Bill_W
That isn’t the way things are moving. See the posts from Scoutbook Advisory Council. The new activity logs will ONLY be in Internet Advancement 2.0. Based on remarks within this thread, Scoutbook is going away, everyone will me moved to Internet Advancement 2.0. What you are saying is what we were lead to believe, not what is happening.
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@DonovanMcNeil any chance it is being considered to give Den leaders the rights to view and approve logs in IA2? With large Packs such as ours, we make extensive use of Den Leader entry to save work on only one or two people with access (as might be the case with IA2 security and entry - yes there are K3D, but if a unit has a technologically challenged Cubmaster and CC, it can be difficult to get a K3D added that is tech-savvy and can help).
Fair point. As I apparently said at the time, it should really be better publicized. The fact that @edavignon had to get permission from BSA-IT to share it in a limited forum, rather than BSA IT (or whomever directly handles publicizing the strategic plan) making it public still seems like poor practice at best.
Keeping the folks who are trying to plan in the dark about the strategic plan when it impacts what they are planning is not a strategy for success. For example, our district has been pushing Scoutbook for units, based on what they understood about Scoutbook. I’m curious whether anyone in our district (or perhaps even in our council) leadership would know if I asked them whether Scoutbook or IA2 is the flagship product and which one is planned for long-term development. Maybe I’m just out of touch.
I actually think that, if IA2 is the flagship product, and the features are being re-implemented there, at the very least people who are asking for features to be added to Scoutbook should be aware that the most likely new home of any such feature (if it is ever selected for implementation) is actually IA2, not Scoutbook.
It will be interesting to see if everything that was entered in Scoutbook will make it’s way into the new logs. That doesn’t seem to be the history of development on here. But where will the privileges to enter/approve events come from, will a person that has “Troop admin” privs within Scoutbook be able to do things within IA2? Will there be totally separate granting of privileges going on? Hopefully you aren’t planning on only allowing Key 3 to do this. During the video I saw them talk about leaders, but no definition of what a leader would be, all people classified as a leader within a troop, only key 3, etc. Will the calendar within the Activities program and Scoutbook calendar be linked in anyway? (I highly doubt it now or ever in the future, based on Scoutbook going away.) Will all the features that are currently in Scoutbook calendar already be in IA2 Activity Calendar? If not, now every activity will now have to be entered twice. What about the current attendance record for Troop meetings, etc. will all of that be transitioned?
no activities are separate from current SB Calendar - SB has a Calendar - IA has this log entry
In testing all SB Logs made it to Activities
K3, K3+3, and Unit Advancement chair at launch will have access to enter new Logs or approve logs. Expanding that is being worked on
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K3, K3+3 and Unit Advancement chair is obviously designed by someone that doesn’t know how things operate in busy troops. I don’t want to become a K3+3 within my.scouting. There should be no reason an ASM should have that priv. Your average advancement chair is a member of the committee and doesn’t tend to go on activities. Most SM and CC are way to busy to deal with data entry, let alone a COR. So data entry for activities would either fall on an ASM that goes on the events, a secretary or an activities chairman.
So now our troop will have two options, either make me (or say an activities chair from the committee) a key 3+3, have the Scoutmaster enter all the information for the activities, or stop tracking the activities. Based on the fact that there was no tracking of activities outside the actual handbooks before I started entering them in Scoutbook, I know which way it will probably go.
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@JamesSoltysiak: From what I understand the logs are used to provide some data for advancement tracking. I do not see Scoutbook going away for advancement tracking.
I am floored. We’ve been told all along don’t use IA 2.0 if you are already using Scoutbook. Now I am in charge of logging Scouts activities in IA 2.0 in stead of them logging in Scoutbook. I have been dragging parents and Scouts one at a time into Scoutbook all year. It is not worth the effort to teach them a new platform. This is very disapponting.
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Bill_W, look at the following quote [edited] located above related to other posts within the thread.
“it’s been said that IA2.0 is being developed in a more modern programming language to allow faster development and greater capabilities, so eventually, this will replace ScoutBook and become the “de facto” ScoutBook.”
Pretty clear. Scoutbook is temporary, BSA intends IA2 to become the main platform. Read all the posts from the members of the advisory council within this thread.
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I agree. There are some interface anomalies in IA2 that should be fixed, but I didn’t care because I used Scoutbook. So, why should we care about Scoutbook? Let’s just move over now.
Sorry thought you had the label next to your name. Edited my post, but it is clear from the other post that was included in this thread.
@JamesSoltysiak, no worries. I just didn’t want to confuse others that I was in this small important council. The SUAC do a tremendous job and try to walk the fine line of representing the volunteers and allowing us the little peek behind the curtain we are allowed. They perpetually try to help troubleshoot in a positive manner. We all wish BSA would allow them the ability to share more of the roadmap as it would undoubtably make their job easier having to discuss these topics on the forum.
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They spend tons and tons of hours dealing with us unruly masses. With no control over budgets and the inability to make policy changes (advancement or otherwise), they have a hard balancing act to perform.
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I will copy/paste a facebook response on this I had to write this morning - There is no way SUAC can truly know when major releases will be released as it is sometimes a slow buggy process. And we are under non-disclosure agreements not to discuss. So since BSA IT does not share the info now there really is no way. And we don’t want to hear “You said we were getting this, why has it not come out yet.”
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@DonovanMcNeil, I understand completely about user expectations. Definitely don’t want to go there on the over promise and under deliver route.
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@DonovanMcNeil we understand that you can’t post a feature by feature thing or you personally can’t post roadmaps. This isn’t the same thing as saying, we are planning a new widget to the screen or are adding the ability to do x, y, and z. Obsoleting Scoutbook and moving functionality to IA2 should be something we are told about, especially if it is contrary to what we have been and are still being told at the council and district level. This is something that should be have been explained a long time ago. Not blaming you personally. We were specifically told to STOP using IA. As a software developer myself I can’t see why they aren’t doing what they did with the report manager. That is obviously something written with a new under the hood interface, most likely based on the video, the same JAVA interface they are moving to, but it is linked to from within Scoutbook. Why not link the new interface for Activites from within Scoutbook also? At least until IA2 is more advanced.
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Who cares? “Scoutbook” and “Internet Advancement” are product names. We do not know what they be called in the future.
There appears to be confusion between program components, their names and the product names.
I am more concerned with what data is being collected, how it is defined, whether it can be used for other data reports such as the district camping reports (and district JTE), merging data and reducing double-data entry from the use of multiple data entry systems.
One of the challenges my council (and district) has is that all JTE camping data is not being submitted. The other is merging camping data for units and lone scouts (and lone cub scouts) who are not entering their own data with those who are.
Bill_W,
A retired university IT programmer/analyst (among other things)
