Catching Up On Blog Questions
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Catching Up On Blog Questions
Occasional blog of Bob Scott, Director of Scoutbook for the BSA
Welcome back to my unapologetic occasional blog. I am going to use this posting to share some perspective based on a number of questions posted to my last blog about future direction and timing on Scoutbook development.
But, first, performance. We hope that you have all noticed improved performance, especially in the past week. Over the past several weeks ten team members have been focused on performance - identifying and implementing software changes to improve the performance of the tool. During that time they have touched all aspects of the tool – queries have been tuned, caching has been implemented, history archived, and application changes have been made to speed your Scouting job.
The performance data says that the work has been successful, we hope it is improving your Scouting experience. Page load time is 35% improved on desktops and 25% on mobile devices. Server response time has improved four fold and session duration decreased 17% while pages viewed went up 11%, but the job is not complete – more users are getting their work done faster. Performance improvement will continue to be an ongoing quest as we add users.
On to some of your questions and frequent issues:
Syncing Advancement Between Scoutbook and ScoutNet: As you know today this takes a set of steps to export the Scoutbook advancement file, then log in and upload that file in Internet Advancement. We have a totally separate team working on creating a true sync from Scoutbook to ScoutNet. The team is making progress per the plan we have outlined. We hope to being testing in mid-November/ early December and will update you on planned release and implications for unit leaders as we get closer to release.
The development team’s priorities, post performance sprint are as follows:
Imports: We are aware of a number of units which are having difficulty importing their rosters from ScoutNet. This has been isolated to two situations: 1) units with new Lions registered in the unit and 2) situations where there are duplicate four-digit unit numbers in a council. Fixing these import bugs is first and second on the development priority list post performance sprint. Expect progress in the next week.
Updating Training for Adults: This functionality has been broken since last year when BSA moved to a new learning management tool and changed our approach to online training. The bug affects individuals who have taken Cub Scout and Venturing position-specific training since last fall. We regret that it has taken so long to address this issue. Fixing this functionality is next in line after the imports. Until we begin working on the solution I can not provide you with an estimate of when it might be released.
Cub Scout Shooting Sports Award: We are tardy in implementing this award and will be working it after the two issues above.
Membership Numbers: As a reminder, much of what we are doing now and will be in the future will require a valid membership ID for youth and adults. Please keep working to include member IDs in each person’s profile in Scoutbook.
TTFN, have a great weekend Scouting and for those in the Matthew hurricane impact area, the hopes and prayers of the Scoutbook team are with you.
Thank you for all you have done and for your diligence! We look forward to the continued progress in the coming weeks. Enjoy your weekend.
All Scoutbook Users,
For those who continue to post and ask questions about items not yet in development, I would like to direct you to the future requests forum. Those requests are mintiored and compiled to make the decisions for the direction of resources. If the item you were inquiring about was not listed above, in a prior blog, or in the IT Roadmap then it may be a little while until they come to that feature. I can't speak for the Scoutbook team but I have been following things for a while and the focus items have been well defined and it appears that there will not be much deviation at this time. I do continue to suggest that you place your ideas in the future requests forum so your ideas can be considered.
And thank you for the update. It is much appreciated.
We have been unable to do it for a year. Contacted customer service because only 5 scouts were updating.
It was looked into until they couldn't figure out why (all the data matched) and then Scoutbook said they were not going to look any further because of the pending automatic sync between the two systems.
This email chain happened in April and required me to redo every single award for the year for every scout. I took hours and we only had 18. Now I have 42.
I really don't want to have to go through that again.
Hope the calendar invitees auto population new scouts on exsisting events are seriously considered for the next round.
When inviting it would be great if there were an All ____ choice, so new scouts would be auto added. We should have the correct options based on which calendar the event goes on, but for a pack event something like:
All Pack
All Tigers
All Wolves
All Bears
All Webelos
All Leaders
Individual selections....
Reports are scheduled to be worked on next year. See: http://itroadmap.scouting.org/scoutbook/
This will present problems as we have had a few incidents where we had to submit several applications for the same Scout (in one case it was five separate applications).
Nothing will sync until the member ID is there, but until he's registered and the ID is generated/known, there's nothing to sync to anyway.
Seriously, though - I am CONFIDENT there are LOTS of people out here who would be more than willing to help out to make this tool better. Even if it is for more than one hour a week.
Include unit number, district, council and other identifying info in the email.
Otherwise, you or he can post in the forums with the exact details of what he has done and what he is seeing.
There is no point to bringing it to the forums. Per customer service, I was doing everything correctly and all the data was correct/matching.
They sent it up the chain and I was told they weren't going to look into it because they weren't sure what was wrong and the sync would fix it anyway.
The SUAC members have been able to solve MANY issues that BSA member care cannot. We have found workarounds for issues that member care has said there is no solution for, but because we are not notified of posts to the blogs, we have a harder time solving problems here. Give us a chance, post a description of your problem in the forums and we will try to solve the problem.
We loved it
isn't that one of the existing glitches itemized in the post, that they will be researching in the near future
It was one of the primary reasons we waited to switch to Scoutbook, and we've only switched this year as our previous provider was folding up shop. I do love many of the features of Scoutbook, but the Pack / Den Awards was a feature I really REALLY was anxious to start using.
In addition to this feature I would LOVE a Payment Log report (we can do the CSV to excel trick, but my treasurer struggles with Pivot Tables and advanced functions to get a true report).
Also where might I find a way to manage Permissions across the pack and what features are tied to which permissions? Can my treasurer, who is not a pack admin do an export of the payment log or would they need to be an admin? Do they have to have full control or just edit profile rights to update payment logs? A matrix of function to permissions would be SUPER helpful. Thank you,
Tim
Regards, Tim
Venturing support is listed on the IT Roadmap but at this time we do not have a target release date.
Scoutbook is great and user friendly. I have no doubt that this would really help.
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