Activities moved from Scoutbook to IA

Troop 2053 in NY.
Trying to get used to using IA for activities. Only one of our key 3 can access any of our members once an event is entered. The one that can is not able to access any of our new 5th grade scouts or their parents.
Please help.

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Hi, @JeffreyBrewer,

I would start by checking the following items at my.scouting.org in the Member Manager:

  1. Verify that all three of the Key 3 are correctly showing in their roles at my.scouting.org. This can also be done by the individual Key 3 members checking their own accounts and looking at “My Profile” in the left side drop-down menu. It should list their current unit-level positions. If their Key 3 position (Scoutmaster, Chartered Org Rep, Committee Chair) is not listed there, the issue is one that needs fixing with the registrar, because those individuals not showing the correct roles need to have their registration corrected.

  2. Verify that all of the new youth are correctly shown in your official roster at my.scouting.org in the Member Manager. Member Manager is only accessible to Unit Key 3 or Key 3 Delegates, so one of them will need to check to see if your new scouts are on your official roster. Again, if they’re not, that’s an issue to address with your council registrar, to see what the status on the transfer applications is. Even though the youth might have been “transferred” in Scoutbook, that doesn’t actually replace the transfer youth application being submitted to and processed by council. The same is true of new scout applications. Just adding the new youth in Scoutbook doesn’t register them with council. You may already know these things, but it’s a common enough issue that I wanted to mention them.

  3. If your unit doesn’t have any Key 3 Delegates (K3D), you might consider asking the Key 3 to designate (in the Organizational Security Manager at my.scouting) up to three other individuals in your unit that they consider sufficiently trustworthy and skilled. K3D have the ability to access things like Member Manager, Organizational Security Manager (OSM), training information, and other unit-level information at my.scouting.org. They can also access the activity logs and other things in IA2 (scoutbook.scouting.org). It’s useful for units whose Key 3 are not particularly active (more common for Chartered Org Reps, rather than the other two), or are not particularly computer savvy or have easy access to the system. It also allows delegation of the activity log functions to someone other than one of the Key 3, helping relieve some load. I believe that anyone who is designated as the Unit Advancement Coordinator in the OSM can also access the activity logs. Both Key 3 delegates and Unit Advancement Coordinators must be redesignated in OSM by the Key 3 each year when recharter hits.

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Now is the time to flush IA down the toilet into the sewer it belongs, we just need a few great scouters to want to push down on the handle. Why with stressed funds is BSA supporting multiple platforms that all do similar things? A scout is thrifty which means expediting, consolidating, and making more efficient, so the process instead of taking away of scoutbooks capability of logging hikes, camping, and conservation hours, let us put the RIP to IA and figure out how to migrate the users to scout-book. IA is the worst piece of software I have encountered in my 40+ years of computing and needs drastically to be taken offline and overhauled as it is an embarrassment to the scouting movement.

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Bravo Jeffery Brewer from Troop 2053 in NY and thank you very much from Scott Marbut Cub Scout Pack 110 Far East Council in Japan, Committee Chairman, I feel your major pain. Believe me it is not you nor your unit, it is Internet Advancement which is a very bad piece of software that was pushed way to early and underdeveloped to think about all the possibilities and ramifications of a process that was work completely in-perfectly. No matter what the professionals say to try and salvage this time waist-full deeming piece of software there is no cure on your part. The best and only option is to request the toilet handle to be lowered and flush the experiments as there is no solution, but only to consolidate and go back to scoutbook logging all activities.

YIS,

V/R

Scott

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I have to agree, but it is the OPPOSITE direction of travel. They will continue to move components over to IA and sunset items from Scoutbook due to the infastructure of Scoutbook being old and IA being current.

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I have not been able to log into IA for three days. I probably need to reboot. Do you think it has a virus or malware?

Matt.Johnson,

IA has a fundamental problem that it pulls its information from scouting.org, and controls are in place so even the Key3 can not edit their unit. IA will forever be full of errors until users can be trusted with editing data. No one will ever use IA even though BSA spends a lot of money developing it, they will instead buy software that offers features units and families want like Scoutbook and Troopmaster.

Our unit is in Japan so we are still using carbon paper in triplicate to register new scouts. One of my scouts names was misspelled, which I easily corrected in scoutbook, but when I got into IA after a week of trying I noticed the scouts name was spelled wrong. I am working in scoutbook several times a day that is how I can keep our unit current even though we will have 71% of the Pack leave this summer. The only time IA and myscouting will be accurate is the week after recharter goes through, then for our unit, it is worthless for managing scouters.

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I haven’t had any issues connecting to IA2 (scoutbook.scouting.org).

Have you tried going directly to scoutbook.scouting.org without passing through scoutbook.com or my.scouting.org first? Maybe the time/date stamp on the SSO authentication is being confused by the time difference between the servers and your locale?

When you log into my.scouting, are you still showing as one of the Unit Key 3, a Key 3 Delegate, or Unit Advancement Chair in your positions? If so, and connecting to scoutbook.scouting.org directly doesn’t cure the issue, I’d send an email to scoutbook.support@scouting.org with your details, details of the problems, and what you’ve tried to resolve the issue.

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Charley,

I can log into scout book and my.scouting.org but I can not log into IA. I am CC for my pack listed in scouting.org through 31 Dec 20 this year which is recharter for us.

I get to the login in screen of IA I put in my name and password, then click on I am not a robot and hit enter for a second I am into the site, then I am logged out due to inactivity with an error code saying the same thing. Why would I send anything to scout book? Scoutbook works fantastic for me, all my problems are with IA. I have also noticed since we were forced to use IA to log our hikes, camping, and service hours that all platforms are slower. We are out here in Japan so these platforms are crossed linked so the latency is increased as it has to cross the Pacific Ocean.

I wonder if that’s due to a time zone issue somehow. Is it an issue for your other unit Key 3, or for other Key 3 in your area?

I think the tech support folks are the same for both.

Chartered Organization Representative COR would only extreme circumstances ever get into a database. Forcing everyone to use IA just happened last week, and I don’t think anyone in my District has ever used it, nor ever needed to use it as Scoutbook is the standard and it works for us. We are a day ahead of the USA so we have learned that we have to log events in Scoutbook the following day. Calendar did not work for a long time and we finally got that resolved so the reminders would happen using local time zone. Cub Master has not yet tired to log into IA. I normally do all the book keeping in the summer as we pursue the Summertime Pack award and Outdoor Activity Award. So I have been trying to figure out IA since we were forced to use it, and I have failed everyday. Our pack will log hundreds of hours of community service this summer. We will hike every week, and we have camping scheduled as well. Now the only thing that works is the mobile app which is great for individual scouts but impossible to log 49 scouts who just completed a hike.

@ScottMarbut - the activity logs were moved to IA on May 6 as noted in a change log post. That is hardly last week.

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OK I was in a COVID-19 time warp so we did not do any activities for a while. I did not see the announcement until a couple of weeks ago and now I can not log anything, nor even log into IA. In just a short time we will start our summer program with our Pack and now we have something which does not work IA, and we had something that did work Scoutbook and I am very angry as I have spent a ton of time even just chatting on this message board.

Flush IA and flush again to make sure it is gone I going to tell every scouter that I know until it is gone or fixed.

I’m a COR, and I’m active with my units every week, so please don’t make sweeping generalizations.

Aside from that, part of my COR job for rechartering every year is making sure that the correct assignments in OSM are completed as soon as the charter is updated.

@ScottMarbut have you tried to clear the cache in your browser? If so, I suggest you submit a ticket at Service Management so they can see why you can’t get in. I checked, and I can get right into IA2.

I finally got logged in after four days. I used Internet Explorer first. Then I was able to use Chrome and I did not need to clear the cache. IA is extremely slow and still very buggy in IE. We just went on a hike and a beach cleanup how do we log the event? Previously under scoutbook I could use quick entry and easily log the entire Pack. I see no way other than log each individual scout which is a pain since we have 49 scouts in our pack.

There’s a how-to for recording group events in IA2 here:

This was one of the links in the yellow banner at the top of Scoutbook logins for a while. Some folks dismissed the banner already, so it doesn’t pop up for everyone.

If it’s a planned event, you can create them in advance:

For adding the scouts to a group event, you create the event first, then you can add the scouts one-at-a-time via a pull-down menu. I think there’s a way to add them in blocks, but I haven’t used it enough to get a feel for it. The feature debuted after we were in social distancing, or close enough that it hasn’t made sense to create a lot of group events for us. I understand that scouts & parents who use the Scouting app can add themselves/their scouts to group events created by the unit leaders from the app. That might allow for reducing overall workload for the person logging. However, one of the adult leaders (Key 3, K3D) would have to approve each scout who added themselves (or was added by a parent). I think it would be easier to just add the scouts myself.

Charley,

My screen in IA is nothing like the links you posted. YES I am CC of Pack 110 FEC and I can see my name listed as such in my,scouting.org Organizational Security Manager. The work load would not be an issue if I did not spend all week messing with IA, I could have been done in a few minutes using Scoutbook

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@ScottMarbut I recommend that you start on the Roster page in IA 2.0, then:

  1. Check the filter on the right side so that it Show Youths and Adults (if you want to include Adults).
  2. Check the page setting at the bottom right, so that you can select more individuals at one time.
  3. Select the individuals.
  4. Click on Record Progress.
  5. Select Service Hours, Campouts, or Hike.
  6. Select date using calendar or select Today.
  7. Create New Activity.
  8. You only need to fill in the required fields (with asterisks).
  9. There is a Basic tab at the bottom when everybody has the same basic information. Or you can use the Advanced tab when different individuals have different hours / nights / miles, etc.

Jennifer all I can do is run reports. I have been trying to log things for a while. Last night we did a beach clean up and a hike. Maybe I should just go to JTE Service Hours reporting site and just skip IA until you folks can fix it.

Our Pack is doing an event every week through the summer and I just posted all those to the Scoutbook calendar so I can send reminders to the parents and take attendance. Now I have to add all the events again in IA before I can log the service hours?