As a Squadron Commander I need an overview of all events that have been advertised on the squadron and the take-up by cadets. (With paper lists on the notice board I get this at a glance.)
Will the portal have a screen that will allow staff to see an overview of all activities and the names of cadets who have put their names down?
If not, this needs to be addressed as there are often 10+ activities on the board at once.
Exactly what I asked before @Flighty.
This is a must.
Some sort of dashboard overview showing who has applied to which event.
But also why squadrons have the final say on things, not only from the perspective of maybe having to staff them, but also they may be doing their own thing, which is far more important.
There is another aspect of potentially giving people too much choice and the one thing you donât want to give teenagers is too much to choose from.
I think if people want this to work as it seems they want it to, we need to completely remove the need for squadrons to send staff to anything. Cadets want to do it great, let the parents be the arbiters and not squadrons. How many sporting events especially need a âteam managerâ who must be from the squadron, but you only have one or two cadets who want to go, so a member of staff begrudgingly goes, when it would be better for parents to be there.
I donât disagree at all and I ran a busy Sqn with 10+ events being organised at the same time and I had the same issue.
You need to realise that staff will not have access to the portal. Your side of things is SMS which is not what my team are developing although we are obviously working hand in glove with the Bader guys that are.
So, the requirement is:
Does that cover it?
*edited for terrible grammar
Sorry James, Iâd say theyâd have to have names, not just the numbers.
If I have a Cdt whoâs known to be a little nuisance etc and suddenly decides to put his name for an activity, especially with limited places, then Iâd want to know.
Also, apologies if this has been covered before (this thread moves fast). Are we allowing Sqnâs to put cadets forward for activities.
E.g. A WHT weekend, 1234 Sqn has been allocated 5 places, and 13 of their cadets (who are eligible) nominate themselves for the course⌠Can the Sqn go through to filter down to 5 or is that up for the organiser/WHQ?
Names it is then - but please understand that all I will be doing is passing along the requirement to the Bader guys to look at. Events is on their high priority list at the moment and I will try to influence them where I can.
Again, that is the next phase of development and is beyond what we are doing in MVP but it will be in the next major release post MVP.
You need to realise that it isnât just a case of developing it in CP, we have SMS to consider as well as that drives everything - and there are two developers at HQ who are massively busy and are often given higher priority work to do, like fixing Universe when it breaks so you continue to get your VA to your bank accounts 
Scope creep is rife in software development and we are very focused on achieving what we said we would achieve in MVP and then moving onto what is next in iteration 2 (ie bid management) and we will be looking at bidding up and down the chain of command after we have achieved MVP.
I have passed along the requirement to the senior Bader Developer along with some explanatory notes.
We have our âWednesday Warsâ meeting every Wednesday evening and I will bring this up during that call to see if it is something we can integrate into the SMS events functionality which is released at the same time as Cadet Portal.
Bear with us - small team and this is a reasonably big chunk of work.
Further to my last, I can confirm that the requirement I outlined above has been accepted by the Bader developers and they are working on a dashboard solution for the new Events module as I type. I saw an initial version of it last night and it is looking really good and I think you will like what you see 
Also, we have all agreed that the ability to âApproveâ, âReject (or something like that)â and âAdd to reserves listâ will be available in SMS Events in time for Cadet Portal MVP. We fully appreciate this is absolutely vital and it was discussed yesterday evening at length - so thatâs really positive.
All of the work is being tracked through MS Azure DevOps for both the SMS development (in support of Cadet Portal) and the Cadet Portal work itself.
Next big hurdle for us is the penetration and security testing which is taking place in early December. This is fantastic because it means we will be entering the Beta testing phase with the tool tested against the MoD/RAF requirements.
Sounds good. Any chance of a briefing similar to the cadet portal on the changes to the SMS Events module? This has been really useful and I think it would be just as much so to discuss the changes to the events module.
Funny you should mention thatâŚbear with me and I will post some things shortly!
I have been authorised to share some new SMS Events Dashboard screenshots which is an area still very much in development - comments and feedback very much welcome. Both the VDT and Bader Devs are very open to your feedback on this and we are listening.
Please note this is just a first pass and we are trying to present quite a lot of complex information in an easy to access manner. Please also note this is SMS, NOT Cadet Portal.
So, first thing are the different types of events:
Single or multi-Squadron Events that do not involve bidding for places - examples could be a Parade or Bag Pack where you want everyone to turn up with no limits on numbers
Single or multi-Squadron Events that do involve bidding for a defined number of slots - examples could include a course, AEF, shooting etc etc. Squadrons could invite other Squadrons to these types of events and allocate each unit a defined number of slots. Equally, Wing could be doing this.
The requirement was to be able to see at a glance all of the events being managed on SMS at any particular time and the cadets that have put their names down for each as well as other information. We are trying to display a lot information on these event tiles and this is just a first passâŚ
Each event will have a tile on the dashboard. The reason it is being done with tiles rather than as a table is because you can get a lot more information onto a tile than you can on a row in a table - they also display more effectively on different types of screens (responsive).
Here is an example of an event tile.
There will be tooltips that you run your mouse over to explain what things mean like this:
You can see here the tooltip for the cadet numbers. In this case, the twelve slots are available in total for the event which is the (12) and 7 of them have been filled by cadets from your Squadron. If there is a N/A in the brackets(), that means that the event doesnât have allocated slots. If the organising Squadron has not yet allocated the invited Squadrons slots yet, the brackets() will have (TBC).
When you click on the number of cadets, a modal (a dialogue box window - see Modal window - Wikipedia) will open which lists all of the cadets and their status like this:
Here, you can see the âSelectedâ, âRejectedâ and âReserveâ status for each cadet.
As I said, this is just the first pass and any constructive feedback is welcome and is being listened to 
In the next couple of weeks, the Bader guys will be releasing a walkthrough/talkthrough video on the new SMS Events module in a similar way to the Cadet Portal one we created a week or two ago. It takes two weeks to get approval for the videos, so bear with us.
I am also putting together an automated TG21 production video for Cadet Portal and requesting that be approved as well.
FS Jackie Goodman 
Something smells niceâŚ
Looks great. Loving the references in the cadet names too!
Looks a bit âfresherâ than the rest of SMS - is there a gui overhaul of everything coming, or is it just that itâs a new thing and thereâs some pretty colours and the tiles?
That is a long and slightly boring story - but yes and no. It is getting a facelift and then will get a much more extensive UI rework in the future. It certainly looks a lot better than it currently does
Just a thought - can cadets add information to bids? For example, if Iâm running a course I might offer different streams or sub-courses, is there any chance of a âquestion boxâ?
This is somethjng we did on SquadronBox / MySquadron and it was less of a question but more of a comments box which the cadets could be encouraged to fill in for special dietary requirements and so forth. If we are going to do this in CP, we will need to add to some of the DB tables and the UI and there will need to be new functionality in SMS so the staff can review, probably through the returns list above but I think that is achievable.
It wonât be in MVP but no reason it couldnât be in the next version . I will create a work ticket and assign it to the Iteration 2 list 
thanks @MattB!
Actually, I already have that on the list for Iteration 2
This is why we are using a dev platform so we donât loose great ideas!
Looks good.
Have you thought about having an auto-updating brassard to complement the PTS page? Eg. a new window which has the brassard shape which updates to have all the badges on it that a cadet has earned. And then on the same window you could have a blue/grey square (jumper patch) to show flying badges, then just stick the lanyard somewhere on the page.
Would make it more visual and easier to comprehend for cadets whilst also showing them where their badges need to be.
Thatâs a great idea, might have some interesting programming though!
