6.5 Product Brief

Product Release Summary

This Product Brief includes a summary of Regent 6.5.0.0, information on key enhancements, and direction to additional documentation and information.

Product Release Description

The 6.5 release addresses product defects as listed in the “Bugs” section of the Release Notes, and also enhancements and new features including:

• Smart Form Manager​

• Present ‘Upload a Form’ Button on the Student Experience Portal When Document is Moved Back to Needed or Incomplete Status​

• New Option to Display $0 Disbursements in Student Portal​

• Fund Fees Setup and Term Setup: Add Validation to Prevent Deleting Items in Use​

• Factor Budget into New Award Amount in Awarding Tool​

• Package Using Actual Loan Fees for COA

Further details on enhancements/new features and a complete list of bug fixes as well as any new scripts and data views can be found in the Release Notes. 

The Release Notes also contain information on new configuration options, and a list of updates to the Admin Guide and User Guide.

Other Documentation 

In addition to the Product Brief, the following documentation is also available: 

System Requirements

Any client currently using Regent Award may take Regent 6.5 for UAT and ultimately production upgrade.

Any client currently using Regent Review may take Regent 6.5 for UAT and ultimately production upgrade.

Any client currently using Regent Access may take Regent 6.5 for UAT and ultimately production upgrade.

Any client currently using Regent Fund may take Regent 6.5 for UAT and ultimately production upgrade.

Any client currently using Regent Award may take the Regent 6.5 version of Student Experience for UAT and ultimately production upgrade.

Any client currently using Regent Review may take the Regent 6.5 version of Student Experience for UAT and ultimately production upgrade.

Any client currently using Regent Fund may take the Regent 6.5 version of Student Experience for UAT and ultimately production upgrade.

Some Regent Access clients may take the Regent 6.5 version of Student Experience for UAT and ultimately production upgrade. Please work with your Account Manager for additional information. Note: All current customer-specific functionality in the legacy portal may not be available in the new Student Experience portal at this time.

Clients using Regent Award for Salesforce will not need to upgrade to a new Salesforce application version in order to continue current functionality.

New Feature Overview for Regent 6.5

Smart Form Manager (RS-21759)

The 6.5 Release includes a Regent Smart Form Manager Tool, which has been developed within the Regent user interface to allow institutions with a Regent Fund or Regent Review License to edit an existing Smart Form, import an existing Smart Form from a different environment (e.g. QA to Prod), and create a new Smart Form.

In the construction of a Smart Form, clients can use a variety of Sections, Groups, and Questions. Sections are comprised of one or more Groups, and Groups are comprised of one or more Questions. Sections and Groups are used to organize Questions into separate categories within the Smart Form.

Users can incorporate conditional logic to tailor each question on a Smart Form to an individual applicant and minimize the number of questions an applicant is required to answer by using Dependency logic. Dependencies use dynamic logic to hide or display Sections, Groups, and Questions, based on prior responses to Questions within the Smart Form. For example, if an applicant responds ‘No’ to a question surrounding military affiliation, the corresponding military affiliation section will be hidden from the applicant. A Section, Group, or Question can have one or more Dependencies. Validation logic can also be added using Regular Expressions to ensure the validity or accuracy of the Smart Form Question response.

Smart Forms are associated to a document in Document Setup via the Smart Form Type or Smart Form Code. Smart Forms are made accessible to students in the Student Portal via Document Requirements. The Smart Form Manager is found in Tools → Smart Form Manager, where users with the permission enabled, can create, import, or edit Smart Forms. NOTE: This tool is designed to be used at the Institution level. Only one Campus per Institution should be configured. The Smart Form Manager permission can be set in Roles → Permissions → Global Permissions → Tools Permissions.

Regent Review and Regent Fund clients can refer to the Customer Zone Knowledge Base topics Smart Form Manager and Permissions List for more information. Clients should contact Account Managers / Project Managers for additional training via service offerings.

Open

Present ‘Upload a Form' Button on the Student Portal When Document is Moved Back to Needed or Incomplete status (RS-20296)

Prior to the 6.5 Release, if a non-smart form document requiring an e-signature was moved back to ‘Needed’ or ‘Incomplete’ status, the ‘Upload a Form’ button would not repopulate. Non-smart form documents without an e-signature requirement have already had this functionality.

With the 6.5 Release, the Student Portal was updated to present the ‘Upload a Form’ button when a non-smart form document requiring an e-signature moves from a ‘Received’ status into a ‘Needed’ or ‘Incomplete’ status, to allow the student to upload additional documents.

The help text for the ‘Display Upload for Documents in Received Status' configuration option on Document Setup was updated to differentiate when a document’s status is Yes or No. If ‘Yes’ is selected, students will be able to upload attachments when the document status is ‘Needed’, ‘Incomplete’, OR ‘Received’, allowing for multiple attachments to be added to a document requirement for a student, including documents with e-signature requirements.

Open

Note: Smart form documents are out of scope for this enhancement. If a smart form document needs to be re-uploaded by a student, the following steps should be taken:

1. Update the initial document's status to Waived so it will not be displayed in the portal.

2. Add a new document as either Needed or Incomplete status.

3. The upload icon will be displayed in the portal for this new document so the student can upload the new attachment.

New Option to Display $0 Disbursements in Student Portal (RS-16731)

A new ‘Display $0 Disbursement' dropdown field has been added to the Financial Aid tab of the Portal section in Institution Setup. This field allows an institution to decide whether to display or hide $0 disbursements to students on the Student Portal.

If ‘Yes’, the default value, is selected for this field, the student will have the ability to see $0 disbursements on the Payment Details section of the Financial Aid screen of the Student Portal.

If ‘No’ is selected, $0 disbursements will be hidden from the Financial Aid Component Award Tile for the Payment Details when in a disbursement status of ‘Cancelled’, ‘Declined’, ‘Scheduled’, or ‘Paid’. Also, if all the disbursements in a term are $0, the message, “There are currently no disbursement details to display”, will be presented in Payment Details.

Fund Fees Setup and Term Setup: Add Validation to Prevent Deleting Items in Use (RS-25203)

To better support users, Regent incorporated an additional validation check in Fund Fees Setup and Term Setup, that prevents the deletion of Fund Fees or Terms if the configuration item is being used by the system.

If a user attempts to delete a Term or Fund Fee that is currently in use, Regent will not allow deletion and will display a message.

Regent Fund - Factor Budget into New Award Amount in Awarding Tool (RS-23839)

In this release, the ‘New Award Amount’ values in the Awarding Tool have been updated to reflect budgetary limitations. This change will ensure that Regent does not over-award funds with limited budgets, even to students who would otherwise be eligible.

For students with a positive Calculated Eligibility value, but not enough budget to cover a full award if the awards higher in the sorted list of students were to be approved, the New Award Amount will be $0. (Awards will not be created for these students.)

New informational text has been added to the Awarding Tool Results screen: “'New Award Amount' values are affected by 'Current Remaining Balance' of budget(s) and sort order of student list. 'Remaining Balance After Award Approval' will be adjusted when 'Approve' is selected for an award.”

The ‘Current Remaining Balance’ at the time of the Awarding Tool Selections process run will now be saved so that the user is notified on the Awarding Tool Results screen if the budget balances have changed. The message will be: “At the time the Awarding Tool Selection process ran, ‘Current Remaining Balance’ was (amount). The balance for this budget has changed. ‘New Award Amount’ values do not reflect the updated balance.”

It is important to note that if users edit award amounts within the tool, the award amounts for the other students do not automatically adjust.

Package Using Actual Loan Fees for Cost of Attendance (COA) (RS-11986)

With the 6.5 release, clients will have the option to use a student’s actual calculated loan fees in the COA rather than an averaged amount configured as a flat amount based on grade level or other criteria.  The existing ‘package to net’ functionality using actual loan fees for packaging up to Direct Costs has been enhanced to:

• Clearly display the actual calculated loan fees in the COA breakdown in the Financial Aid component of Student Experience

• Clearly display the actual calculated loan fees in the COA on the Awards Tab within Regent Award

• Use the actual calculated loan fee amounts for all packaging, not just when packaging to Direct Costs.

• When the new option is in place, a student with no Direct Loans will no longer require a manual adjustment to remove loan fee amounts from the COA.

• An improvement to the logic will more accurately anticipate Unsubsidized loan fees when calculating Need for the Subsidized loans that are packaged first during the packaging run. Clients currently using ‘Package to Net’ may see some slight increases to Subsidized eligibility due to this improvement.

 Implementation:

• Clients currently using the ‘Package to the Net Loan Amount for Direct Costs’ option for Title IV Direct Loans will automatically be transitioned to use the updated ‘Package Using Actual Loan Fees’ option for all Direct Loans. 

• Clients newly electing to use actual loan fees will select ‘yes’ for the ‘Package Using Actual Loan Fees’ option in Institution Setup (inheritable to the Campus Level) AND will configure an effective date.  Use of actual calculated loan fees in COA will be applied to all loans with Academic Years beginning on or after this effective date.   The default effective date is July 1, 2023, so if a current client is implementing this option at some point in the future, be sure to select a date that will minimize the churn on loans in current academic years.

• A build script will automatically add a Cost Group for Actual Loan fees with Cost Items for Subsidized, Unsubsidized, Parent PLUS and GradPLUS Direct Loans to all existing Cost Setups. (Typically, a client will have just one Cost Setup in an instance of Regent Award).  This new Cost Group will support display of the specific loan cost items for a student in the COA sections of Student Experience and on the Awards Tab in Regent Award.

• When a user saves a new Cost Setup, the Cost Group for Actual Loan fees will be added automatically.

• A client currently using configured COA amounts for loan fees should sunset any configured loan fee Cost Groups by entering an Effective End Date so they don’t continue to be considered once packaging is using calculated actual loan fees for all active periods.  That said, if a client elects ‘Package Using Actual Fees’ and there are still configured loan fee amounts that are applicable to an Academic Year, Regent will ignore the configured loan fee amounts and use the actual calculated amounts in packaging and for COA loan fee display.

Known Issues for Regent 6.5