Powerful Utilities
Overseer includes some powerful maintenance tools to assist with access control and operational support of your school’s database.
Backup
and Restore Utilities
A simple menu command will compress an entire Overseer database into a single file for backup purposes – typically in less than a minute. Regular backups provide a recovery option in the event of a damaged or lost database. Another menu option will fully restore a database to its original state at the time of backup. Together, these two features provide a high level of protection in a manner which can be routinely performed by office staff.
These same options may be used to copy a database to diskettes for transfer between computers (e.g. between home and school during the summer break).
Maintaining Database Integrity
Some database applications have high maintenance costs and require service calls to restore integrity to corrupt files, or to migrate data from one software version to another.
Index tables can get corrupted as the result of operating system crashes, or power outages. Corrupt index tables can give rise to error messages about faulty indexes during normal operation of Overseer Admin or Overseer LAN. The corrupt tables can be automatically reconstructed in a matter of minutes via the Rebuild Database menu option. This task will also pack data tables to eliminate waste space associated with deleted records. As the task is run, a log is generated of the status of each table. Any remaining faulty tables will be clearly identified, in which case, restoration from a previous backup may be required.
Software upgrades often entail structural changes to Overseer databases. This is not a problem because every attempt to open an old version of a database will result in an option to automatically restructure the database for use by the current software version. If exercised, this option performs database structural changes sequentially, from the original version to the latest (e.g. version 1.2 -> 1.3 -> 1.4 -> 1.6 -> 1.7 -> 1.8 -> 1.9). At the end of the restructuring, the database should be immediately available via the current software.
Other
Utilities
An Import Photos menu option will perform a mass import of all student photos for an entire school from a CD or other storage medium.
At the end of each school year there are students who will graduate from the highest grade offered by the school. A Year-end Processing menu option will automatically terminate the enrolment periods of all graduating students. Depending upon a preference setting, students who graduated a specified number of years earlier will automatically be promoted to alumni status. They will also reappear in the database as adults rather than children. All student marks and class detail information will also be purged for former students as of a particular school year.
Allocation of licenses and passwords to teachers for Overseer LAN and Overseer Grades may be managed from within Overseer Admin. Similarly, teacher access to Overseer LAN can be enabled or disabled centrally to permit exclusive database access for administrative staff for specific tasks.
Overseer also automatically assigns unique email/login addresses to students and staff as an aid to managing network and/or email accounts.
A built-in Demo database enables users to practice using new features on a test database before attempting real changes to the live database.
Overseer Admin also contains utilities for exporting core child, student, family or organization information to comma-delimited ASCII text files for ease of import into other applications (e.g. financial software) or spreadsheets for making custom reports. Download the Overseer Sample Reports document for additional information about the content and format of export files.
