New ManageBac Settings and a Preview of our New Look

Over the past year, we have been working to better align and standardise our interface across ManageBac and OpenApply. The new ManageBac settings are the first step towards simplifying the navigation, improving usability for existing and first time users, and moving towards a responsive layout that will support effective use of ManageBac on tablets (iPad + Android) in addition to web.

To highlight some of the key changes:

• Settings is now organised under menus with a description of each section.
• Steps are sequential to guide a school through the setup process in the most logical way.
• This replaces the QuickStart wizard.
• The left navigation menu provides a fast, efficient way to move between pages.
• Academic terms and years has been fully redesigned to visually indicate the duration of terms and to ensure correct configuration in advance of class creation.

Over the next few weeks, we will be rolling out additional improvements for reports generation in the new interface design to better streamline the full reporting lifecycle from scheduling generation of reports to proofing & review as well as granular access & permissions.

As part of this Settings redesign, we have also made a significant architectural change, so that all Classes will now be mapped to specific academic years & terms. This change will greatly streamline and improve the ‘back-to-school’ process in future academic years and to support efficient archival of historical classes. In other words, you will be able to easily carry forward classes, set varying durations for a class that may only last one term and most importantly you will be able to go back in time to see units, tasks & assessments, resources, transcripts from prior years.

2015-2016 is a transition year for ManageBac and in the spring of 2016 we will be previewing our new system interface, which has been implemented recently on OpenApply for admissions & enrolment. To preview how that looks, please check out:
https://demo.openapply.com

Thank you for patience with this new update and apologies for any shock or confusion about the new design, we hope that you will find it an improvement over the previous design