New year, new reporting system

Reblogged with permission from Care Opinion UK.

For a long time, Care Opinion has offered a range of reports to subscribers, with many flexible options for both report filtering and scheduled delivery.

Because the amount of data on Care Opinion is growing every day, recently some subscribers have been finding that their reports (for example, all stories in the past year) are too big for us to run successfully.

To meet this challenge we have made a few changes to the way we deliver your reports, which we hope will allow you to run bigger reports.

How we delivered your reports in the past

Until now, we delivered your reports like this:

• If you ran the report "on demand" in the browser, you had a wait a little while and the report would download for you.
• If the report was scheduled, you would receive an email with the report attached.

How we will deliver your reports in the future

From now on, we're delivering your reports in a slightly different way:

If you run the report "on demand", we'll show you a notification in the drawer (the slidey panel on the left of the page).

Once the report is ready, you can click the drawer notification to go to the report page.

If the report is scheduled, you'll receive an email with a link to the report page

In both cases, we link you to a page where you can download the report, see when the report ran, why you received it, and (if scheduled) who else received it.

Pros and cons

This new system has one con and a few pros. The con is that there's an extra click - you have to visit the report page to get your report.

But we think the pros outweigh the con:

• you can run larger reports
• you can see more information about the report, when it ran, why, and who else got it
• the report page, with the report, stays online in your personal account and so you can go back and find a previous report whenever you want
• we don't send attachments, so our emails won't use up so much of your mobile data allowance

We're hoping that once you get used to it, you'll like the new system. Over coming months we'll make changes based on the feedback you give us, and we have a few related ideas in the pipeline too.

As always, if you get stuck, get in touch!