Day 2 of the X2 Aspen Community Conference

Here I am again at the X2 Aspen Community Conference. While X2 Aspen information is obviously of most interest to X2 Aspen users, users of the countless SIS products out there should feel free to chime in and let us know where their SIS is ahead, behind, or otherwise heading in completely different directions.

For now, I'm getting ready to sit in on a session on Pando. This is the integrated tech support, knowledge management, and asset management tool that X2 built on top of their SIS. They use it internally to deal with their support issues, but are now making it available to districts for their own purposes. We'll be rolling it out this fall, so for the first time we'll have full helpdesk and tech support ticketing capabilities for free (or at least for the same price that we currently pay for X2 Aspen).

More updates to follow...I'm actually presenting at the next session on a social network we put together in Ning to connect end users, so it may be a bit before I post anything (unless there are some juicy details on Pando that would be of interest to a broader audience).

7 May 2009, 9:24am In the Pando session. Pando is incredibly powerful, but, not surprisingly, built around X2 Aspen needs. This means that districts will need to do a lot of customization to make it work more generally for their district. The customization isn't hard, but it's all a matter of time. It does, however, natively include event planning and project management, as well as asset management and a knowledge base.

Last I'll say about Pando, since it's so specific to us X2 users, but I'm mighty excited about it. The asset management, ticketing, and project management are going to be huge. This is going to become my cloud-based repository for an awful lot of information.

7 May 2009, 1:37pm In the family management information session. How does your SIS deal with families? Foster kids? Siblings living in different homes? Have you found an SIS that is particularly good at this?

We're finally getting around to completely cleaning up our family units, using a procedure built in to X2 to initially identify sibling groups matching on any number of fields (home phone seems to be the best, so far). However, there is quite a bit of manual work to be done identifying shared contact information and merging address information. This is hardly unique to X2 - How does your SIS deal with it?