Coming soon: official transcript requests! While our crack coders apply the finishing graces to them, we thought we'd give you a preview of the upcoming features.

Your students will soon be able to request an official transcript right from their Profiles. Their requests will be queued up in the new Transcript Requests view in Academics; from there you can review and fulfill them with a few quick steps. Here's the whole story:

1. Setup

First you'll configure a few transcript request settings.

• Delivery methods include print/mail and email. You can offer one or the other—or both.
• Do you charge for transcript requests? You'll choose a fee and optionally set up fee rules to cover particular kinds of requests—for example, you charge one amount for a printed transcript, and another for an emailed one. You'll also have the option to not charge.
• Charge for requests either by charge-to-account or by having your students cough up a credit card number upfront.
• In general academic settings, you can enable web transcripts (more below).

2. Students submit requests

After you've enabled official transcript requests, a student will go to his Profile > Student view. From the new Transcript Actions button, he'll select Request Official Transcript. After entering information about the recipient and handling your payment arrangements, he'll submit it.

3. You fulfill the request

You'll find all of your students' requests on the new Transcript Requests view. To fulfill a request, you'll go to the request's info page. There, you'll choose a layout for the transcript, preview the document, and take care of the delivery details—emailing the web transcript link or printing a mailing label for a paper copy.

Web transcripts and a few interface updates

A few new items accompany transcript requests. The aforementioned web transcripts create a unique URL from which an up-to-date PDF transcript can be downloaded. This is handy for when you email a transcript link in March while the student's Spring courses are still in-progress—come June, after they're all finalized, the transcript recipient can just visit the URL to see how the student fared that semester. Once you enable web transcripts, every transcript you export will contain its own unique URL in the footer.

We've also placed the utilities gear onto the funeral pyre. We'll replace it with action links and the new Transcript Actions button; the gear on the Profile > Info view shall meet a similar fate.

We're pretty excited to get Transcript Requests out to all our customers. They'll replace some pricey standalone transcript request services some schools are using. And as with all new Populi features, they won't require any software integrations or other wiring-together. Just set 'em up and let 'em rip.