Present: Justin Hopkins (MOBIUS), Jennifer Bielewski (Lyrasis), Ben Shum (Bibliomation), Tim Spindler (C/W MARS), Cristina Trotter (Oconee Regional Library System, GA/PINES), Chris Sharp (GPLS), Adrienne Detwiler (MOBIUS), Janine Gordon (MOBIUS), Elaine (TNRD)
Jennifer volunteered to record the minutes.
1. PINES/GPLS Reports RFP update, if any
PINES has met with Emerald Data Networks, who will be developing the reports interface.
Everything is at an early info-gathering stage
PINES folks will be developing use case scenarios; Cristine will be working on this committee
The plan is to get use case scenarios and functional requirements together by the end of Dec; development will begin in Jan; first interface review in Feb. The second formal review is planned for May with completion by Sept. 30.
From a PINES email regarding this project: "This project will involve the design and development of a new interface for Evergreen reports. This will not replace the existing interface but should provide a streamlined easier-to-use access point to generate reports."
The interface will be developed specifically to PINES requirements, but in such a way that allows further development
given the complexity of the underlying database schema, streamlining the interface would be a challenge. Creating a handful of the most commonly required views and masking the underlying complexity might be how this could be solved.
We will keep this on the agenda for future meetings to see how development proceeds.
2. Documentation
Please review what exists and submit what is needed to Jenny (jennifer.turner(at)mnsu.edu)
Jeff Godin and jasperreports
Jeff has been experimenting with JasperReports and JasperServer as an alternative front end for Evergreen reporting. JasperReports is a reporting framework, JasperServer is a self-service web interface for running reports on demand and/or scheduling reports to be generated on a recurring basis, delivering results via email, etc. It uses "direct" database access (using a JDBC driver to make a native postgresql connection), and requires some knowledge of SQL to design a report template.
TADL will be using it internally for most/all of their Evergreen reporting. It eliminates a lot of post-processing of report output.
Hoping to have an external demo site up soon! In addition to a demo system to poke at, some sample report output might be of use. Screencasts might also be helpful.
TADL is focusing on designing reports to meet their needs first, but with an eye toward what would need to take place for someone to make this work in an environment where not everyone has access to every report / bit of data, etc.
Cristina still to add reports documentation to the Evergreen Community wiki page.
3. Evergreen reports training pre- or post-conference at Evergreen Annual Conference
Nothing new; at the last update, we were on the market for someone to run the training and to find out whether there's space/time availability around the conference itself for that.
It would also be great to see a demo of what Jeff has been doing with Jasperreports.
4. Anything else from past meetings?