 Well, David, it looks like it's 545 to me. Should we dive right in? We can, what do we got? 12 good folks coming in here. All right, yeah, why don't we get started here by getting my cursor roll over the right screen? Excellent, so welcome, everyone, to the ProQuest ETD Administrator users group session here today. My name is David Jenkins. It's my product and I'm the dissertations and thesis team. My co-host here is Austin McLean, the senior director of academic relations. In fact, I've got a slide that'll talk about that a little bit more. This is our team just as a reminder for people that need a scorecard to play along with us. As you can see, there's been a lot of growth in this team reflecting that the investment ProQuest is making in our dissertations and thesis business. Julia joined last year, Jess joined last year. Ake will join shortly before that myself. We've also added another product under the team, Christian Jackson. He may be interacting with you, do some work with PQDT and other aspects of the business. But these are the basis that go along with the folks that are doing dissertations and thesis business for ProQuest. So today, just going to talk about some roadmap themes for what we have going on here in the tail end of 2021 and going into 2022 and 23. And this is really dovetails into what April and May showed last year, breaking things out into what we're doing in three buckets. One is what we're doing for administrator workflow enhancements. Two, what we're doing for student workflow enhancements. And then third, which is where we spent the majority of our time, and I'll reiterate that again here in a moment, what we're doing with application modernization. So we're doing some work to transition into some new technologies. And it's going to pay some dividends for us that we'll touch on here quickly before we open things up for the floor to everybody to ask questions and go to Q&A. So to the point that I made just a second ago, we have been in the midst of a very long technology refresh, going back and replacing all components, rewriting services, and simplifying the code base. Because it's been out there for a very long time. And as we all know, when code's out there, eventually, you can take some steps to improve responsiveness and make it so it's a stable platform that you can build and implement future enhancements on in a much more responsive and quick fashion. So we're winding back over time. We did the author workflow releases throughout Q2 2020. And then we started on the admin workflow in 2021. And we released the first half of that in July of 2021. And here in a second, we'll talk about it. So that first July release that happened this year bought really the first visible changes to the application that have been part of this technology refresh. To that point, we were rolling things in one for one functionality replacement, a new for old. And with July, we actually made some changes that made a difference in the UI. We were doing things that reflected our new designs for make this look and feel like our other products. We made some changes in the ETB list page. And to reports and a couple of other things that many of you have noticed and received some positive feedback on. So we do appreciate that. So that put us about 50% way through that process of modernization and also there's some accessibility improvements that we're making. The drag and drop functionality would be a good example of that for what we did that makes it so. Someone using assistive technologies can better use that functionality to move fields in or out of a report as an example in an accessible fashion, which it wasn't such before we made that change. And that's one of the reasons we excited to make that. So where are we kind of in the next month and change here? We will finish up that remaining admin workflow activity. We're on track for at the end of October. And I said we're going to release it in Q4. We actually had some meetings. And I think what we're going to end up doing just to not disrupt your lives and stay away from your releases near the holidays is looking like we may just have that just after the holiday. So as not to disrupt anybody's lives, we're going to put it through plenty of QA paces and make sure we put out the quality product that we expect. We always have that to expect to as soon as possible. And again, that release is going to probably more resemble the earlier author workflow updates where it's a one to one replacement of functionality with some minor UI adjustments. And we're putting in our modern designs for things like buttons and shapes and colors and fonts. So we're not going to move the cheese very much, I guess, is what I'm trying to say with that. So we'll be on the lookout for that maybe when we return from the holidays. So with this two-year transition of technology migration behind us, we finally get to an earnest go and look at what people have been bringing to our attention to the ideas portal through discussions and customer touch points, things that have come up in support tickets about what are we going to do next to improve EPD administrators. So in the short time that we have in November into December, taking into account holidays and vacations and such, we're going to have a team working on a couple of things. One of them is we've heard that there's some institutions that would like the ability to drive the ProQuest delayed release or the embargo, drive that directly from your institutional repository embargo. So that is something the team has got our stories queued up. We're actually putting together some conceptual designs. And we'll start work on that. Maybe at the end of October, probably certainly in November. On the administrator efficiency front, I've heard loud and clear through our discussions, probably in sessions like this last year and in the voting on the ideas portal, that being able to save and apply report settings is a big deal for administrators. You come in on a routine basis, you run the same reports, and it's the same thing. So we are looking at being able to allow you to save a report setting, come in and apply that, and run the report to improve your efficiency. You don't have to go and select those fields and drag them in and out. So I think that's going to be something that's going to resonate well with the community. And that's my prediction. I'll leave it to you to give us that feedback when we get that designed and delivered. And then finally, for those of you, and I'm guessing it's the majority of you, when you start your work from looking at the ETD list, if you go and do some work, you click on a link to go look at that submission. It opens up, or excuse me, it redirects the browser to display that ETD. And when you hit the Return to the List page, the query parameters are not there. And so we're, and that was a function of some limitations of our new technology stack. We're in the process of fixing that, and that will be rolled out sometime in early key one of next year during the downtime. So it doesn't affect you and your usage time. So beyond that, and this is where we're looking to the community in the forum today. In our ideas portal, I'll show again here in a second. And then some discovery communities that are a discovery community I'm setting up to understand what people's priorities are from different institutions and kind of compile what's the pulse of everyone for what we need to focus on next. So in that 2022, 2023 timeframe, again, we show those three buckets, the red, the administrator workflow enhancements, the green student workflow enhancements and third, the web application modernization, which are typically more internally focused, but important for you as well. So I'm not gonna try to read through the entire list, but these are things that are shown, primarily shown in the ideas portal. We'd like for you to go there and look at the ideas portal a second in static form in one of the slides here, but go in and look at those items, vote for them, and that's gonna help us to prioritize what it is that we're gonna go work on next. So there's some things that are very heavily voted on, I'll just call out a couple here. In the first group administrator workflow, we're doing some work to make the email templates so for a revision email or an approval email. We're creating a self-service configurable section that the school can do without having to ask for help from ProQuest support in order to do that. So giving you your own section to be able to customize that text in there without interaction with us. So I think you're gonna find that to be something that's been asked for and will be beneficial to you. There's been a lot of votes for auto delivery batches of ETVs and actually with the discovery community I'm gonna talk about here in a little bit. We wanna further kind of dig into that to find out the use cases and what kind of parameters people wanna use so we can design something that's flexible to meet the majority of everybody's uses. And that's probably enough out of that section but you can see there's a theme of self-service. Putting the hands in your hands or trusted partners the ability to go in and do some configuration of aspects of your site so that you can change things on the fly without having to go through ProQuest support. Student workflow, the administrators are primary users. You do get things occasionally that affect the student workflow. One of the ones is email notification of revision. Visions being submitted. Apparently there's a pain point where students submit their revisions and they're wanting notification and apparently they've been reaching out to their administrators to confirm that other things have gone in so it's just a way that we can automate the fashion. Provide some sense of satisfaction to them that they know that it's been received and they don't have to worry about following up and making sure they're following behind. I do wanna go down here in this section. This is more of an internal ProQuest thing but you'll see it and we'll talk about it as we're gonna transition to a single sign-on security implementation. It will still be based on an email and a password but we're gonna utilize the same single sign-on functionality that you would use to sign into other ProQuest products. So, and on top of that probably most importantly is password resets will be self-service. So if somebody forgets or changes and loses track of things, they will be able to recover that themselves in just a matter of minutes rather than having to get some intervention from the ProQuest side. I think that that's something that is gonna be beneficial from this time to know if things happen. I've been promising this slide is coming and here it is. So, at our ProQuest ID exchange, it is at ideas.proquest.com. If you go to that URL and go into the ET administrator form by clicking on this icon or these words here, it'll take you in and we'll show you all the items that have been submitted by you or your peers. You can add your comments to those. You can up-vote them. There's actually no down-voting so it's all just voting, I guess. And so this is the data that we use to take a data-driven approach to what we wanna prioritize based on market need. Not necessarily, there are some other factors in there. It's not just all popularity contest but we wanna deliver what is gonna bring value to you and your partners. So please make sure you're going into the ideas portal and voting for those things so that we can do what has the most impact for you. All right, this is what I'm gonna get excited about because I ran a discovery community for the dissertations dashboard or ET dashboard and we'll look at a slide in a second on that. So I'm very excited about this. I mean, now we're at the point where we're through this two-year technology transition and we're starting to work on new things. We're gonna have new designs. We're gonna have new concepts. We're gonna have ideas that we wanna go test. So I'm going to be standing up a discovery community to provide feedback and help us set product direction. So again, reviewing concepts and mockups when we get things to a point where we have a lower fidelity or a higher fidelity, actual piece of code that you can test and making those things available to work on and getting together both online and offline with me and your peers to discuss use cases and validate those use cases to make sure that again, what we're doing is gonna meet the needs of all of our partners. So this is something we would expect based on my experience with the dashboard is that we're gonna be meeting monthly or so and I've been doing some fun things around office hours while just be around for an hour or two and people can pop in and pop out and ask questions. So it's not necessarily, you know, an all escape for everybody that be there. But, you know, about an hour a month for a meetings. And then, you know, as we come up with mockups and concepts, you know, we'll forward those to the group and just ask you to look at them and provide some feedback. And I use the word assignment. That's probably too structured of a word, but, you know, just have you put a little time into that, give us some feedback about what your thoughts are on the usability of it, things that you'd like to see. And of course, in this forum that we'll have set up, and we're looking also to have to be a little bit of, you know, organic interaction between our partners because I think that's where, you know, we see people sharing kind of best practices or how do they use things or it generates other ideas. So, you know, the takeaway here is that if you're interested in participating, you know, reach out to me on my address, email address is there, david.jankins.proquest.com. You know, we're not looking for 50. We're probably looking for in a neighborhood of, you know, eight to 10, maybe a little bit more schools to participate. And again, just kind of give us a wide array of insights and perspectives on these new ideas, concepts and designs that will help us shape our roadmap moving forward. Communication, I wanted to kind of pile like this based on some things that happened out of that July release where we sent out some notifications based on people who were identified as primary administrators for a school and quickly became apparent that some other people were looking for information that we shared in those emails. So two things to think about. Number one, we are in a much more active fashion utilizing the what's new section at the top and the header on an ETV administrator. So you will see, you know, there's, whether it's we're going to roll out a bug release or release notes or anything along those lines, pay attention to that and that's a way that we're going to roll out some messaging. And then the second one in one of those emails that April sent out, I'm not a month ago or so, she was kind of testing that notion that there's people outside of just the primary administrators that like to be involved in email communication. She set up a URL that's here I'm going to attempt to read it right now. And if you're interested in, you know, pretty direct communications and it's not going to be minor stuff that'll come to you but things that are kind of time critical or essential we'll be able to reach out to you. So please go to that URL or if you prefer, you can reach out to me and I'll make sure that you get on that list. And it's going to be a little bit of an experiment to see how we're going to use it but you know, we want to be able to have information to be able to get a hold of this. Before we get to the Q and A I think I'm reserving enough time here just to want to put in the plug for ETD dashboard. So for those of you that are depositing into PPDT, thank you. And so ETD dashboard is the analytics tool that gives you insights into how your dissertation synthesis are being accessed globally. We can tell how many have been, you can see them here but I probably won't try to go into but give you information on that so you can get insights to be able to manage your programs, manage your collections. And if you are using it, I'm actually interested in hearing how you're utilizing that information in some new and innovative ways that maybe I'd like to hear about. And if you don't have access to the dashboard, reach out to me and we'll make sure that we get to get to you and anybody else that you'd like to have access to set up in there. Then the last one, just another heads up and I know a lot of people have IRs already but just talking about our partnership with the X-leavers component of ProQuest we are working very closely to be able to with the delivery component of E2D Administrator not only deliver it to PVDT, we're also supporting exporting to a support based institutional repositories as well. So that was a lot of fast talking but I did want to leave a lot of time here. We got about 20 minutes left, it looks like. I would like to open it up to the floor for folks with any questions. I need to switch over here to the Q and A tab I think and see if there's anything in there. And see if anybody has anything to say or any questions for us. Any questions at all? Anything about the product? Anything about any emerging trends that might have something to do with the submission process? Anything just with dissertations and theses in general? I've got Austin here, Austin knows everything. I'll just call him. Yeah. Well, Larry, you're usually a good one for a question. Can we call on you if you're still in the session to give us some feedback or suggestions? I'm about out of suggestions today. Okay. Fair enough. Anyway, it sounds very interesting. I like a lot of the things that you're doing. And I think it's improved then. The email is a good addition. The way you're working with the email, I think that'll be an improvement. The customization given you control of your own text, is that what you were referring to, Larry? Yeah. Yeah, that's been heavily voted. I think it's gonna be welcome for people to be able to put in your own text in a more real-time and self-service manner. Yes. And being able to manipulate the graduation dates, I think that's important because those graduation dates right now are kind of, they kind of float around when more students don't attempt to wait for an official walk in the graduation. They just wanna get out of the institution and do their thing. And so whenever they graduate is whenever they graduate. Right. They finish, they finish. So we need to be able to manipulate that a little bit. Sounds like a trend really, as much as anything else. Is that something else that other folks at other institutions are saying? I'm not sure. I would think they probably are. I'm sorry, I wasn't asking you Larry. I was opening it up to, throwing in some other folks. I'm sorry? I was drawing in some other folks. See if anybody else has noticed that is kind of a trend of the walk when you're ready kind of the scenario. Right. Yeah, so folks can feel free to unmute themselves if they'd like or type in chat. And we're happy to read out both of those and have you participate. Larry, that's great. Thank you for kicking off the discussion. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Maybe in the meantime, what I'll do is I'll pull up the idea exchange and we can take that. Roxanne submitted something here. I noticed the idea, sorry, Austin. I noticed the change in the Jolly Update that now the date submitted in the ETB list is based on the last date the students submitted, not the initial date. Can you explain why this change, this was made? I think this was noted, Roxanne, certainly we have not changed anything in the metadata or lost the original submission date. I believe that that is something we're gonna roll out in a bug fix here. So good catch on that. That is something that has happened and we'll get that to be displayed properly in the list page. So stay tuned for that, but that should roll up here very soon. I believe that's in our next bug release. Great. And yeah, John Hagen asked if he could propose the discussion that we had with the USETDA group where we talked a little bit about the ProQuest Clarivate acquisition and absolutely you can do that. Yeah, there was a lot of good information and feedback shared there. So that's absolutely fine. But I think what I'll do now is to show the idea exchange and have people be able to take a look at what we are getting up to in terms of kind of next steps for those ideas. So here we go. Here's the idea exchange. Are you able to see that folks? Anybody? Yeah, Mike can see it also. Okay. So the key area is if you're a frequent user here, you can see the hot ideas or the top ideas. And that'll show all the ones with the most votes and then the new ideas. So when you come back to the idea exchange, you can always go and look at what's new probably since you last joined. But I think what David was talking about is us acting upon your feedback. And so your feedback really trends to this focus of the top ideas. You know, what are the things that are being voted on the most for changes to ETD administrator? So David talked about a number of these things. I think that's kind of meaningful that we are taking this into consideration with that prioritization that David talked about earlier. So the customization of revision emails, the automated delivery of scheduled ETDs. Those are two that David talked about. We haven't talked about the checklist option. David, maybe you could talk a little bit about that. All right, and basically what it is and it seems a little bit counterintuitive because we put checklists in place to make sure everybody goes through and verifies that everything that is required is in place. And so what has been asked for, and I can't remember if it's, it could be nine institutions voting one time or one institution voting nine times. I can't recall, and you won't be able to see it from a non-advent panel. But they're wanting to be able to just click and check them all off. So it's a little bit counterintuitive versus the use case for how this is originally put in place. So this is one of the items in this discovery community that I wanna dig into. And understand why that is. Cause the checklist is there, as a safety net to make sure nothing, something isn't moved along that doesn't have everything in place. And in my mind, at least as a product manager is, well, if you just can click it and close everything out without having to verify each one individually, then the opportunity to miss something goes up. So that's one of the ones that we're collecting some data on and we'll talk about in a discovery community. Okay, great. And you can see the others folks on the webinar that make tags visible to the whole team, send confirmation email, and students submit revisions. Yep, talk about that one. Yeah, so it is planned. So you can kind of see the real time, when something goes from under review to planned as this one is, you'll know that it's coming up in the queue for the work by our development team. Yeah, and there's an ability also to sign up for notifications. If you vote for it, you can opt in to us giving you updates or receiving updates when something moves through the lifecycle, through the point where, we go and update here and say that it will be in an upcoming launch or excuse me, an upcoming release. Great, and so the hot idea is if we take a look at that page for a minute, you can see that change name prompt to name as appears on title page has quite a few new votes and allow admins to opt out of receiving emails when students submit revisions as a couple of votes as well. So those are probably the newer ideas coming to the exchange. Yeah. But good, so we won't be offended if right now you go over to ideas.proquest.com and go right in and start voting for ETD admin while you remember to do it. We're happy to have you do that now or you can do it at a later time. The key is to do make your voice heard and let us know what are most important to you and to your university. So I'll stop sharing that, which I think I did. You did. Great. So other feedback or questions that anybody has, you know, the session is about ETD administrator, but we're happy to take questions about ProQuest dissertations and thesis global or PQDT global or anything else related to dissertations. We'd be happy to answer your questions. Compliant end of day crowd. That's right. That's right. It's been a long and interesting day. And, you know, obviously David and I are here after the conference, I'll be at the conference tomorrow. So you can chat with us if there's something that you remember after the session and you thought, oh, that's what I was gonna ask about. But we really appreciate your use of ETD administrator and your contribution to the ProQuest database that then feeds your IR. We have over 800 users to ETD administrator and more coming in every month. So we really appreciate your support and we're happy to have this be a living and growing resource, thanks to David shepherding things through with the development team. All right. Well, there's nothing else. So I'll stick around, but I appreciate your time today. You have my email to reach out. If you have any questions about dashboard or ETD administrator and would love to hear from you and hopefully we'll, some of you interested in being in our discovery community. So thanks for your time today. Thank you. Hi, I just wanted to say that I'm really looking forward to the plan changes to the ETD administrator. I think it's going to make things a lot simpler for all of us. Is there something specific that you noticed, Valerie? Yes. Notifying the students that their revision was submitted successfully. Is that something you hear of quite a bit? Am I okay? Am I okay? My email box is so full all the time. I come in, I have like 30 emails as if I've gotten their revision. So. All right. A huge difference. Good. I think that's going to be, I'm not sure everybody gets quite the volume you do, but it's certainly been a pain point that has been uploaded and discussed in chats like this one. So glad we're prioritizing the right stuff and hopefully we'll make your life a little easier. Yeah, Valerie, that's great feedback. How are things going with you during the pandemic? Were you able to do your work remotely or what happened there? Oh yeah, no problem. It was so simple. I've actually enjoyed working at home. That's good. Are you still at home or are you in your office now? No, I'm back in the office, but only four days a week. I have one day at home. Okay. It's nice. Let you focus and get more things accomplished maybe? I am so more productive at home. Interesting, yes. Yeah. So yeah, it's been really simple. That's good. Simple as good. Well, great. Well, maybe you'll consider joining the development community that David is talking about. You're a power user, a long time user. So we welcome to have you if it's something you're able to do and fit into your work schedule. Oh sure, yeah. Actually, I'd be very interested. Okay, great. Great. Yeah, it's not a big time commitment. It gives you some early insights into where we're headed and what some of our designs might look like and different levels of fidelity. Some of them might be a mock-up that you can look at. There might be some things that have some level of programming behind it you can interact with and understand that, give us some feedback and make sure we're headed in the right direction. Yeah, I think it's great. You're involving the community. It's very nice. It's good to be finally working on things that we need a lot of community involvement in. While the two-year technology refresh was spent a lot of time on that and it was an investment we needed to make because it's so much easier to develop new features. It's so much easier to improve our test development and test coverage because things run faster. You should be seeing from an administrator perspective way better response times on pages that used to take quite a long time to load like a list page. So it's an investment that we needed to make and I think we're all gonna see demands paid from that time. Actually, I do have one question now that I think about it. When you load the assigned to administrator page you get graph on the right-hand side. Is there a way to hide that? You should be able to collapse them both. You can? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, is it just visually distracting for you or? Actually, I think it takes a page of little longer to load. Interesting, okay. That's at least my perception. Okay, we'll look into that. Maybe there's something we can do to optimize and make it load faster. And I'll see if there's something that we can do to make the default so it would come up with them collapse potentially. So that's great. Otherwise, it's really helpful information. Good, good. Yeah, we made some informed decisions on the restructuring of the old version of the graph and the data to the new one. The old one was just, it just didn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people and we just wanted to streamline it and make it very obvious who has what. And you can, if you need to, who has a little bit of extra slack right now or who has the most slack, I guess nobody has a lot. We'll be able to give them, we'll be able to assign it. So I'm glad that's working out for you and we'll see if we can do something to tighten that up a little bit for you. Great, thank you very much. Great, well thanks Valerie. We really appreciate it. I think we're off to the next event.