Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
As a Unit Admin I would like the ability to add.”labels” or “annotations” to individuals, so that I can use this annotation/label to generate reports for that Sub-Group/Sub-Unit/Demographic, or email only those individuals in just that group. Or send calendar invites just to that group.
An example label that would be Unit Admin creatable less than 128 charaters but allowing multiple per individual might be , “PLC”, so that an one tagged with PLC could be added to meeting invite, those that have mandate to attend the PLC are present, etc.
I doubt this will be entertained by Scouting America IT as it seems like a limited use to power users.
There is an item in the backlog for Scoutbook Plus messaging to be able to create custom groups so you could create a PLC group for messaging. I can ask that the groups be extended to calendar invites as well.
Does the backlog item contemplate the ability for those groups to be “shared”, @edavignon, in the sense that if one user defines the group, then others can use the same definition of the group for email/calendar/etc? That’s the main application I can see (e.g.“The PLC”, “All of the PLs and APLs”, “All of the OA arrowmen in the unit”, etc), in that everyone will want the same definition for those types of groups. I can also see individuals wanting to create less general-purpose groups that might not need to be shared.
Fair enough. I wasn’t sure you could say even if you knew. If you could add it as a feature request to the backlog item for consideration, that would be great. I can see it having the same level of value as the “shared reports” did when those were introduced. Right now, it’s all shuffling of mailing groups among scouters using the extension, which can be a clunky and error-prone procedure even for one scouter who uses more than one machine. Not that I would have any personal experience with such errors, of course.
Could this be achieved by having the Scouts in multiple patrols? It would make the normal roster view “messy”, but some of it could be done with that. I had tried to do this for OA membership with mixed results. That way the “OA” patrol, separate from a scout’s normal patrol, could have a calendar.
Does your troop use TWH? It has this feature, called Dynamic Subgroups. We have probably 40 - 1 per patrol, all Greenbar, all parents of Boy or Girl, all ASM, all SM, all Patrol Advisors, all Committee, etc, and if the position tags are kept up to date in TWH, it does work well. The email distro addresses are formatted like: adults.troop123, asms.troop123 etc, bear.troop123 @twh.email
