Every facilities team we talk to says some version of the same thing: the requests never stop coming in, and most of them come through email.

Staff send messages that are often vague, missing the building number, or don’t include enough context to route the request without someone reading the whole thing first. That reading, interpreting, and re‑entering is real work, and it happens dozens of times a day in larger districts.

This June, Follett Software is focusing on updates that cut that manual work down and make the everyday tools your team relies on a little clearer, faster, and easier to use.

For Work Orders, that includes a major new AI capability alongside practical improvements that help teams manage multi‑step work and share everyday know‑how. Across the Facilities Suite, including Schedules, Event Registration, Utilities, and Drawings, you’ll see updates that support cleaner requests and less manual data entry.

Here’s what’s new, with a focus on outcomes for facilities and operations leaders.

---

AI Email Ticketing for Work Orders: From messy inbox to prioritized queue

Now, AI Email Ticketing is available for Work Orders.

When a staff member emails in a service request, AI reads the message, pulls out the key details, and creates a complete, structured work order — automatically. Your team starts each day with a prioritized queue in Work Orders instead of a packed inbox to sort through.

Behind the scenes, the AI:

• Reads the incoming email and extracts the request details
• Identifies the building and space based on the message context and your district’s data
• Classifies the request by category and assigns a priority level
• Generates a structured work order with an AI‑written summary, ready for assignment

School staff don’t have to change how they work — they keep emailing in requests as they always have.

Just as important, control stays with your team. All AI‑populated fields are clearly labeled in the system so your staff can see exactly what the AI filled in and override anything as needed.

---

What’s new in Work Orders (beyond AI)

AI Email Ticketing is the headline, but the June release also includes non‑AI improvements that help facilities teams manage real‑world work more clearly and keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door.

In many districts, multi‑step jobs are still coordinated in email threads and hallway conversations. Fix knowledge lives in side documents. And teams spend time answering the same basic questions again and again.

This release focuses on three areas.

1. Knowledge Base: A better way to document how work gets done

Every district has procedures that live in a mix of shared drives, binders, and memory. That works until a key staff member is out, a new technician starts, or recurring questions keep surfacing.

The new Knowledge Base gives Work Orders a native place to document fixes, procedures, policies, and self‑service answers — right alongside the work itself.

It can support technicians as an internal operations resource, and it can also serve as a self‑service support center for school staff.

For facilities teams, that can mean:

• More consistent responses across schools and buildings
• Faster onboarding for new technicians
• Less time spent answering the same basic questions
• Fewer important procedures trapped in side documents or with one experienced employee

The Knowledge Base is not just about publishing answers. It’s about making everyday facilities operations easier to standardize and easier to scale.

2. Subtasks: Managing the real shape of facilities work

Facilities work rarely fits into a single step. A boiler issue might require an inspection, ordering parts, scheduling an outage, and a final check. A summer classroom refresh might span multiple trades and several weeks.

Subtasks (shipping shortly after this set of updates) will let you break a complex work order into individual tracked tasks, each with its own status and assignee. That helps your team:

• Make ownership clearer on multi‑step jobs
• See progress at a glance without digging through notes
• Keep related work connected instead of scattering it across multiple tickets

For districts that also use Follett Software’s Technology Suite, the same core capabilities — Knowledge Base and Subtasks — are landing across both Work Orders and IT Asset Manager. That creates a more consistent way for facilities and IT to track work, share knowledge, and support staff when a request crosses team boundaries.

3. Mobile improvements: Supporting technicians who aren’t at a desk

Facilities work happens in hallways, classrooms, offices, and equipment rooms — not at a desk.

Recent Follett Software Ops mobile app updates expanded what technicians and staff can do from a phone or tablet, including:

• Editing request details directly from the request screen
• Attaching purchases, inventory, assets, and files from the mobile app

For teams that spend most of the day moving between locations, these updates reduce the need to go back to a desktop just to finish routine work. The result is less friction in the field and a more useful daily mobile experience.

---

What’s new across the Facilities Suite

While much of the attention this month is on Work Orders, there are meaningful updates across Schedules, Drawings, Utilities, and Event Registration as well. Together, these products make up the Follett Facilities Suite, which brings facility management tools into one connected ecosystem for K–12 districts.

Here are some of the highlights for facilities and operations leaders:

Schedules

• Revamped request process — A guided, step‑by‑step flow helps staff specify what they need and find the right space, reducing abandoned or mis‑routed requests.
• Custom email templates — Configure request‑related email communications by status to match your district’s communication standards.

Drawings

• Drawings OCR (optical character recognition) — In the field, staff can snap a photo of an asset tag, and the system reads the tag and populates the asset record or work order. This cuts down manual entry and reduces toggling between systems.

Utilities

• Utilities PDF Reader — Upload utility bill PDFs and the system extracts line items and creates bills automatically. This is especially helpful for larger districts facing high volumes of monthly bills.

Event Registration

• Deeper integration with Schedules — Tighter two‑way integration helps keep program details and space usage aligned.
• Cloning functionality — Spin up similar programs faster by copying the details from an existing program instead of rebuilding from scratch.

For a complete list of fixes and improvements, districts can refer to the full release notes.

---

What this means for facilities and operations leaders

The June 2026 Facilities story is not about adding complexity. It’s about reducing it.

For Work Orders:

• AI Email Ticketing helps your team start with a prioritized queue instead of a crowded inbox.
• Knowledge Base helps standardize answers and preserve operational knowledge.
• Subtasks (coming shortly after this release) help teams manage the real shape of multi‑step work.
• Mobile improvements help technicians keep work moving from wherever they are on campus.

Across the Facilities Suite:

• Updates in Schedules, Drawings, Utilities, and Event Registration reduce manual data entry, improve request quality, and make it easier to keep information consistent across systems.

For facilities and operations leaders, that adds up to:

• Clearer ownership on multi‑step work
• Better continuity when staff change or teams grow
• Less repeated effort for technicians, coordinators, and managers
• A smoother experience for staff who depend on facilities support every day

These enhancements build on Follett Software’s existing Work Orders and Facilities products, which are designed to help K–12 districts manage facilities at a high level within a school‑sized budget.