[sims] Is there a way to prevent cover from appearing on the timeline too far in advance?

[ee31ag]

Hi,

 

With timeline on the new SIMS homepage, teachers seem to have suddenly discovered how to look into the future and see what cover they have coming up. This is causing our Cover Manager more grief than is necessary as teachers are asking a lot of questions about cover arrangements which are only tentative the moment!

 

I don't know much about how Cover works in SIMS but we were wondering if it was possible to avoid cover appearing in the timeline until it was "confirmed" in some way? I suspect the answer is 'no' and we'll have to resort to putting up a notice dissuading teachers from looking into the future with the timeline but would appreciate any suggestions or thoughts.

 

Thanks in advance!

[vikpaw]

Unfortunately not, if you've booked it and saved it, then it's done and will be available.

What you can do is book absences in, but not actually cover them until a bit later. You lose the benefit of doing it early, but will solve the problem to a degree. There's not much benefit in doing it too early, as the people used could be off themselves.

It's a pain to sort, but if you had a test server you could use that to do tentative arrangements and see whether things are workable and whether or not outside cover is required.

We publish cover to the intranet, so if you could encourage people to check that, you can only publish as far ahead as you want them to see. However, now they know they can get it on the timeline then you probably won't be able to stop them.

What you need is someone senior who line manages the cover organiser to back them up and set up a policy that cover can't be queried more than a week early, or something like that, or just that it can't be queried.

[ee31ag]

Thank you for the suggestions.... I think we'll go with the easiest option: telling people not to get too anxious about future anything more than a day or two ahead!!