Present: Ron MacKinnon, Joanne Oud, Gail Sperling, Linda Teather
The minutes of April 16 and July 15, 2003 were approved, with one correction. They will be added to the TUG Statistics and Reports (TSR) area on the TUG staff web.
The TUG Reports Training Team appointed Alan Gale as the group’s facilitator for the Fall term. Ron confirmed with Alan that TSR should be kept informed of the Team’s progress and should be contacted if assistance or advice is needed but, otherwise, should work as independently as possible.
Informal review of the training conducted by ThoughtCorp indicated that the sessions were well presented and effective. The only deficiency identified is that little coverage was given to the running of existing Impromptu reports but Gail will cover this when she meets with the Training Team. TSR will try to develop an evaluation form for the next ThoughtCorp session.
Gail will meet with the Training Team on August 12th to review the cubes and security structure.
Several inexpensive online training courses are offered by Cognos (in the $100-$150 per person range). For example, the Training Team might benefit by registering one person in the Introduction to Impromptu Web Reports or this might be an option for the new UG member of the Training Team. The Cognos training catalogue is circulating among TSR members.
Gail and Bill have met with all TUG functional groups to review the security options for the Cognos server and have set up user accounts, user classes and access levels on the production server to reflect the input received from managers.
The Training Team asked TSR for a list of staff members who will require Cognos training. Gail has a spreadsheet of user accounts on the Cognos server that Ron, Joanne and Linda will review.
To do: Gail will send the spreadsheet to Alan, Ron, Joanne and Linda. Ron, Joanne and Linda will review the list and identify additions and/or deletions for the trainees list.
Ron is coordinating the appointment of a UG member of the Training Team to replace Pam Jacobs.
A revised draft of the PowerPlay cube archiving policy and schedule was discussed. The revised document incorporates input received from Library managers regarding the schedule for the transactions-reserves cube and UG’s responsibility for storing the original CD ROM set.
TSR members approved the implementation of the revised policy and schedule.
To do: Linda will obtain an electronic copy of the policy and schedule from Gail and arrange for it to be mounted on the TUG staff web. After this is done, Ron will send a message to TUG Library managers.
A hardware and software support document for the Cognos servers will be drafted for discussion at the next TSR meeting.
Gail reported that she has created backup and restore batches for the Cognos servers. She will confirm her work with Cognos Support. She also reported that Microsoft SP4 and Cognos upgrades will be scheduled for the servers soon.
Gail reported that she has updated the requests cube and the underlying queries to try to get more accurate reports. She has asked the TUG Circ group to compare the results from the original cube on the production server and the revised cube on the test server. Gail will discuss this with the group at its next meeting.
In May 2001, a problem report was submitted to Endeavor regarding their changes which compromised the ability to extract accurate statistics for requests. The status of this report (#44832) on Endeavor's KnowledgeBase is still "Pending". TSR supports attempting to escalate this incident via the Prototyping Coordinator.
To do: Gail will seek support from TUG Circ to escalate incident 44832 and contact the TRELLIS Prototyping Coordinator.
Gail had previously provided written notes to TSR. At the meeting, TSR reviewed her experience at the Cognos TechForum Conference. Gail indicated that it was very worthwhile, especially for the opportunity to participate in usability and hands-on labs with Cognos programmers and software experts, to meet with Cognos developers to share ideas about software enhancements, to establish contacts with Cognos staff and other users, and to attend useful training sessions on server administration.
Gail increased her knowledge of server administration and gained ideas for improvements to our Cognos servers. These include:
Revising the Impromptu reports queues and priorities to set queues for jobs other than high priority jobs as "floaters". [Implemented]
Preventing a user from inadvertently deleting newsboxes, as happened in the Spring, by creating a new theme for Upfront which would not display the "delete" option for user classes other than "owner". According to Cognos documentation, this work requires knowledge of HTML, XML, cascading stylesheets and JavaScript.
To do: Gail will draft a brief description of the work and skills required. In September Linda and Ron will investigate options for assigning this work to UW or UG staff.
Adding html code to cubes and reports to create links to documentation web pages. Gail recommended placing this in footers on Impromptu reports since the code displays in the client version. She will add a link to the index page to the report documentation template. The report creator will need to edit this link.
TSR members acknowledged the value of TUG participation at Cognos technical conferences and recommended that we should try to budget for attendance by one of TUG’s Cognos system administrators at least every other year.
TSR approved Gail and Bill’s attendance at the Cognos Business Forum in Toronto on September 16th. Since the only expense is transportation, other members of TSR or the Training Team might also attend if the program is of interest.
The TUG Reports task list was reviewed and updated to reflect progress since March 14, 2003. The updated table is appended below.
To ensure that continued testing of the production server occurs, reports users will be asked to check that the reports they run regularly with the desktop application also run on the web and to compare the results. Anything unexpected or missing will be communicated to Gail and/or Bill, with clear details and examples (e.g. screen shots or annotated paper copy).
To do: Ron and Joanne will ask reports users at Guelph and Laurier to check their web reports.
The Training Team should be given advance notice that they will be asked to participate in a review of documentation and the documentation template in the Fall.
To do: Gail will alert the trainers to the documentation tasks when she meets with them next week.
A TRELLIS software upgrade is scheduled for August 15-18. There is no known impact on reports.
The Maclean's survey responses are due soon. Gail has placed the 2002/03 ARL/CARL/Macleans spreadsheet on the TUG Reports production server. She noted that it is incomplete for WLU until the previous year's data is added.
To do: Ron, Joanne and Linda will review the data and contact Gail if problems are identified.
The next meeting will be scheduled for late September. Agenda will include planning for the next ThoughtCorp training session and the Training Team's plans for staff training.
| Completion goal | Task |
|---|---|
| Completed |
|
| Nearing completion |
|
| Ongoing |
|
| Deferred |
|
| Dropped |
|
| Fall 2003 |
|
| End of Dec. 2003 |
|
| Winter 2004 |
|