We’ve been building! In addition to the revision to the tags section, we’ve included two more features that will help you stay connected with your work.

Automatic reminders once your program has completed

This is a small change, but hopefully it will make it easier to keep your programs up to date with the latest information. Now, when your program ends, we’ll send you an email reminder so that you can attach any additional files, or fill in missing information such as attendance or assessment data.

Reports

Reports were always something that we have been wanting to put into the system. We wanted to make sure we were building something that was based on how people actually used their data. We’re proud to let you know that our first version of program reports is now available on the system. If you are a group administrator, you will see a new button in the sidebar of your group page.

Before using the ProgDB, you would create reports of your programming data by manually creating spreadsheets.  After putting your staff on the ProgDB, you could automatically export these spreadsheets with instantly up-to-date programming data.  Now, you can instantly see reports of the most commonly requested data without any exporting or spreadsheets.

Conversations during the testing period and current users advised these initial reports that are available now.  Specifically, we have created interactive graphs and tables with live data showing the information that our groups were most interested in. You can see totals by academic term, by groups, people, programing form and months.  Now, instead of waiting until the end of the month or quarter to see summary programming numbers, you can see your current numbers anytime.

As always, you can still get to all of your data by exporting it to a spreadsheet, but we wanted to create visual tools that will make it a little easier to see what is going on. Since this is the first version, we expect to see a number of iterations and improvements to reports over the next few months.

Both of these features were requests from groups who are using the ProgDB. Let us know what you think and share how you use your data – it will help the ProgDB become something that you love using.  What are you waiting for – its okay to play and have fun with your numbers!

Tags: new features, notifications, reports

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under ProgDB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.