Printable View
I've just been asked to find some ways of making the information in SIMS more accessable (i.e. for those who find looking at home panel graphs too complicated).
Is there a way to run a report off where I have filtered the date of the events to "yesterday"? When I look at the options I only seems to be able to specifiy specific dates or date ranges, this is a problem for the hard of clicking.
Any suggestions?
I don't see how a home page graph is too complex. if that is too hard for them, how is a sheet of data gonna be any better?
You don't get a yesterday option in a report like you can in a homepage panel.
What you can do is programmatically send a date in, to do this make your report, based on a date. Then use commandreporter to schedule it, and pass in a params file to put in the date. It's not pretty.
The other easier option is to schedule your report to run, for today as current day by default, if that's possible. Then schedule that report. You can push it out to staff, but they will still have to click on it and look at the spreadsheet or whatever it produces. This will be on their homepage. None of these options seem easier than using the panel designed to do just what you want, that they seem to not like. :s
Don't go there.. Just dont. Come work here and you'll see how hard it is to convince people :( Apparently looking at two/three graphs is tricky...
What they want is a single page report that will include all the details of yesterdays behaviour and achievements and possibly absenteeism for their house for "yesterday".
Might look into report scheduling...
Report scheduling is really powerful.
Do you think you can click the calendar button on their homepage panel, and tell them that a report for yesterday is currently not possible, but you have enabled a slick new report for Today, which if they view at the end of the day will give them exactly the summary they need.... ;)
Are you working in a secondary school? you can configure homepages just for head of house that will pick up their pastoral role from pastoral structure, so they only see their house details.
If you are in an independent school, try it as well!
Scheduled reports are great but guess where they pick up the reminder from - the home page!!
Vegetarian but dont hold it against me!
Just had a quick talk with our DH and pointed out what you can do with the home page (He's new and hasn't used SIMS). His response was... "That's good and it shows what they need, perhaps our Housemasters need some training on it" Had to resist the facct they had already had 2 INSETS and most of them had some 1 on 1 help as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by vikpaw
*sigh"
Still, result with the Deputy Head, which is a good thing.
:cheer2:Quote:
Originally Posted by Stuart_C
That's fab news @Stuart_C - Quite often, it's best to let senior leadership push the need for change, or in this case, no change. Teachers will always resist, especially when being told what to do or how to do something by the 'data manager'. You just have to grin and bear the training issue, but now they have been told from the top what they must do, you can remind them how to do it. It's your job to facilitate, not aggravate, but they might not always see it that way. Now is a good time to give them the option of scheduled reports too, so you are also offering them something extra, and an alternative. Do some testing, just bear in mind, having too many reports running at the same time (even overnight) will cause a slight slowdown.