My troop has always used all of the options in the Scoutbook user profile for tracking Medical part ABC dates, OA membership dates for election, ordeal, brotherhood, & vigil, swimmer classification and date, middle/high school names, grade level, etc… However, I logged in today and see that the system is now linking over to the Internet Advancement system which only has the bare minimum of info: name, address, email ?!?. No phone number, none of the extra data that we painstakingly update every year to make our lives easier for running reports… was this an error when porting over to internet advancement or was it a determination that the units do not need to track this info?
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See tonight’s change log
Thank you for posting an update in the change log. I am sad to see the changes though as I have always found Scoutbook to be a more user-friendly platform for end-users vs the Internet Advancement platform which is harder to use and harder to train my non-tech-savy parents to view their scout’s advencement.
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Concur with Rebecca. These changes aren’t user-friendly, and a process to capture all of the profile info and display it in IA should have been developed prior to the most recent change - we had also been using SB profiles to capture school and swim test info, among other things, and it’s now gone. Our hope was that we’d be moving away from Internet Advancement completely, not returning to it. Is this part of an overall plan to rely more on IA? Because that would be a giant step backwards.
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You would think they would have learned their lesson about rolling out new fixes before they are complete with the whole moving activities to Internet Advancement. Guess not. It is one thing to have a few bugs, and entirely different thing to have entire things missing and broken while they are doing this.
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The SUAC tried to get this change held until it had the same functionality of Scoutbook plus the feature assistant extension but we do not control the release schedule.
We have told BSA IT once again that members are upset with another release that loses capabilities.
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I sure hope all the functionality is coming back. It would also be nice if they warned us about things like this. I personally was trying to update all the schools since this is the time of year for that. Also I hope they warn us about any major changes, like if they all of a sudden decide all the comments/pictures attached to advancement will disappear or something like that.
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We are in the process of setting a Court of Honor for 5 Scouts who have earned Eagle Scout. Some of them earned Eagle over a year ago but due to COVID, were not able to schedule their Court of Honor until now. In preparation for that Court of Honor, I pull a lot of information from Scoutbook that is not advancement related such as OA membership information, swim tests information - all of which is now lost thanks to this latest unannounced change by the BSA IT staff. I realize that the IT staff was decimated by furloughs but who at the National level is overseeing what they are doing? Is Rick Hillenbrand still the BSA Technology Chair and, if so, is he someone that Scoutbook users can contact?
They are working on moving the user interface for the extended profile information (OA dates, swim tests, etc.) over to Internet Advancement.
However, if you are looking to “pull” existing data, it is still available through Roster Builder (different from Report Builder), other reports (such as individual Scout History Reports), and Scoutbook’s Export / Backup csv files.
Is there a plan to convert all to IA or will it be split between IA and Scoutbook? Coming from a job where portions of our data has to be shared between two systems I can say how much of a pain it is to try and maintain data.
While there are sections of Scoutbook I am not a fan of it is a lot better than losing functionality and information because the information is split between two systems.
The long term plan is to move the User Interface to the Internet Advancement platform. Internet Advancement and Scoutbook use the same database so there is no synching between them.
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Will the ‘Invite scout to join’ button be in this new IA user interface for profiles?
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This does seem to be a big miss.
It has been reported to the developers
This is a horribly timed update. Like others have said we use this info often for reports and take time to keep it up to date. This is a huge step backwards. I have not been happy with the last few updates and every time I see an update warning in SB I cringe and wonder what will go wrong this time. It doesn’t seem that BSA IT staff listens to the SUAC. Is there another way to give feedback from us the users?
What is the point if they use the same database?
You can ask your council professional staff to provide feedback to BSA IT. Since national put all support on councils, this is the only path to contact BSA IT.
BSA IT plans to migrate form the current Scoutbook UI to an Internet Advancement based UI which will allow them to add more features and better integrate all of the various BSA systems. The Scoutbook UI is written in a language where finding developers is very difficult due to its age. The Internet Advancement UI is written in a language where it is easier to find qualified developers
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And if your Council staff doesn’t care or thinks it isn’t worth their time?
I just saw a Post by Bill Nelson that said that in a recent update to IA “Order of the Arrow is displayed in member’s profile.” I have looked at the profile for several of my OA members but I still don’t see anything in the profile that says the member is a member of the OA.
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