Focus/SIS provides essential data to the users who need it in real time.

	Take control of user access with incredibly fine-grained permissions. Focus/SIS system administrators can assign read-only and editing access to any function within Focus/SIS. These permissions can be assigned to individual users or groups of users.

• View admission status, course schedule, final grades, GPA
• Perform degree audit
• Pay fees with credit card or e-check
• View upcoming assignments
• View teacher-supplied course materials (such as the syllabus) online
• Take online quizzes
• View assignment & assessment grades and track performance in course
• Register for classes or apply for admission

• Take attendance
• Publish course information
• Announce upcoming homework assignments and assessments
• Create graded online assessments
• Prepare paper exams to be printed and scanned for grading
• Submit final grades (which are automatically calculated by the Focus/SIS gradebook) for transcripts
• Weight grades, exclude assignments for individual students, and customize grading scales

• Create student fields to store student information and perform searches and reports on these fields
• Add students to the system when they apply, and transfer the students when they are accepted
• Print transcripts
• Define user permissions
• Schedule students into classes

Integrate Moodle into your SIS to provide e-Learning.

• Provide numerous course activities including forums, quizzes, assignments, and chats
• Automate formative assessment
• Create and grade paper exams with scanners
• Facilitate communication and collaboration between teachers and students
• Develop online lesson plans and monitor student online coursework
• Eliminate the task of scheduling students in more than one system

Provide Formative Assessment the Easy Way.

Focus/SIS works with Apperson Optical Mark Read (OMR) auto-feed scanners. Paper Exams (with multiple form codes) are created in the e-Learning component of Focus/SIS. When the bubble sheets are scanned, the grades are automatically uploaded back to Focus/SIS.

Integrate the perfect cafeteria system.

	Use any hardware. Our implementation specialists recommend touchscreen point-of-sale hardware and barcode scanners for your schools. However, your schools can use the computers and barcode scanners that you already have to run the point-of-sale terminal.

• Integrate Focus/SIS with the open source point-of-sale cafeteria package PSCafePOS
• Track student lunch purchases with a point-of-sale installed in the cafeteria
• Publish student lunch purchases and nutritional information online for parents
• Track free/reduced lunch status
• Use student ID cards to debit declining balances. Students can use the same cards for the library. Or, cafeteria workers can use laminated barcode sheets for younger students
• Accept online eCheck and credit card payments for family lunch balances

Integrate the simplest library system.

	Cataloging. Circulation. Integrated with your Student Data & Billing System.

• Integrate Focus/SIS with the open-source library management package OpenBiblio
• Keep track of library materials
• View due dates for checked out books
• Search an online card catalog
• Accept online eCheck and credit card payments for overdue book fees

The Focus Advantage.

	Training & Consulting Focus also offers customized solutions to schools, districts, and institutions of higher education. If you e looking to switch systems or databases or to transition to an E-Learning system, count on our seasoned consultants to provide everything from advice and detailed implementation plans to train-the-trainers or customized hands-on training. We specialize in assisting faculty with minimal experience in online environments with designing, developing, and delivering E-Learning courses on any platform to mimic the immediacy and intimacy of conventional face-to-face classrooms.

We built Focus around five principles to create the Focus beCAAUSe: Compatibility, Adaptability, Affordability, Usability, and Scalability.

Compatibility
To maximize its compatibility, we designed Focus to work with virtually any form of data as either inputs or outputs. We also fully integrated every aspect of Focus to ensure that no piece of data every needed to be entered more than once. Instead, users can manage every piece of data involved in every aspect of a student’s life on campus—from classroom to cafeteria—seamlessly within a single application.

Adaptability
Focus is an exclusively web-based, all-inclusive, fully-integrated system. Because Focus uses Open Source code, you can rely on the skills of existing IT staff already familiar with Open Source to make changes to your own version of Focus to accommodate growing and changing needs.

Affordability
Because Focus eliminates the need for the licensing fees for multiple systems, it also represents a highly affordable system for managing student information. And, with Focus aiming to become the preeminent provider of student information systems, our highly competitive pricing strategy ensures that Focus is the market’s most cost-effective solution.

Usability
A highly intuitive interface, customized to meet our clients’ needs ensures that anyone can begin using Focus within minutes—and that information is readily available to all stakeholders, from parents to support staff to faculty and administrators. Fine-grained permissions ensure secure access to data. And full integration with Moodle ensures teachers can manage courses, assignments, and grades without ever leaving Focus, which seamlessly records grades and generates transcripts based on Moodle courses. Of course, administrators and support staff can endlessly customize Focus to accommodate student and campus needs as they develop, adding fields in seconds as needs arise.

Scalability
Focus is also almost infinitely scalable, accommodating the needs of districts that anticipate rapid growth in their student populations, as well as increased demand for different kinds of data, including security and healthcare information.