To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: February 16, 2022
RE: Tech Department Report
At the end of last year and over the summer we incorporated some new functions in Sips to help LRA streamline its monthly progress reporting. Now we’re doing the same thing for TEAM. Working directly with Apex, their online course provider, we’ve automated student account creation with Skyward and set up passwordless authentication through their Google account. Next is automating downloading of progress data and the collection of in-person attendance to generate their weekly and monthly reports. There may also be opportunities to automatically roster students into their courses within Apex, we’ve still to see how far we can take it. But every step will result in less manual administrative work for the staff there.
Our new employee Isaac is fitting in well and already working very independently, really helping to share the burden of support tasks across the department. He’s helping with day-to-day helpdesk duties as well as learning about our phone systems and application deployment system. The extra help in the department has already made a big difference to my ability to work on other tasks, such as the Sips improvements mentioned above.
On the security front, we have just enforced 2-step authentication for almost all of our employees, just KWRL bus drivers to go. We’ve been gradually rolling this out to all staff as it almost eliminates the threat of account hacking through phishing or similar means. We’re also in the midst of our annual inventory, updating our systems to make sure our records are up-to-date.