it forward in the workflow, it must be added to the reviewers queue. You can allow readers or reviewers to do this themselves.

Or manage it automatically using rules, but the place that they'll have to add the file to, or the file will have to be added to automatically is called the queue. I can do it by hitting add to queue down here or backing out a layer, which is possible always by clicking the slate icon I've selected this record.

And I can add it to my queue in the top right corner so that I could do that with multiple records at once. Once in a queue, the record can be reviewed.

I hit review form next, bin, and um, I can see here that a reader form is displayed. We'll talk about configuring those in a minute, and routing options appear here at the bottom.

We've seen the external. We've seen what our reviewers are seeing. Now let's move over to the internal tool. We'll step back out another layer and just make sure that it's clear how we're arriving here at the workflows from the database.

And it's its own central tool. Everything that you just saw is configured in here and we're starting in slates Business School review.

You'll see right away that the browse tab displays visually on this outside of the process.

And the home page of the workflow tool is showing the browse tab as well. The home page does this because browse and your bin structure and the stages of your process are so important to capture what this workflow is actually doing. At least one bin is necessary for a workflow to render. They represent stages and substages of your their review of your review process. And to reiterate, the way that the record moves through the bins and the journey that they take is really instrumental to the output of the workflow.

Yeah, and the function of this process in your overall slate instance. You can play around by hitting edit.

And going one layer deeper with the order of these stages, you can move columns, you can create new columns. I have done too much.

Move it on back in there.

Perfect.

And organize your bins in groupings as well. Within each bin you can also determine settings which will be important for things like bin routing and who can review applications at each stage of the process.

Next, spin settings. Um, over here you can see this is a kind of version of the query tool specific to workflows that we'll talk about in just a moment.

But next, spin and Q are probably the most important settings to think about here. Um, there are important because they can determine where a reviewer can actually.

Send this record.

From this bin, so it's reflected.

Down here in this dropdown, there are currently no limits there, but it's something that you'll have an option to add as the administrator. You can also permission the bin so that only certain types of reviewers, or only reviewers with certain permissions are actually capable of moving this around in the process.

You also might have noticed back on the top level of this workflow that some of the bins display the message records are moved into this bin automatically. You won't see that in the external display of the workflow. This is happening behind the scenes, but there are rule fueled movements of records through bins and they can be managed within the workflow tool as well. Even though they're technically using the rules apparatus. Rules are crucially responsible for pulling records into the workflow in the first place.

And Bin movement rules or rules acting on workflows are typically an exclusivity groups, so this is a great like visual overview of all the automatic actions being taken throughout your workflow.

There are special types of bin, or there's a special bin type of rules, and they can assign both bins and also cues. So keep in mind that it is possibly or possible, as I said, to automatically assign readers to a given record and know that this is happening in the background. Your readers aren't always going to be aware that files are automatically appearing, or they'll know if they didn't add them themselves, but this is something that you as the administrator pretty much have sole control of, and they are just the ones who are determining.

Who are actually reading the file and determining which notes need to be added, and then where it needs to move after that. Speaking of notes being added, we're moving over to the next tab of the workflow tool, the Tabs tab, which we also saw a preview of in the external display. These tabs determine what you want to actually see in the record, and you can see here that as they display and the reader.

And they align with the overarching tabs here in the workflow editor as well. There are overarching formats that reader tabs can take.

We go in a layer deeper, as is pretty typical in this workflow editor. There are a couple of layers that you need to think about for making edits.

And you can then fill these tabs with multiple materials. We'll get to that in just a moment. But there's a couple of formats that these tabs can take. They can pull in links either from outside of slate or a link to a slate portal. We saw this and still see this displaying and kind of the dashboard home tab for this record. Tabs can also display other multimedia content collected in slate, like a portfolio or a video essay, probably the most common type of or format for reader.

Have is the one that displays materials, um these reader tabs.

Can have multiple materials configured for them, and there's a palette tool within each reader tab to display materials of many different types. You can select a literal material type to display for that record, but you could also display a form other objects pulled straight from the record, like timeline data or even messages. And you can also use this tool called a data container to create a group of exports and determine exactly which data points will display.

For this record, regardless of how they were entered by the record in the 1st place. So if you want to only display certain pieces of information that you gathered from that record on a slate form or from a slate hosted application in this application use case, you can do so.

By building a data container.

And then selecting in this case all the school scoped related fields for that record and then.

Know that you can also use filters over which types of schools are displaying data sorts. Um, this has a pretty robust knowledge base article on it and I won't be getting into it in too much detail today, but this is an excellent way to leverage exactly which data should be displayed at which point of the process. Individual reader tab materials can be conditionally hidden.

And you can also conditionally hide and tire reader tabs. Um, you notice that there's not exact parity here as there is with the internal and external tools. And the interview notes, for example, are filtered by bin, and they're only going to show up in the faculty review column later on in the process. So this is one way to make sure that the appropriate materials and appropriate overarching tabs to organize those materials are all showing up at the right times.

Next up, we know what the materials are displaying and when. Now what information do we want to gather about them? Once a reviewer has added a file to their queue and they're ready to give their input, they can hit the review form and send to bin option, which I did before on the bottom right and they are redirected to a reader review form. Or a reader review form populates in the reader so that they can add those notes and display only the information that you want to gather from them. Those forms are configured.

In the forms tool they have a scope of reader, but they can be easily added.

To the reader review forms tab in the workflows tool.

You can drag multiple reader review forums all around add new forms of a reader scope.

And.

You also have the opportunity to determine which forms will conditionally show for your applicants at various stages of the process. To those of you familiar with the form tool, you can hide or share, hide, or show fields based on record data based on, in this case, the file or record that is displaying alongside that form in the workflow. But you can also hide certain forms altogether and filter for them back at this level. As you saw, there's a little query tool in here.

Um, this summary tab reflects all of the logic that is, um, embedded in each of those reader review forms. And I can see in this case I think that Mary qualifies for pretty much everything. I can see which forms would display when those readers reviewers select reader review forums, and in which bins they would be displaying. So just another way to get a good overview of your process.

We're nearing the end, and this is something that you might be familiar with, might have seen but I didn't refer to yet, and the reader apparatus. The view is a version of the query tool. As I mentioned before, it is the lens through which you're viewing the records at multiple levels in the workflow or in the reader itself. Filters can be overlaid on an entire workflow or within a given bin, and can narrow down records in the slate.

Reader um, so that it's easier for your reviewers to find the records that they want. Exports are can be displayed.

And these basically become the column headers.

And then sorts can determine the order that the records show up. So there's a couple of levels in the slate reader that this can be leveraged. We'll back out to the Browse tab. Currently the default view is selected.

I can switch to the international applicant view.

Hit update and now I'm seeing my two foreign national candidates here in the pool.

I can also do the same thing at the search level and customize it further no matter where I am, so I'll update to include only international applicants, but I can also in this case. There's no application major here, I don't want to see it.

I'm updating it.

And I think the next time I refresh, which I won't do right now because I don't want to lose the workflow, this other export will be gone. You might have noticed that I'm doing some of this in the query or in the reader itself, and that's because I'm an experienced query user. I know how to query, but I could also just hit the drop down, select one of these preconfigured views that you as the administrator made, and that may be fully sufficient for the vast majority of your reviewers as they access.

The workflow through that slate reader in the bins tool, you can set a default view on a bin level and an overall default. It doesn't have to be called default here, but this option indicates that everybody who's entering this workflow is going to be seeing these kind of overlaid filters and these column headers for the exports. And in this case, my workflow default view has a sort so that the records are viewed in the order that they entered.

The workflow itself, which is cool if you want to help people impose that order on their cues for instance, and work through files in a certain order. Views can be added to individuals queues as well.

And last, but certainly not least, we've got reader lookup. This is an option that feels maybe a little bit hidden. So much of what we just saw has the ability to display information about the record and update information about the record. But when you are, or when one of your reviewers is.

Looking at a file either in their queue or outside of their queue, you can always click on the record at the top left.

And um, see, just kind of a basic brief overview of information about this record and in the case of applications, a couple of relevant data points that slate is building in automatically. It's this piece at the top that the workflow editor or the workflows tool is allowing you to configure under reader lookup and make what this what you will.

This can be really handy as it displays some links outside of the reader. Download PDF links. It's handy and helping you move around Slate navigate outside of the reader for your reviewers. But the brief small excerpt of this that you can customize yourself that is done in the workflow tool as well.

And we've now reached the end of our journey in the workflow tool. If this is all sounding like a lot of information, maybe for some of you it's review information, but you do want a place that you can access it without having to listen to this entire webinar. Again, the application workflows section of the knowledge base does reiterate most of this, including some of like the strategic planning and like thought exercises that I mentioned going into the building of a workflow and for those of you who are seeing.

All of this and saying, yes, I do know how to do that in the legacy version of the tool, but I need to know now how to migrate it into this new version of the tool. I am not building from scratch. I'm going to pass things off to Melissa so that she can talk a little bit about some of like the the nuance and different ways of thinking that are involved there. But thanks all of you so much and I'll now hop into the chat and try to support as best I can with questions.

Thank you, Louise, and thank you everybody for participating in the chat. The questions are coming in fast and Furious. It's fun. I haven't done this in a while. So I'm it's, it's it's been a great test of knowledge.

We did get a lot of questions ahead of our presentation today regarding the migration from the legacy reader or the the deprecated workflows to the current workflow tool.

Where, where, where we have actually used a lot of those questions to help frame the migration considerations that we're going to be presenting. So first and foremost, the legacy reader is not going away yet. And I assure you that technicians will provide ample warning when and if the legacy reader is going to sunset. At this time, there's no particular cutoff date. I know we had a few questions submitted ahead of time for is there like a cutoff date? Like is it June 1st, is it, you know, January 1st?

Next year or whatnot. We don't have a cutoff date yet, but as I said, I I did did confer with several of my colleagues and if and when there is going to be a sunset date, it's going to be, you know, definitely provided well in advance so that you can make the necessary arrangements to transition. With that being said, since you do not have to transition immediately, you may wish to at least consider the steps you may have to take if and when you choose to, to make the transition, just being able to prepare ahead of time.

I think makes things a little bit easier, so who should really consider transitioning? I would recommend those databases that are currently using workflows built on the deprecated workflow tool. I would encourage them. We as a team would encourage you to consider transitioning at your earliest convenience. And how do you tell if you are on the deprecated workflow tool or not when you do log into the slate?

Reader just pull it over quick. You should be able to see these are legacy readers. This is the this is built on our current workflow tool that that Louise has demonstrated on and these are built on the deprecated workflow tool there. So if you have any of these like reader access points when you click on the reader that say workflow at the top those were built on the deprecated.

Workflow tool if they should still work, but they they are probably not going to be as efficient. And again the support and that that tool is is really kind of going to sunset now that the current workflow tool is is up and running.

Another recommendation for who should consider transitioning now would be those individuals who have a lot of groupings. So if you were not building out workflows but using the legacy reader for your entire reading process, but you have various groupings, perhaps you have one for undergrad, one for grad, one for your adult Ed, one for your summer sessions, and that so that you have a rather busy set of groupings. But it's not necessary that all of your readers at all times have access to those.

For being so, I have a little example in my in my test instance. So this is like 3 different groupings here, but I have three sets of users or readers who are reading in these each groupings. If you do have that, we would recommend thinking about making the transition to the workflow the current workflow tool more readily because it's just going to give you one greater efficiency to the way that you have to set up permissions is going to be a little bit more straightforward because essentially you're going to be able to provide those point of access through the reader when you click on the reader.

They're just going to be able to see like graduate readers, we're undergrad readers, or, you know, summer session scholarships, whatever the case may be. So we would, we would definitely recommend that that you know, individual instances using so many groupings. Break them out into the individual workflows.

If your instance has been flows in the legacy reader or the deprecated workflows tools that are on a custom query base, our team would also encourage you to consider migrating to the current workflow tool and the primary reason is going to be greater efficiency. The bases that are going to be used, the configurable joint bases being used in the workflow tool are going to be far more efficient than those those custom query bases. On the custom query bases, they have to check a lot against the user credentials and.

Not as as each user logs into the reader and starts to read. So the the workflow tool on these configurable joint bases that allows you a lot of customization are just going to be a lot more efficient for your processing time and just for access.

We also would encourage if you are building out any new reading processes, we would encourage you can you to consider to use the the current workflow tool, especially if it is a workflow for that. Why, why should you transition to the to the new work or the current workflow tool that that has been kind of enhanced version of workflows and readers. It is definitely going to be more efficient. It's going to give you a lot more again a lot more opportunities for customization.

Because it it is built on the configurable joint base the reader the the legacy reader doesn't really use configurable joins except for an A couple of different ways of the portal and and some of the querying and that. But the the current workflow tool really can optimize all sorts of you know configurable joints and I have to say as someone who's for many years in our in our old model our old service model I was I was the reader team lead and I really like the the kind of this.

Nine of the workflows now where you can actually maintain everything within that tool. So everything for a given workflow can be navigated to right within that the workflow settings for that, whereas before those of you who have been.

Who who have who have built out the process and the legacy workflow. You remember you have to go to reader bins first, then you go to reader review forms, and then you go to a tool in the database that's reader tab groups and then reader tab materials, and then you go back to assign them. So everything is right within each individual workflow. As you're building them out, you can drop and drag as as Louise showed you, and it just makes things a little bit more efficient. Same thing for when you're building up the rules again, you have all the configurable joints available to you and you're able to just really kind of very easily limit the exclusivity.

Groups of these rules apply to this workflow that I'm building with. You have to be careful with those exclusivity groups, of course, but.

So there are like myriad reasons and I'm sure those who've already who've already transitioned over can kind of speak to even even more of them, you know, either through the forums or through our chat today. But let's just talk a little bit about how you could transition or how you should think about transitioning. As many of you know, if you've been with us for for a while, we do advise you routinely auditing your instance of sleep. At least for some schools that's at least once a year. For other schools that is at a various.

Various intervals within their cycles. Some of our schools, you know, review everything a couple of times of years. Others, like I said, do it once a year when they have a natural break in their cycles. Some of you don't have as natural a break, so you will sometimes audit your your slate resources when you have a little bit more downtime or when you're reviewing the least number of applications. So here are some questions to ask your team. Are you using every bin? Would reworking your bins or your bin automations create greater efficiencies in your process?

Um, sometimes when we built out the bins initially we're mimicking some of you are probably mimicking a paper process. I know I was in my first, the first time I set up a reading process in Slate as a slate end user and sometimes the the the steps that you needed in a paper process are much different than what you need in an electronic process or virtual process. So absolutely you know as you transition think about are you using every bin is something happening to the file and every bin or some of those just you know kind of just steps in the process.

Which is a visualization of the process. Then, you know, maybe they're not necessary in the new flow. Are your rules always doing exactly what you want them to do? Were some rules built initially that you're kind of still using, but they're not doing exactly what you want? Do you find yourself having to manually, you know, push files along or move files back again? As you consider rebuilding this process and the workflow tool, now is a great time to kind of clean up some of those, you know, clean up some of that work that maybe isn't doing exactly what you wanted it to.

You.

Another important consideration would be have you removed users who are or are no longer reading files for your institution, or perhaps they no longer work for your institution. It's always a great idea to to inactivate those users on the regular and do an audit of your users. If you are still using the same review forms, review them. Do they need edits? Can you archive some? Can you combine some? Are there forms that you were using but now you're not using? You can.

Absolutely. You know, now is a great time to do that. One thing to consider is in within the the workflow tool, you do not have to reconfigure your review form. So the current review forms that you're using in the legacy reader, or you were using in the deprecated workflow tool, they can just as easily be assigned to bins in the workflow tool, which is great. So that's no additional work for you when you think about reader tab groups and materials again because you can build out individual workflows for most of your.

Processes. You don't have to sometimes go through the habit of like saying, oh, I only want this reader tab group to appear for these particular applicants. And you know my grad applicants because maybe you were reading grad and undergrad in the same flow. You would really be able to be very specific with your reader tab groups and materials. However, the permissioning on the TAB groups would still exist within the workflow. So if there's one reader tab group that you only show to your administrative users, or maybe it's.

The discipline questions that you only show you can still permission those much as you do in the legacy reader.

Just a few words about some of the materials and items and that you and objects that you display on reader tab groups and materials would be. Especially when we think about reader reader dashboard portals, reports and queries. Reader dashboard portals can be assigned to reader tab groups in the current workflow tools. They will not have to be reconfigured or rebuilt, they they will. They are very easy to you just create the reader tab group for them.

And pull them in as you did previously. Reports and queries built on configurable join bases should be displayable within the workflow tool. You shouldn't have to rewrite those however, reports and queries that you're showing in your legacy process that were built on either the prospect base or the OR the applications base. Or if you were doing like in a a data a data set scoped review process, those would have to be built on the on the newer basis so that they can show up and be pulled into the workflows. Louise.

Also spoke to you about views and setting up views, which are the updated version of preset queries and default queries. One of the benefits of the workflow tool when it comes to the preset, excuse me, the default queries is. Previously in the legacy reader, you could only have one default query across all of your grouping. So if you had four groupings within the legacy reader, there was still only one default query that you could leverage. So oftentimes our schools had to utilize a preset filter for and and set it as a default for specific.

In Safer grant and or or adult learners or your part time evening program or whatnot within the workflow tool, each workflow can leverage its own default view, which is great.

Umm.

Just a couple of a brief word about rules. Your rules will have to be rewritten if you transition over to the workflow tool. They cannot be repurposed because they will have to be built on the configurable joint basis within the within the the new the new tool. So within each group, each workflow that you create will have its own bin automation. Couple of things to think about. Please watch the exclusivity groups, particularly if you had multiple groupings and your legacy.

Reader and now you have individual workflows. You want to make sure you're filtering appropriately. It also may be necessary to.

To have various exclusivity groups for each group of been movement rules. And maybe you don't have that now, maybe you just have like undergrad grad. But if you break it out even further you may need a little bit more specific. Be astute to the filters that will be necessary because as with with configurable joints you will have to build out the the filters for bin exist, bin does not exist. The same with Q exists or Q does not exist. If you don't want the files being pushed, it's easily dropped from from queues.

There are some wonderful examples in this, in this showcase instance of slate of how these been movement rules work. Actually Louise and I and a few of our colleagues worked on a project earlier in last fall and we we did update the rules in showcase within the new the example in the in the current workflow tool. So those are just a really great example to see that neither of the rules nor the workflow components can be suitcase at this time. So they are something.

They are just going to be a little bit of a of some manual work to set up on on as you transition over. But then after that, as Louis showed you, you can drop and drag them around if you want to change the order that they're in, so.

One of the nice things if you are going to consider transitioning over to the current workflow tool is you don't have to do everything all at once. You can give yourself a little bit of time to work on it because it's absolutely possible to start building in production as well as to start building before you do anything or deactivate the legacy reader. This definitely makes building out and the workflow tool a little bit easier because it's not necessary to actually disrupt your work. One word advice is if you are going to transition over to the enhanced.

We would encourage you to just have a cutover date for yourself so as to let your readers know when they will resume. Work in the current workflow tool and perhaps no longer be accessing it in the the like legacy reader. And our team can certainly give you, you know, advice for when you turn off the reader on those other bases if you wish to do so, and just keep all of your reading to the workflow tool.

We were asked a few questions about configurable joint training and I just wanted to bring to your attention that there are some wonderful configurable joint classes available through our Learning lab and those courses are available to anyone who has either has or wishes to have a.

A learning lab subscription and the new courses are starting to be released. They started to be released last month to the Learning Lab. Courses are also available if you are purchasing a slate, festival path, Slate, Innovation, Festival Pass and again those some of the updated courses are there but there are some great configurable joint courses there now. We also have regular community conversations. Louise and her fellow CSC's are been offering regular conversations at various levels. I think they have beginner.

Intermediate and advanced conversations on configurable joints, and there are also some wonderful configurable joint examples, again in Slate showcase. So if it's something if you need, if you're like me and you're rather visual and you would like to see a visual example, that's a great place to go if you can figure showcase as you're under your clean slate environment.

I also do want to point out, we'll point out again later on in the webinar that there is going to be a community conversation on March 21st that is going to be a continuation of this conversation. It's going to be discussing using the workflow tool and slate. So if you have questions that we can't quite get to today or we don't have time to get to today, there's another opportunity to ask those questions. So, so we are going to actually move into some questions and we did receive quite a few questions.

During the and on the registration form and we are receiving quite a few now in the chat. So continue to poke pop those questions in the chat. But we're going to actually get to a couple of questions that were were asked ahead of time and we got two different sets of questions. I know the heading says workflows for advancement but we actually were asked can we share a workflow example for advancement schools and can we share a workflow example for our student success instances. A couple of examples for the.

Advancement is we do have a couple of schools who are leveraging the workflow for donor cultivation as well As for our board member applications. And I worked with a school who put their internal grant program that they administer from their advancement office in Slate as well. There is an example of.

Of this workflow processes in these showcase advancement. So here's this cultivation this is a cultivation prospect for for gifts that was built out and this example again lives in our sleep for advancements showcase addition. So this is again a cultivation of of givers whether it's ultimately you know some schools maybe it's just major major gift prospects. This one is just prospects in general.

For student success, we also have a few other examples we can we can bring to your attention. Some of them are this case management or conduct. Some of our schools also manage their retention policy in there, which for some of them falls under this case management or a conduct. What is the, you know, what is the risk for the student you know, being retained by the institution? Some other examples that we have seen have been for internal scholarships. So I'm already a student and I'm, you know, I manage out of the student affairs.

Office I manage scholarships that are granted to current students that they can either apply for or they qualify for orientation leader review, application review, as well as internal degree audits. So you know you're if you're auditing degrees for your, you know, your juniors or seniors or in preparation for just ahead of graduation. So those are just a couple of examples of how the you know or other.

One of couple of our other slate brands are are using the the workflow and if you have unique ideas or unique examples of how your institution may be using it for advancement or student success, absolutely posting the chat here or definitely engage in conversation on our community forums.

Alright, so we also had a few questions, a couple of a few different questions about workflows and materials or I've titled this material metadata.

So I'm going to defer to Louise, who has some.

Good advice for you on on a couple of these.

Can y'all hear me?

Good.

Like that's what 70% of the questions in the chat were. Reading through them after the fact of my audio had a little bit of a problem at the beginning. To those of you who thankfully joined later, it was fun to read through that and know that the whole time I was just talking and talking of the storm and not knowing what was going on.

Right, but this is a great question and I'm gonna read at least a couple of them out loud or some highlights out loud.

Um, workflows and material metadata is how we've organized these questions. But the gist is how can we use a workflow to process materials right. Yes, we want to use it to like leave input on the record to review the record on the whole, but there are certain things like transcripts that need to be authenticated and can a workflow accomplish this? My short answer is yes it can.

Um, there is not currently a way to have a material scoped workflow. Workflows can only be made on the base of your records, but there are some cool ways to access material metadata within the workflow. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen again.

Melissa if you're comfortable with that, I'll seize seize control.

Um, and I'm starting in the workflows tool here, but this is also it depends on how your workflow is set up, but also the material that you're trying to review or assess. It also depends on how this is set up. So I believe in this workflow as it's displayed in the slate reader.

I have.

In my queue, an application that's in the awaiting GPA bin and in my hypothetical process, it's important that I assign a GPA to the to each school to each transcript that comes in corresponding with the school and the students record. Just for some hypothetical background here, so not all the tabs are displaying here. This is early in the process. This is within a larger workflow focused on.

A single stage, which is, um, say, material authentication or GPA authentication. In this case, though, you are able to think of your own use cases for the total I'm about to show you. So I'm seeing this transcript. I mean, right off the bat, there's a couple problems. This clearly isn't a Claremont McKenna transcript, and this applicant's name is not drew. We can address that in a moment, of course, but for the purposes of our example, we can see up here.

A little bit more information about the material that we're currently viewing. This is just a data container displaying information about the school, but when I navigate over to the transcript itself, which is a material, I'm able to.

Based on a configuration I'll show you in a second, make edits to properties of the material or the metadata of the material is another way of saying that by double clicking the editable tab in the top left and over to the right, if those of you or those of you who are familiar with batch acquire will recognize this apparatus really well. A form here appears with, in this case a bunch of school scoped fields. These don't have to be school scoped fields, there might be other just regular application.

Scope materials that you'd like to leave input add information to the material themselves, but schools and authenticating transcripts is a pretty common use for these material metadata forms. I'll show you where it is in just a second. One thing I can do here is because I determined that this record is not what I need it to be, I can switch it to the correct record and here as well.

There we go. And because Drew doesn't have any schools on his record, it's just going to become a folio item. This is a school scope material, so that's a little layer of nuance there. But when I hit save, when it needs some material type assigned, it's going to become transcript.

I've hit save.

When I go back into the record in the same bin, I haven't moved anything. The transcript is gone from here because it's been assigned now within the reader to the correct record. That was the action that I took on it in this example, but I could also have filled out those fields and know that they would be reflected on, in this case, both the school record and in the form of material metadata form that can be appended to the material wherever it appears in slate or where it is accessed.

On the student record, I said that I'd show how that is set up. Not all of it is done in the reader.

Are in the workflows tool, but the part that is will be on a bin to bin level. There are some bins earlier in your process where it might make sense to be able to update material metadata. The GPA bin is one of them.

Read settings allow materials processing. That is what allowed that editable option to appear next to that material. And the reason that it was based on the material that's being pulled up is because over in material settings overall.

School scoped transcript official. I had enabled a material metadata form and um, that appeared because in the forms tool many layers here.

I had set it up with a scope of material.

So a couple of different places you're going to want to know what material, um, or I guess what information you want to gather and append to a material or the record associated with that material. You're going to want to know which material you want to use this form for. You could use this for multiple different material types. Set that up in the materials tool in the database and then make sure that your bin allows for the quick little exit and re-entry from batch acquire. Hopefully that's.

Full it always takes longer to explain that I want it to because there's so many different parts of the database. But this is really powerful and though it was just one early stage of the process and my workflow, you might have a document authentication workflow that relies pretty much exclusively exclusively on this tool and is just meant for say I've seen workflows that just manage GPA calculation, again seeing in the realm of application. Sorry if this isn't as relevant to our student success and advancement colleagues, but there if there's any document that needs in and of itself.

To be reviewed.

And the material or the commentary? The field should live in conjunction with the material, not just with its parent record. This is a great way to do that.

I'll let you seize control again, Melissa.

I think we have time for maybe just another question or two.

OK, alright so.

And so many great questions in the chat. Um, please join us for community conversations in the future. I'm so sorry I was not able to get to all of them.

OK, we did have a few questions about permissions and Louise and I were chatting at the end of last week and this week as we were doing some prep work and we could probably have multiple hours on permissions. So we had a couple of questions that came in today about permissions or earlier this week about permissions. Permissions on the workflows work similar to how they work in the legacy reader. You can absolutely permission at the bin level.

You can permission the workflow itself if you wish to only have certain users access it, much like you do your groupings and the legacy reader and much how you limited permission to individualize workflows using the deprecated workflow tool. Population permissions are still possible in in this as well. It's a little bit different than how you're doing them now, but again, we we have instructions for that. We're happy to to walk you through that process. We did have a question specific to the best way to limit access to specific tabs in our materials in the workflows.

And once again, we would encourage you to set those permissions at the at the tab level and within the workflow tool. You still have the ability to set a permission on the on each bin. If you wish to force as to who can see it, you can set up permission. I know I I I responded to something in the chat of. You can absolutely set still set a custom read permission, a custom move permission as well as a move anywhere permission and that is set if if you go into the.

Have been itself. It's going to be set under this next bin and Q settings. The custom read permission would be the permission required to see the bin. The custom move permission would be to move files out of the bin. The move anywhere would be that user would have the ability to move the bin, the file anywhere, even if you've limited this next bin. The same is true for your reader tab groups and materials. Again, that would be the best way to permission if you don't want certain users.

You see all of the reader tabs like I know we've had a lot of schools where if there's like discipline questions, sometimes they only want their higher level users to see that. And again that would be a custom read permission set. Here you can use one of the standard permission out-of-the-box permissions or of course configure your own custom custom permission. So those are just a few permission questions, but again those are great questions for some of the ask US anything community conversations as well.

We did have a question a couple of questions about the about the person Scott workflow. Louise, I we're right at the hour. I don't know if we have time for this one unless you have a a quick answer.

Oh, we can't hear you, Louise.

Today.

We still can't hear you, Louise.

Alright, well we we have lost Louise's audio, so we are right at the top of the hour. So I'm going to bring us to the end. We are very grateful for all of you attending today. It was so great to connect with you. Thank you for the great questions you submitted ahead of time as well as that you submitted through the chat today. I just wanted to throw this slide.

Up here to let you know that we do have this upcoming community conversation on using the workflow editor on Tuesday, March 21st and registration is open. So absolutely attend and submit your questions. And I am very grateful to Louise for joining me today and letting me join her, I should say. And we always love connecting with our site community, so we hope to see you at a future community conversation slate present and of course during any of our slate innovation festival and summit events.

Take care everybody. Thank you so much. Bye, Louise.

Thank you. I know you can't hear me. Bye.

We did our best.