Feature request

First, I have been really happy with the features, stability, speed and integrations with BSA and Scoutbook. Thank you for all the handwork! Some features that I know people are looking for would be:

  • Photos & Video Storage - It would be great to have a way to upload, sort (folders), categories, share and edit event pictures and videos.

  • Pack/Troop Website Hosting - There are dozens of sites on the internets that are offering services (free and fee based) for website hosting. ScoutLander is one as an example. However, support is nonexistent and there is no integration or synchronization with BSA. It would be amazing to have a one stop shop for communication with new and existing scouts and families.

Are either of these features on you radar?

Thanks!

Chris
Pack 439

Chris,

Both of these have been previously requested. I doubt we will ever see the BSA implement either. Both require significant amounts of cloud storage which, when you don’t own the data center, can be very expensive. Scoutbook and many other BSA systems are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the many free options available, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Microsoft Onedrive, etc. we recommend using one of these services for your unit.

@ChristopherSmall - as someone who works in a data center for a large company, a privately owned data center at that what you are looking for will come at a major cost. You would need the primary then failover locations and since the space is rented the cost would be significantly higher. An additional consideration would be long term storage expansion needs… as in how much do we start with then how much more to we see as organic growth and need beyond that. This is not really that simple if you want to do it properly.

Here’s a ZDnet link to some cloud services to consider. Any of them can provide enough storage for most units at a pretty marginal cost – especially if you consider that some of them are free for users that already subscribe to other services (like Amazon and Microsoft).

I think it would be more appropriate to manage this at the unit level - as a Troop Committee Chair, I don’t want to be dependent on BSA national for the storage of this kind of material. National might consider negotiating an opportunity for units to save money on this (affinity program, maybe), but shouldn’t be involved in the management of it.

It would be nice even to just have blank URL spots on the unit page in Scoutbook so that Scoutbook would be the only spot to know and then see a “Troop Webpage” like and a “Troop Photos Page” links. Then what ever service a unit uses would be very very weekly integrated.

A great example of the integration is the ical feed that can be integrated into a webpage. So, that is cool and doesn’t require the BSA to be in the webpage business.

In Sea Scouts, we’re transitioning nationwide to a Google platform for unit storage and programming. Google Classroom has been a big hit, and they offer a meager free website but also plenty of storage of images on google drive. Check it out.

We also find the speech-to-text capabilities of Google Meet to be very good. I wouldn’t recommend it for a business, but it seems to work fine for our application here.

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