We originally built Populi to help a local college replace what small schools typically have to settle for: a creaky old system with Word and Excel tacked on to plug the holes. Since then, lots of other schools have signed on, most of which left another system to get going with us. One way to look at us is as a business that replaces other software.

And if we’ve learned anything from replacing software, it’s that software (like any tool) creates habits in its users—especially software that makes you do too much work. These "habits" aren't limited to individual users, either: sometimes, entire schools shape policies and institutional workflows around the limits of what their old system could do. Policies and workflows that Populi probably transgresses.

Some of this is because Populi obviates the need for these old policies and workflows. In other cases, it gives you a round hole where your old software made you use square pegs. And other times, Populi introduces the "proper" way to do things where previously you had to just kinda, y'know, wing it.

Whatever the case, we've found that Populi can disrupt how a college runs itself. Online registration might do away with your enrollment process for incoming freshmen. Your approach to billing could differ from what we intended with tuition schedules. That old "submit grades" spreadsheet just ain’t the same as our gradebook. Bookstore just might be the first real inventory system you've used. And so on...

Populi just isn't what you're currently using, and it's probably gonna rub up against how you're used to running things. So, our exhortation to prospective customers: during the sales process, just dig in!

We'll even give you the shovels...

• Nick and Joseph will do as many live demos as you need.
• We’re liberal with logins to our demo site—which has the same codebase as our customers’ sites and the same access to our help desk. Get your faculty and staff to try it out, too.
• Ask lots of questions. Ask about the big stuff ("What do you mean by Accounting?"), the seemingly-little stuff ("What does the course catalog mean by 'credits'?"), the technically-arcane stuff ("What's your approach to server replication and redundancy?")—and everything in between.
• Nick and Joseph will answer as many phone calls as you can dial and as many emails as you can type. And if you ever stump them, they’ll find someone else here who can help. We want you to be well-informed.

Dig in! Beyond finding out what Populi does (or does better, or does different), you'll get a sense of where your school has been formed by your current software—and where Populi might hit your pressure points. Of course, we trust that Populi will do a better job for your school than whatever you're using now—in everything from the software to the security to the support. But we simply want you to make the best decision you possibly can, and that includes knowing about the potential sticking points.

In just a few weeks, we're planning to release an overhaul of course instances. From a complete navigation overhaul to some brand-new features to a second look at things we've been doing all along, the upcoming release will make courses a lot more intuitive, useful, and flexible. Have a look at some of the things we're doing:

Navigation

Courses are getting our new tab-based navigation, which we're slowly rolling out to all of Populi. As you can see from the screenshot, courses will feature the same basic items—assignments, lessons, gradebook, etc.—and certain actions (finalizing, for instance) will be subsumed under the appropriate tabs. Additionally, who you are will affect where you land when you navigate to a course—registrars and Admins will arrive at the Info tab, and students and faculty will come to the new course Dashboard.

Dashboard

The course Dashboard tells faculty and students what's happening now and what's coming up via Alerts, Schedule, Discussions, and a retooled Bulletin Board. Alerts notifies students about upcoming tests, assignments, and currently-available lessons, and informs faculty about test questions that need to be graded. Schedule draws from the new course calendar and displays upcoming course events (due dates, special meeting times, etc.). Discussions summarizes recent activity on course discussions. And the course Bulletin Board is getting updated with file uploads, comments, and a revamped interface.

Online Learning

A few new things are in store for online learning. Tests feature new question types—Matching and True/False. Discussions can now be course-wide or attached to a specific Lesson—and you can also attach files and images to comments and replies. And we're making improvements that will make video embedding in Lessons better than ever.

Assignments

We've created three assignment types to simplify how you use them in your courses. Test assignments will automatically create a corresponding online test. File assignments feature a feed of comments and file uploads so teacher and student can interact about the assignment—they can even pass an essay back and forth with revisions and corrections. And regular assignments will simply be a graded assignment—perfect for things like completed readings.

Calendar

The new course calendar lets faculty, registrars, and academic admins add and update course events. Upcoming events display on the course Dashboard, and course calendars are seamlessly integrated with the corresponding calendars on Google Apps.

Miscellany

The new reporting tab features the Performance Dashboard and the course Change Log. Cloning and syncing are getting a minor retooling. And, we're also scrubbing the iTunes U integration. Few customers used it (it's probably Apple's clumsiest, most aggravating product)... and we have something much better in store.

We loosed our latest release the evening of July 5th. It's a minor update with a number of tweaks and improvements to Library, ISIRs, and the Populi API.

Library

Now you can add images to resources as well as delete resources or individual copies. Also included: automatic barcode generation for resource copies. This feature finds the next available barcode number and adds it to the copy—so it works around your existing resource copies without you needing to double-check (you can also disable the barcode generator).

To enhance Populi Library's cataloging abilities, we also built in a Z39.50 search. Now when you add a resource, Populi Library fetches an image from Amazon.com and other resource data from a number of public Z39.50 servers. You can specify which servers you want it to search, add new ones, and even change the order Populi will search through.

We also gave you the ability to waive a Library fine!

API

Our biggest update ever to the Populi API really beefs it up. Now you can:

• Add new people and check for duplicates
• Add and remove roles, tags, contact info, and custom info fields for anyone in the system
• Add and retrieve Prospect information
• Retrieve information about recently updated people
• Request and download backup copies of your Populi data

With the new API functions, you'll be able to add people, sync your Populi people with an external directory service, and send your Populi backups to external web applications to save and encrypt however you like. It also paves the way for us to do some other interesting things down the road...

Miscellany

We added CPS transaction numbers to ISIRs. This information lets the Populi ISIRs importer keep your data in better order. For instance, they prevent you from importing older data. We also organized the display of ISIRs data in various places by the CPS transaction number. This accompanies a number of other, more behind-the-scenes ISIRs improvements.

Additionally, this update is accompanied by some interface niggles and a number of bug fixes, tweaks, arcane performance changes, and so on.

We recently posited that it makes a lot of sense for small schools to outsource IT-intensive assets like their information systems. We think so not just because our service lets you do that, but because it really does save a small college a lot of time, money, and software migraines. And besides, colleges exist to educate, not build software. Small organizations—colleges and software companies, for instance—should stick to their core competencies. It's a key part of embracing constraints.

At Populi, our core competency is providing college management software as a service. We do one thing (though, that one thing does a lot of different things), and it would be foolish to spread ourselves thin designing other software or maintaining other services.

We know this firsthand. Back in the emsi days, a programmer built the first version of the Populi help system. It consisted simply of a custom search that scanned a hand-coded, wiki-style knowledge base.

This worked okay... for a little while. The search did only one thing—it searched—and it still required our maintenance. And writing in a wiki knowledge base was about as much fun as getting caned with a bamboo rod.

More importantly, when Populi got going as an independent company, we knew a lot more about our customer support needs. We needed not just a searchable knowledge base, but also a way to efficiently channel support requests, embed training videos, get support metrics—and make support comprehensible to our users.

Now, we could have devoted one of our developers to expanding our custom search to do these other tasks. But that would have been to the considerable detriment of Populi itself. So, jettisoning the custom approach, we signed up with Zendesk. While Zendesk costs money—money we watch go out the door every month—those are dollars well-spent:

• We don't have to divert people, time, and money away from Populi to build a support system.
• Zendesk has a great API, so it integrates seamlessly with Populi—better, even, than our in-house custom search did.
• Our customers get access to a great support tool—we believe Zendesk enhances the service we offer and helps us make good on some of our core company values.
• Zendesk provides updates and support for their software, helping us improve what we offer our customers with zero effort on our part.

We've also outsourced* our project management and related tasks to the folks at 37signals, our accounting to Xero, and our email to Google Apps. While none of these are customer-facing like Zendesk, they nevertheless help Populi run a lot more smoothly, which frees us up to do what we need to do. It's safe to say that we pretty much can't live without them.

Sometimes, however, we find ourselves going in-house after using other software. For instance, we once used Freshbooks for invoicing, but now we route our customers to our in-Populi payment system. Now, Freshbooks is a great product,** and it really fit the bill for a time. But the same things that drove us to outsource other things—reduced cost and a better experience for our customers—drove us, in this case, to roll our own:

• We were asking our customers to use Populi for their work, to view an invoice in Freshbooks, and make payment by yet some other means. This needed streamlining.
• We couldn't offer automatic payments—something that's expected of web-based software.
• We spent too much time manually creating invoices and troubleshooting problems; our new system cuts down on that, for instance, by showing you which students you were charged for.
• There was too much room for manual error; for instance, we had to re-enter invoice amounts into our online banking every month in order to do ACH drafts.
• The guts of the system were already there when we added online payments. It didn't take a lot of work to turn that into our own invoicing-and-payment system.

This post is subtitled, "Sticking to what you're good at"—both our use of Zendesk and our move away from Freshbooks were both done with this in mind. Zendesk makes Populi better by making it super-simple for our customers to get support. Scooting in-house for invoicing helped us simplify our customers' bill-paying experience, and gave us another opportunity to improve what we do.

In other words, we certainly don't preach outsourcing for outsourcing's sake. Outsource when it makes sense to—and, as we've already said, we think it makes sense for small schools to outsource their information systems (to us, hopefully!).

* Lemme just get this out of the way: when we say "outsourcing", we hope you know that we'll NEVER outsource development or support. Put another way, never outsource your core competencies!

** Our own Mark Ackerman says that Freshbooks "is nearly flawless."

Google recently announced that they'll be dropping Google Apps support for older browsers on August 1:

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

If there's one thing we always jump up and down about, it's that you should keep your browser updated. Browser updates improve security and functionality, and as more and more of our work moves to the web, this is more and more of a crucial issue. You could say we're pleased with Google's decision in this area because of the incremental improvement it may help bring to the web as a whole.

So, if you're using Google Apps for Education (with which we integrate, in case you didn't know), you'll need to make sure you're running an up-to-date version of a supported browser on August 1. That's about seven weeks away! To give you a leg up:

• Download Safari
  
• Download Chrome
  
• Download Firefox

(Since we're giving you a leg up, we're not providing a link to download Internet Explorer... though we do support IE8 and IE9)

In the wee hours of Wednesday, June 8, we released our overhaul of Populi Financial Aid into the wild after months of development, testing, and refinement. The new features (together with the U.S. Department of Ed's proprietary EdExpress software) will let your Financial Aid office handle the entire aid process—everything from importing ISIRs to managing aid applications to batch disbursement of funds. We previewed the new stuff in some recent posts; here's a summary of what we just released:

Navigation overhaul

All of Populi Financial has been moved over to the new tab-based layout, which clarifies the navigation (and works better on mobile devices).

Aid applications

We built out aid applications so your aid office can track FAFSA data for each applicant, attach files to applications, and interact with student applicants from the application or via email. Students can upload files, ask questions, and accept or decline awards.

ISIRs imports

The new ISIRs importer converts the gobbledygook text file into all kinds of useful information for your school. FAFSA data automatically creates aid applications. Updated files plug new data right into existing apps. You can even create new Prospects if you receive an ISIRs file for someone you haven't heard of before.

New workflows and reports

Use Populi Financial Aid to track Federal Work Study awards. Create batch disbursements and aid refunds. Automate your disbursement schedules for the entire aid year. A new academic progress report lets you find students in trouble. Existing reports have been combined and redesigned to give you a wider, more comprehensive look at your school's Financial Aid data.

Other stuff

As usual, we took the opportunity to work in some bugfixes and performance improvements. We've made some architecture changes that will enable us to do a lot of cool things with future development.

And Financial Aid now has its own forum in the Populi help desk.