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Forum thread: Report
| Irfan Ally 16 April 2013 18:13 |
Component: (stearsoft.co.uk/STEARsoft web interface/Palm-device) STEARsoft version: Support request: Hi I have just set this up for my school. We have the 200 student licence I'm test running it but need help. I have created a power teacher acc for the office principal. I wanted to know if he wanted to view the attendance or wanted to extract a report of the attendence of the whole school how would he? D I need to add all students on his acc as a class? Please help this is one thing I can't get my head round. Thanks Irfan Ally |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 16 April 2013 20:44 |
Hi Irfan, He doesn't need any students of his own. He goes to 'All School Data' (link at the bottom of the main page when he's logged in). In the 'All School Data' area there are tabs at the top. The 'Attendance' tab lists all attendance for the school with links to detailed sheets (note that during a holiday or weekend, nothing will show here). The 'Counters' tab allows him to produce various attendance reports for the whole school. I wonder if the following subtle detail is causing confusion: The 'All school Data' area only shows data for classes that have been marked 'Priority'. The idea is to mark your morning and afternoon official attendance classes as priority and leave lessons in between as normal; this stops a flood of lesson by lesson attendance data confusing your statistics. To mark a class as priority, either: go to the class attendance sheet, then go to the 'Class Details' tab where a check-box lets you select this or: in the administrator section go to the 'Edit Class accessibility tags' screen where you can quickly identify your priority classes en-mass. I hope this solves any mystery, but please do post back again if not. Yours, Marcus |
| Irfan Ally 17 April 2013 17:13 |
Hi, Marcus thanks for your prompt reply. Problem solved. Sorry didn't know I had to mark the classes as priority. It's all working now. Just one more question. I wanted to create a guest/cover teacher account which has all the different classes in. As we have a spare ipad we keep for cover teachers so if we set the acc on their then which ever cover teacher comes for any subject they have access to register. Is this possible ? And if so, will it sync on the actual teachers acc to show register done and view register? . Sorry for trouble. Thanks Irfan |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 17 April 2013 18:01 |
Hi Irfan, Glad to hear first problem solved. Cover is not so straight-forward: Unfortunately the iOS App doesn't manage cover, and the method you describe won't get round that. There are a few other options though. They revolve around using the standard web interface (which can be done from an iPad of course). Either: - The person doing cover can be given a power-teacher login. They can then use the 'All school Data' area to access any attendance sheet and take the register. Or - The person being covered can give permission for a specific person/account to have access to take their register. The cover person again accesses through the All School Data attendance screen. - Or the covering person could use the login details of the person they're covering - Or take the register on paper for the office to then transfer (although ugly in principle, for occasional cover this is good in practice) - a paper option is kind of needed waiting as backup should there be a power network failure anyway. Improving the cover situation is on my todo list, so if you have any suggestions for a better way you'd like this to work, please do pass them on to throw into the development 'pot'. Yours, Marcus |
| Irfan Ally 18 April 2013 17:23 |
Hi Marcus, Thanks for the reply. Sorry about this but have realised an issue: I have from the admin page- data control/locks section prevented teachers to make any changes to their class. So that all changes can only happen from the office. However from the app on ipad it's allowing the teachers to make changes as in adding students, make changes to student details. Thanks |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 18 April 2013 21:29 |
Dear Irfan, Thank you for your post. Thank you also for discovering and reporting this issue. I'm sorry for this irritation (to put it mildly). The issue you have discovered is not intended, is not something I was aware of until your post, and is something I would like to fix as a priority. The iPad prevents users correctly when the ODBC method is used, but the central-database method was added more recently, and this aspect has been overlooked when ODBC is not in use. I will look into this in more detail over the next few days and then give you an idea of how quickly you can expect a fix/resolution. I'm hoping it won't be longer than a couple of weeks. Thank you again for reporting this and sorry once again. Yours, Marcus |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 21 April 2013 17:24 |
Hi Irfan, Resolving this issue appears to be fairly straight-forward and safe so I'm hoping to have an update that fixes the issue in the App store within a week from now. I will keep you posted. Yours, Marcus |
| Irfan Ally 23 April 2013 18:25 |
Hi Marcus, Sorry been away for few days. Thanks for your reply and prompt action in looking into this. Looking forward for the fix and thanks for all your help much appreciated. Just wanted to know is it possible in near future to be able to also add an option from the admin acc to disable to delete all data from ipad? I'm really sorry to keep troubling you Marcus Thanks |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 24 April 2013 09:45 |
Hi Irfan, The update is now in the App store. I hope it resolves the issue. Note that it is not yet in the Lite version (just in the paid version). It will be updated in the Lite version in due course, but not immediately. Regarding disabling the delete all data, I think I just need to reassure you of its functionality: Doing delete all data is like a reset so that you can start again (perhaps with a different user or different school or abandoning the school system all together) so in part it would not be good to prevent this feature as it could mean people could get in a mess with no means of resetting. The reassurance to give you is that doing a 'delete all' will not (and can not) delete the data on the STEARsoft server. More than that, once you've deleted the data like this on your iPad you can no longer synchronise, except to re-initialise synchronisation (with a one direction sync) to copy all data from the STEARsoft server back onto the iPad (which is the quick way to get back to where you were before doing a 'delete all'). I wonder if this means there is no longer a concern? Or is there something more subtle here? I'd be interested to hear. However, one issue I can foresee you perhaps being uncomfortable about is that whilst you can stop people editing a class, you can't stop them deleting it. However, it is worth knowing here that users cannot delete a 'priority' class (which is usually set up to have the critical data) - and if you stop people editing a class, they can't change it to non-priority, preventing a back-way to delete the class. If you see the need for improvement here then please do say. Finally, please don't worry about troubling me. It is good to get feedback to help improve STEARsoft. So thank you for taking the time to post here, and apologies again for the issue which ideally wouldn't have happened in the first place. Yours, Marcus |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 24 April 2013 09:59 |
Irfan, A further thought... With thinking of security of data (prevention of accidental deletion etc.) I thought it worth mentioning 3 things: 1) I'd recommend putting in place an automated regular backup - the biggest vulnerability is if the pc the server runs on catches fire or has a hard-disk failure, or gets stolen etc. The user-guide in the web interface describes where to find the data which you can then backup with a third-party utility (it's just copying all files from a particular directory). 2) For short-term security of data, you can enable the 'Emergency uploads' feature, which stores 'todays' data remotely on the stearsoft.co.uk servers in an encrypted form. 3) In 'log files' you can enable 'attendance changes logging' which would enable you to determine how data became lost and which user account did it - as well as being able to trace any other odd happenings. This is quite processor and hard-disk intensive as it records in detail every individual change, producing some very large log files, so if responsiveness suffers as a result of enabling this you may need to consider upgrading hardware (or managing without this feature). I would expect it would be fine with a school your size though. Marcus |
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