CLASS News – January 2020

Welcome to the January 2020 issue of CLASS News

Chris Dubrow left CLCs Australia just before the end of 2019 to take up another opportunity at the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) where he started in 2020.

Chris began working at CLCs Australia (back then known as NACLC) more than four years ago. Chris has played an instrumental role in the design and implementation of CLASS to more than 150 Centres across Australia. We will miss his commitment and determination. Please join us in wishing Chris well.

Susan Scott, who has been working with CLCs Australia since November last year, will provide interim leadership for CLASS and other ICT projects while we hire a new person to lead our ICT Team.

CLCs Australia is currently seeking additional people to join our dynamic team.

ICT Business Manager

CLCs Australia is looking for an ICT Business Manager to lead our ICT services, with the main project being CLASS. You will be managing a small, committed team and have very good skills in vendor and project management. You will take pride in providing high quality service.  More details are available on our website.

Secondment opportunity in the CLASS team

Do you have extensive experience as an administrator in CLASS including using CLASS to produce reports? We have a three-month secondment position available with the CLASS team to assist with the CLASS helpdesk, training, data quality and resources. More details are available on our website.

If you would like more information about either of these positions please contact Susan Scott, info@clcs.org.au.

We have recently run CLASS training for a number of Centres in the ACT and for the University of Newcastle. We are planning face to face training in other states between February and June.

CLCs Australia's Reuben and James with the team at Women's Legal Centre ACT.

In the meantime, Webinars are a great way to quickly get up to speed. The full range of CLASS training is available via webinar including new user training, administrator training, reports and projects. More details about this training and how to book it are on our website - https://naclc.info/class/training .

Please don’t hesitate to contact the Helpdesk if your Centre would like training.

And don’t forget that there are a range of useful CLASS training resources on CLC Australia's web site.

We have recently made changes to some of the funding categories which means that you may see more funding categories in the Funding Category Dropdown. If you don’t know how to hide categories that you are not using, please contact the Helpdesk.

A reminder that the Data Consistency Guide and other helpful resources for your Centre are available on the  CLCs Australia website,. We will be facilitating training in each state this year to help you embed the Guide in your centre’s practice. If you have any questions, or want to request training in 2020 please email dataconsistency@clcs.org,au.

Copying and pasting text into Word

A number of you have raised the issue that when you copy text from Word and paste it into CLASS, you sometimes lose information and formatting eg bolding and bullets and numbering.

We have discussed this with the developers of CLASS and a permanent solution is unlikely, so we’d like to suggest a workaround.

Copy your text from Word

Paste it into a notepad. You can bookmark the notepad in Google Chrome - data:text/html, <html contenteditable>. This can be a bit deceiving because you will only see a blank, white screen. However, clicking into the screen and typing will reveal that the screen is actually a notepad.

Copy the text from the notepad and paste it into CLASS.

If you do this the formatting should be retained as in the following example.

Clients with only one name

Clients and additional parties to do with your cases may be from diverse backgrounds that have different naming conventions, including mononyms (persons having only one name).

Some centres have reported issues with conflict checking when nothing is entered into the ‘Last Name’ field of a client record.

The Department of Home Affairs recommends that best practice when doing data entry for a person with a mononym is to enter the name that you have in the ‘Last Name’ field. For more information see this guide on their website.

  Security Risk with Windows 7

Windows 7 will no longer be receiving security updates to protect it from modern cyber security threats. Microsoft stopped offering security updates to Windows 7 on 14 January 2020 after 10 years in service. If you use Windows 7, then every new cyber security threat will remain unmitigated unless you can find a third party to write the security patches for you.

One CLASS security recommendation is to only use devices updated with up the latest security updates. This means there is a growing risk to sensitive content from computers running Windows 7, and the risk will continue to grow as time goes on and more vulnerabilities are discovered and threats developed.

We strongly recommend replacing or updating any Windows 7 computers with a supported operating system (such as Windows 10) as soon as practical.

Information from Microsoft  here, and a more detailed outline of risks in an article from ZDnet  here.  

Suggestions:

We’d like to thank CLASS users for sharing their feedback and suggestions regarding CLASS. Your suggestions and feedback contribute to the continued development and usability of CLASS.

If you have suggestions, questions, or feedback; please email us at naclc@classhelp.org.au.