News and Blog
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Remember how I discussed lookup windows last week and how they are like “little” lists. (See, I told you I would remember. I wrote a note!) Well, this week I am going to take that conversation one step further and talk about how easy it is to manage lists in Escape Online. Almost every activity in Escape Online is set up as an SLF (search, list, form). This helps build the perfect list, displaying just enough information so you can make a decision as to whether or not you want to view the record. You can also sort the list by any column and move columns around. |
Filtering a list works exactly the same as how I described last week with lookup windows, but, obviously, an activity list is going to have a lot more columns than a lookup window, so you may want to define multiple sorts. Of course, lists in Escape Online come with default sorts (e.g., payments are sorted by Pay To Name, then Invoice Number), but you might want a different sort. Consequently, we give you full control of sorting the list.
This works backwards and forwards too. Let me explain. Say you defined five sorts, but you don't like sort number four. All you would have to do is Ctrl+click on sort number three and then redefine four and five.
Now that you have your list sorted the way you want, what about changing the order of the columns. No problem. You can configure the list to fit your needs.
And, of course, you can export the list to Excel for even more manipulation.
One final note about moving around on a list, especially the crazy-good ones like Employees which has 35 columns: You can use your arrow keys to scroll right/left, up/down on the list. Just hold down the shift key and use the directional arrows to scroll through the list.
Plus, like I mentioned last week, you can filter the list, too. For example, you can type E to filter the list by employees' whose last name begins with E. (Note, you can only filter on the primary sort.)
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
MOVING COLUMNSI think this is an awesome tool... the only down side I have is that it doesn't stay that way if you have to get out of the screen and then return... I would like to have the ability to "set" the display of information and tag it as my favorite and have the system remember it until I need to edit it... This might take too much memory up on the system but being a user I ask for alot!!!! Thanks for all you do... Posted: Bambi Weinberg-Tuttle, Sonoma County Office of Education. |
RESPONSEBambi, we have a "New Client Wish List" on our intranet. This is where we keep track of ideas for client improvements. And, as you would guess, there is an item on the list that "wishes" for saving column location and sorts. (Guess who put it there? Me!) I have added your name to the item to acknowledge and track your consideration. Thanks so much for your comment. Posted: Leslie Bailey, Escape Technology. |
The Report Task Force's efforts continue to be very successful, and from what we hear, end users are quite appreciative. We thought we would share some of the actual statistical reports we use to gauge our progress in resolving Crystal report errors. Every Monday, we gather the stats from the preceding week from several customers, as you will see below. Most of our reports are organized by “week of the year” which makes it easy for us to compare a week at a time.
Take a look at this report which is for week 20 which was May 10-16th. Modoc COE experienced seven unresolved Crystal errors, which was a bit more than 1% of their report count. Sierra COE had two unresolved Crystal errors, for an almost 2% error rate. All other customers were below 1%, and system wide the error rate was 0.002 or two-tenths of one percent. Just for the record, PCOE is Placer COE and SCOE is Sonoma COE.
Below is week 21 which was last week, May 17-23. Here the unresolved error rate across all customers was lowered to about one-tenth of one percent. Only 23 errors out of over 20,000 reports! The average response times are great – less than four seconds for most customers. Six customers experienced zero errors! Users are generating nearly a quarter million pages of reports per week. If they were printing all of these, these two weeks would have consumed 915 reams of paper. But of course since most reports are just viewed on the screen, they don’t have to use all that paper.
We are continuing to whittle down the few remaining reports that take longer than two minutes to run, and to correct the “file error” ones which are not really errors, but scenarios where the user’s filter data produced no report data (these “non-errors” are not included above).
We are very excited that so many individual users are running so many reports, and that they run so quickly.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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My life is run by the notes I write to remind myself of what I need to do. I have a To Do list on my desk. I have a notepad on my fridge where I write down grocery items as I run out. I have a notebook in my purse. The notes go on and on and on. That is because I process so much information, every single day, I cannot expect my brain to store it all in long term memory. In fact, I don’t want to commit those things to memory; I want my brain to be focused on the task at hand, not something in the future. Ergo, I write notes and feel free to forget. |
On that account, you can imagine how boggled my mind gets from all of the school business codes (bargaining units, components, journal entry types, statuses, etc., etc., etc.). I cannot imagine having to remember them all. Don’t get me wrong. Codes are great because they promote uniformity and speed data entry and validation. However, the down side is that remembering all those codes would require too many notebooks for a person like me.
That is why I love lookup windows so much. Lookup windows are used throughout Escape Online, listing all of the codes possible for that field and your user id. For example, the location lookup only shows locations to which you have access; the job class lookup only shows classes appropriate for the category you have already selected. You don’t have to remember a darn thing, except F4 to show the lookup window (and you don’t even have to remember that, just click on the arrow).
Another cool thing about lookups is that they are just like any other list in Escape Online: You can sort and filter the list, page up/down, and scroll using the arrow keys.
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The lookup shown on the left is pretty generic, but you get the picture. Other lookups are more complex. To see how one really works, let’s take a look at the Addon lookup in the Additional Pay activity and observe the features. The Addon lookup for this activity is basically like other lookups, but it contains special business logic that sorts the lookup: addons that are defined in the employee’s payroll setup are listed alphabetically at the top of the window, then all other addons are listed alphabetically.
Pretty cool, huh? |
Once I am in the lookup, though, the features are the same. I can scroll to the code I want, or I can customize it for my needs. First, I can change the sort. Notice the arrow at the top of the first column. If I click on it, the sort will reverse. If I click on another column heading (like code), Escape Online will sort by that column.
See how it is now sorted by code, and notice how the arrow lets you know if the sort is ascending or descending.
I can also filter the list to see only those addon codes that begin with the letters CE. I just type CE and Escape Online does the rest. (Note, you can only filter on the column that is sorted currently.)
To return to the full list of addons, I just press Ctrl+F.
Of course, I could also filter before I ever bring up the list. (In fact, some lookups require this – like vendors – for obvious reasons.) For example, instead of typing CE after I am in lookup, I could type it in the field and then press F4 to get the lookup. Now I am focused on just those addons that start with CE. For you speed demons out there, entering filter information before you get the lookup is a few milliseconds faster. The only downside is that you cannot revert to the full list if you have filtered from the field.
Finally, you can also move columns around, but I will say more about that next week when we discuss customizing lists! (No worries, I have it written down on my To Do list so I won’t forget.)
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
As we mentioned in the RTF news item of May 14th, many of the issues are now behind us, and some of our group is focusing on those reports that take more than two minutes to run.
Running statistics for the past couple of weeks, we noticed that ReqPay12 (which is a listing of checks for any given set of filter parameters, along with a summary by fund) had several runs at a Placer district that took around 27 minutes to complete.
As you can see, the Board Report (ReqPay12) is not a complex report.
It certainly shouldn't take 27 minutes to complete.
Because of the growing list of analytics reports we have built, we could easily see that this report was not having performance problems at our other customers. And it wasn't even having issues at the other Placer districts, just the one. For the period 3/1/09 through 5/8/09 there were 196 runs of this report. All customers are using it. Most of the report runs completed in 1 to 5 seconds.
We can monitor the response time of all of our customers, report by report.
If we see anything unusual, we can research the situation.
We can see all of the report request details in our statistical tables. Most of the users were running this report for a week or two at a time. The one user that was experiencing the 20+ minute report was running the report for the entire year to date. She did this three times during our sampling period.
If we do see something unusual, we can take a close look, user by user.
(User names were scrambled for this graphic.)
We duplicated the result with our in-house PCOE database. We ruled out any problem with the SQL data or indexes. So that left the Crystal report as the culprit. However this time it wasn't the fault of Crystal, but rather the SQL data gathering that we had written, and is under our control. (Note that this report was developed in 2005 and hadn't really been touched since then). We were asking SQL to join more data than we needed to.
So one of our report developers re-coded the SQL portion of the report to use our current coding standards. To do the re-coding, and then the verification that the report was accurately gathering the proper data, took just over half a day.
And what was the performance like now - for the same 7/1/08 to today set of data, that had been taking 27 minutes? NINE seconds.
I'm happy that only one user experienced this issue. But in time, no doubt many other users would have asked for an entire year for this report, and they would have not been happy with the performance. So we have done some great work here, with a now very high performing report, and a happy user. One more accomplishment by Escape's RTF.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Last week, I talked to you about tool tips and how Escape Online displays all kinds of great information when you hover over stop signs, exclamation marks, activities, columns, you name it. Well, there is one important source of information that I forgot to mention: the Status bar, located in the lower left corner of your screen. Check it out. |
If you have a list, Escape Online always lets you know how many records are on the list,
and if it is still loading (more available).
If you are running a report, Escape Online gives you updates
as to where you are in the process.
If someone else has a record open, keeping you from editing,
Escape Online displays the user name.
Some of our forms do not load records until you open that tab (like assignments),
Escape Online lets you know that it is loading data.
Those are just a few examples, but you get the picture: we write lots of messages to the status bar. So, if you ever find yourself wondering what is going on with your report or process or why you cannot edit a record, look down and to the left. Escape Online gives you the information you need to do your job.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
For this blog post about the Report Task Force (RTF) we are going to try something new. We are going to report the statistics and results for an entire month, along with our conclusions. The Time FrameActually, it is more than one month. We wanted all the weeks that encompass April 2009, so the actual date range is March 30-May 1. That is 25 business days. |
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Two of our smaller counties were not included in the sampling; we just were not collecting report statistics from them yet. The customers in the sampling are:
Let it be known that the time frame being sampled is not the most flattering for results. During this time, a couple organizations did not yet have the Report Service that automatically “retries” Crystal Errors (this enhanced report service is able to overcome about 80% of Crystal errors). Also, only a few of the organizations have report services that track statistics for “snapshot reports,” thus the count of reports is actually smaller than reality. One of our customers accidentally re-installed an old version of the most often used report (Fiscal03) which produced very long run times until this was noticed and corrected. Lastly, we were installing updated reports throughout the period: we did not pick just a small time frame at the end that would be the most beneficial to the numbers.
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What the users accomplished with Escape Online 5 reporting
Those are some pretty staggering numbers, especially considering the sample limitations mentioned above. Across our sample organizations, that is one report every 6.8 seconds. Over 2,500 reports are being run per day. 844,976 pages, if printed on paper, would be 169 cases of paper! If stacked one on top of the other, this stack of paper cases would be as tall as a 17 story building. But of course our users only need to print those pages they want to. They first always view the reports on screen in a convenient and helpful viewer. The longest single report was 15,499 pages. |
Despite the fact that we are still optimizing reports every day, the performance of our reporting system is really pretty amazing. Check out this table:
| Time Elapsed (in seconds) |
Number of Reports |
Percent of Reports |
| 0 - 10 | 61,343 | 93.32% | 10 - 20 | 1,391 | 2.12% |
| 20 - 30 | 507 | 0.77% |
| 30 - 60 | 979 | 1.49% |
| 60 - 120 | 1,027 | 1.56% |
| 120+ | 490 | 0.75% |
| Totals | 65,737 | 100.00% |
So over 93% of all reports are finishing in less than 10 seconds! Over 95% of reports, or 62,734 of the 65,737 finish in less than 20 seconds. One of the RTF goals is to have all reports complete in two minutes or less. So we are still working on the reports that fall into this category.
The number one focus of the RTF was to deal with the fact that Crystal ends up believing there is an error in reports about 10% of the time, on average. This varied from customer to customer, for reasons unknown to us. What we found was by “retrying” the same exact report request, in the service on behalf of the users, the reports succeed over 99% of the time.
The actual number of errors that were not resolved by retrying was 898. That’s .013 of reports run. Several hundred of these are actually not errors; they are reports that do not correctly handle the condition where a user has utilized filters which produce no data. So the real number is less than 1%. And then keep in mind the sample period has the limitations as described above.
If we were to report on our large counties for just the last two weeks of the sample period, the error rate is less than .005.
Now that we have successfully dealt with nearly all the Crystal error issues, there remain a few other issues for us to resolve. We have a goal of having nearly all reports complete in less than two minutes. As you can see above, less than 1% of reports do take more than two minutes, but we still have our goal.
There are also some reports that don’t handle the condition of “no data found” because of the filters supplied by the user. An error is generated, when what we really need is a suitable reply.
Also, now that we are looking at so few errors, we are zeroing in on some anomalous situations. For example, this week we saw where a user had requested a report with a check number range of 516814339 through 501681360. The user was really looking for a report with 21 checks. But because of a typo (the second digit), the report got confused and ended up running for 26 minutes. Over time we plan to add “reasonableness checks” into the report requests to help users when they make typos like this.
There are some Crystal errors (like out of license errors) that just go away entirely in the .Net 3.5 platform system, because the embedded Crystal version is 3 revs newer.
We have learned how powerful it is to put ourselves in the place of our users. The realization that for any given report, it might fail 10+% of the time was pretty disturbing. We are relieved, as are customers, to no longer have this frustration. Being proactive has been a good lesson for us. We have a good team in RTF, and they have really enjoyed solving these issues for end users. In the near future, there will be another similar effort. But I will leave that story for another day!
We thank our users for their patience while we dealt with the Crystal Reports error situation, as well as correcting those issues in the reports that we do have control over. Like all things Escape, we will keep making it better and better, and appreciate working with each of you.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
The Sonoma implementation train keeps rolling along! I’m happy to announce that the “third finance wave” went live on the Escape Online 5 Finance module on May 1. The districts in this F3 (Finance Phase 3) group are:
This brings us to a total of 36 districts now live on the Escape Online 5 Finance module in Sonoma County. The last group, F4, consisting of 23 districts, is scheduled to go live June 1st.
Of course there will be no rest period as the team will immediately shift focus to the HR/Payroll implementation, which will happen in three phases, going live on January 1 (12 districts), March 1 (20 districts), and May 1, 2010 (the last 20 districts). (Note, seven of the charter schools and others will be live on finance only.)
Congratulations to this latest group of districts converting to Escape Online 5, as well as the Sonoma COE implementation team.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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Have you ever been on a list and wondered what the data in the column represented? Like when you are on the Vendor Requisition list, what does the Loc column represent? Is it the delivery location, or is it the order site? You could always open up one of the requisitions to find out. Or, you could use Escape Online’s handy dandy tool tip. Just roll your mouse over the column heading and Escape Online will display some information about the column. Check it out. |
The same is true for search pages. Let’s use the Receive PO Items search as an example. There is a field called Reference Number. Is it the requisition number, or is it the PO number? Actually, you can enter either, allowing you to receive items quickly without having to know both numbers. But, how do you know that you can enter either? You can look at the tool tip!
At the bottom of every search page field list, there is a tool tip that explains what entries are accepted in the field that is highlighted.
But, what about that little red stop sign in the screen capture above. Did you notice that? Does Escape Online have a tool tip for that? Why, yes it does. If you see a red stop sign (error or required field), a yellow exclamation mark (warning), or a padlock (read-only), you can hover over it and get more information. Just like this.
But that’s not all.
There is another handy dandy tooltip. It is on the Activity Tree. If you roll over the name of the module, Escape Online will display your role. If you have user-based permissions for an activity (like Approve Requisitions), you can roll over that activity to see the specified role.
Obviously, your mouse cannot roll over two places at once, but for demonstration purposes, the screen capture below shows the module and an activity both displaying the roles. It can be very helpful to system managers and support representatives when they are trying to determine access issues.
And, of course, there are How-Tos and online user guides and video tutorials and excellent customer service by email or phone.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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We’ve all seen the articles in the blogosphere about how multitasking is bad. The blogs say that you shouldn’t switch between tasks; instead, you should focus on one thing at a time. That sounds good on a blog, but what about on the job? As is so often the case in life, there is a middle ground. Experts say that what you need to do is focus your multitasking not stop it. Let’s use Tom Cruise in Top Gun as an example. He is multitasking; he is focused. His instrument panel requires him to consider multiple options, but all these mini-tasks are part of a single, larger, focused task: flying the plane. The same is true whether you are a fighter pilot or a budget user. You can open multiple windows, multitask, and be focused and productive. You can fly the plane. |
Escape Online helps you by providing a drop-down menu of all your open activities. Take a look at what I had open during the Budget tutorial:
Obviously, I am multitasking, but it is focused. I only have activities open that have to do with budget. Escape Online automatically sorts the list for me by module, by org vs. org-all. Everything I need is on my instrument panel. Escape even displays a thumbnail of the activity that I have highlighted on the menu to help me select which activity I want to go to. I am the Top Gun of budget!
It is all up to me and my process. I can use this drop-down menu – just press Alt+Enter to display or use my mouse – or I can use my Alt-arrow keys to scroll through the activities without displaying the menu. Take that Iceman!
Seriously, I understand why we should not multitask when the activities are not similar – like balancing a budget, ordering paper supplies, and discussing next week’s agenda for a meeting simultaneously. However, when you have a software package like Escape Online that helps you stay focused on the task at hand, multitasking is the best way to make sure the job gets done.
Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.
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