HIT:Follett/student records

[Nancy Voltmer <voltmer@NETINS.NET>]

 Thank you to all that responded to my request about using Follett's Unison
program (circulation) and the SASI program (attendance). Listed below are
the responses I received. I should also add that I received a telephone
call from Follett (Robert Malone); they monitor our list and wanted to
help. If I understood correctly they are doing a beta test now with the new
version of SASI XP. If you have any questions you may contact him at
Follett. The older version has 11 pages of documentation on how to download
the records. I plan to look into this now for next school year.
Nancy
______________________________________
Follett has a patron
conversion disk and instructions for this process. I have done it the past
two years and will do it once again on Monday. I have our SASI coordinator
at our school do a SASI query following the Follett instructions. I only
get the 9th  grade students each year.  I am leary about importing the
whole student body. I update the  other classes as they come in by
inputting their new 2nd period teacher. I also get a printout of the whole
student body so I can refer to it throughout the year.  Senior advisors at
technical support can help you with the process if you have trouble. You
need to ask for the disk and the instructions. They are about 11 pages long.
______________________________________
 SASI has a query function, if
you have rights to use it, that should produce a file that you can import
into the patron file in Follett.  In our high school, with the block
schedule, our students will change homerooms for spring semester.   When we
query SASI for period 01 (aka homeroom) we get all of the homeroom
assignments for both first and second semester and would, if we used the
file, have most students entered twice.  The SASI query does not seem to let
me use an expression like:  if begperiod = 01 AND termcode <> term2, or
whatever.  It is supposed to have a filter that can be used to refine
further the query.  It does not seem to work for me.  I can take the file
produced, move it to Access, and filter out the semester 2 homerooms.  But,
what I really need it to be able to query SASI, then filter the query, to
make it directly ready for our Athena library software.
_____________________________________
We've had terrible luck with SASI.  We've used it for two years and all
we've had are problems.  With grades, attendance, etc.  The glitches are
slowly getting fewer and far between, but ....  Two years ago we were ready
to toss the program and get something else.  Our elementary schools have no
problems with it.  They started before the high school.  We got a different
version than they did.  We got the upgrade.  That's why we had a lot of
problems.  I can't remember which version we have.  Good luck!  Part of the
problem is that we want so much out of the program.  Their technicians keep
trying to help us get what we want out of the program. So far I haven't
heard anything negative--but we've only been in school a week.
_____________________________________
Our district just spent a frustrating year with SASI and dumped it.  As far
as the libraries go, we use SIRSI for our catalog and circulation and we
have ten high school libraries.  There was no way to upload fines to SASI,
no way to build a bridge program and no way to download, apparently.
However, our central library services administrator was able to download
student records from SASI and import it into SIRSI, somehow.

I had to hand enter the fines into SASI and it wasn't too bad, really.  You
can generate nice reports off it, too.

I guess part of the problem our district had with SASI is that we didn't
have a Windows NT server and we have a whole bunch of Macintoshes (like a
lot of schools!)
______________________________________
We are still trying to download from SASI into Follett.  Haven't been
successful yet.  Seems as if there is a problem converting the data.  Our
technologist has been working with Follett to solve the problem, but so
far--no luck.
_____________________________________
 Also if you talk to Follett technical support about SASI, go
straight to a senior analyst.  The lower level analysts don't seem to know
anything about SASI.
_____________________________________
 We are doing the same thing.  If you find out anything of interest
please let me know.  It took us 4 days to get everybody organized into
the correct classes and the new kindergarteners  into the computer.
_____________________________________
Our district is using SASY as the admininstrative program for the
district.  We have not yet chosen a library automation program for the
district but Follett is one of the systems we are looking at.

We were told by the Follett representative that they will write a
program for us that will download the necessary information from SASY
into the Follett database.  There was a charge for this program ($75.00
may have been quoted, but I'm not sure).
_____________________________________

Nancy Voltmer, Media Specialist                 voltmer@ames.net
Saydel High School                              voltmern@saydel.k12.ia.us
Des Moines, Iowa 50313                          515-262-9325

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