Volunteer Software Development Team - New Cadet Portal

[redowling]

Nice work!

[Paracetamol]

God speed the crew of Cadet Portal.

[incubus]

Could we have a filter on My Events to only show Events that staff and cadets from My Unit are bidding/attending/selected to make it easier to track who is where from a unit level?

Isn’t that the setting that the update on Wednesday made default?

[Biggles_Lovechild]

My bad - you are absolutely correct
Just my Wing so bad at putting names on SMS that no events showed up……

But have checked and found one way off in the future

[james_elliott]

We have just released Cadet Portal version 1.0.2 tonight and the release notes are available at:

https://rafac.sharepoint.com/sites/cadetportal/SitePages/Cadet-Portal-Release-Notes.aspx

Various minor bug fixes for items identified by the Beta Squadrons

[AMW]

What about those of us who are cadets and don’t have access to SharePoint??

[Farmerdan]

Ask your staff

[james_elliott]

What about those of us who are cadets and don’t have access to SharePoint??

Yes, ask your staff in the first instance as we don’t publish release notes on public facing websites. We are considering having a release notes area on Cadet Portal itself.

[james_elliott]

Version 1.0.3 of Cadet Portal has just been released which fixed a number of issues which were reported by the cadets. The biggie was to do with a problem with the menu when using smaller devices like an iPhone 5.

Release notes available at: https://rafac.sharepoint.com/sites/cadetportal/SitePages/Cadet-Portal-Release-Notes1.aspx

[pEp]

This is great service guys, thanks!

Fixed very quickly

[james_elliott]

[james_elliott]

Beta Update
Beta Trials have been going really well and the 12 Squadrons have been brilliant at communicating suggestions and bugs back to us. So glad we have done it because it has allowed us to pick up on things we never would have done until the tool was exposed to the live SMS database.

The big take home has been that SMS data quality is not great. Of the 633 cadet accounts that were created at the start of the trial, about 125 of them still didn’t have email addresses or telephone numbers.

As we move forwards, it is really important (obviously) that the cadets records are updated with the correct information and I have just been busy emailing all of the OC Wgs and Bader POCs today on that issue.

In terms of the Beta feedback, common themes include:

• It would be great if it did XYZ - most of the time, XYZ is already there, the cadets either haven’t found it/realised it is there or the staff haven’t uploaded any data for that specific part of the system. For instance, cadets are asking if they can access local forms and documentation on Cadet Portal. Well, yes, they absolutely can - but the staff have to add it in SMS → Squadron Downloads first!

• Can we have a native mobile app for Android/Apple etc. The short answer is no. While there has been a softening on HMGs stance on native apps, we are simply not resourced to be able to offer that as a facility. Native apps are massively developer intensive, expensive to maintain and a pain to look after on an ongoing basis. Hence why we are offering a responsive website.

• We don’t seem to get any notifications to our email/text message which would encourage us to go back. Absolutely agree and we are working on that now and we are building that functionality into SMS (because that’s really where the notifications come from e.g. cadet selected for event etc) as I type. We are looking carefully at who receives a notification and when - we are probably going to start small and get bigger over time as we understand how things go. For instance, we want a cadet to be informed by in-app notification, email and text message if an event has been cancelled - but we probably don’t want them to get all of those things if a cadet is selected for an event.

• The cadet didn’t get the welcome email. In Beta, this is probably because the cadets record did not have any data on it to send the email to in the first place. We have added a “Resend welcome email” button to SMS which will make it easy for staff to resend them if the cadet has got it/accidentally deleted it etc etc. We have also found that the emails are being sent to Junk Folders and we are trying to identify the email providers in these cases so we can work with Government Notify (the provider of bulk email for us) to see if there is anything they can do to help with that. We have also made a number of changes to the user account generation script which will now detect if an email field was blank but has now been completed and then send the welcome email. Once we get through the deployment, the account generation process will be linked to when the CFAV creates a new cadet on SMS - at the end of the process, their account is generated and email sent. Here is the welcome email resend button in development:

• This cadet transferred and My Brassard etc shows their previous unit number. A lot of these types of issues are because of SMS data quality issues, for instance where the old unit end date and new unit start date don’t make sense. SMS lacks a lot of validation on the fields in the forms which has led to this kind of problem. I believe that all of these types of issues have been fixed by sorting the data out rather than changing the code.

• My Training Dashboard isn’t up to date. Well, we all knew this one was coming! Again, this is simply down to data quality on SMS. If there is no record of Cadet Bloggs having completed their first aid badge, it won’t be displayed on Cadet Portal. In the future, we are looking at how the cadet can communicate the fact that they are missing badges easily - but we are a bit of a way off with that one. As I have said from the beginning, Cadet Portal will see the staff being approached by cadets because their records are not correct. At least you now have an incentive

• We would like to be able to copy/paste the Cadet Portal unique event link into social media/newsletters etc. We are going to add something into SMS that allows the user to copy the URL for the new event they have created and paste that into whatever they wish. It will use the same functionality as is already present on SMS when you want to copy the SMS event link. Hoping to have that in the v5.2 release of SMS on Wednesday.

• We don’t see the feedback the cadets provide. CFAVs don’t have sight of the feedback the cadets provide through the tool itself. I guess the first things to say here is that you really don’t need/want to. If they do something silly, we will manage it with you at the local level. All of the feedback recieved from the cadets has been constructive, polite and well written.

• We would like a Staff Contacts tab or similar. The cadets are asking for a page which lists the Sqn Exec roles and their email addresses, which I think is a legit request and I can see why they would want it. We are going to have a chat on Wednesday about how this could be achieved. Hypothetically, it is possible to do automatically i.e. Sqn Cdr = <insert rank, name> who can be contacted on etc.

• I have attended events but the event history says I haven’t attended any yet. We are looking into this one.

I think that is the big stuff for the time being

General Update
We have had a bit of a tidy up on the Cadet Portal RAFAC SharePoint site and added countdown clocks for the three big releases which are getting pretty close!

Check out the updated site here (you will need a Bader account to access): Sign in to your account

Durham/Northumberland Wing is next week and then onto a much large release after that involving multiple Wings and all of their associated Squadrons.

We have fixes to Ultilearn coming which will allow users to revisit courses they have previously completed - hoping they will be applied this week by Ultimedia.

There are loads of other things going on - probably too many to mention - and everything is looking really positive at the moment.

[Paracetamol]

At least you now have an incentiv

We always have an incentive… to do a good job.
I still dont want a queue at mine or training Officers door with moaning cadets and/or parents!
Our data is pretty good… so hopefully it won’t happen!
Great update, thanks.

[Paracetamol]

and their email addresses,

Please only email!

[themajor]

We have fixes to Ultilearn coming which will allow users to revisit courses they have previously completed - hoping they will be applied this week by Ultimedia.

Will this also impact Protecting Information, H&S and Fire courses that need to be repeated.

[james_elliott]

@Paracetamol

Our data is pretty good

I am sure your data is immaculate squire and I wish I could say that was the same everywhere, but it isn’t

@Paracetamol

Please only email!

I assume you are worried about getting bombarded and want the ability to opt in/out as required. Working on that one.

@themajor

Will this also impact Protecting Information, H&S and Fire courses that need to be repeated.

Hopefully it will fix it for all courses - we are testing at the moment.

[daws1159]

I assume you are worried about getting bombarded and want the ability to opt in/out as required. Working on that one.

With my ongoing quest being to avoid letting Cadets or Parents contact me by phone outside of Parade Nights I would much prefer only email!

[A400m]

Not sure if this has been mentioned - but is there any scope to introduce a squadron messaging/announcements system similar to what sqn FB groups do? Would save the bother of U13 cadets not being allowed on and would also mean that all comms can be moderated centrally if the proverbial hits the blades.

[james_elliott]

With my ongoing quest being to avoid letting Cadets or Parents contact me by phone outside of Parade Nights I would much prefer only email!

The notifications will be notifications from the system, not the parents et al…

Not sure if this has been mentioned - but is there any scope to introduce a squadron messaging/announcements system similar to what sqn FB groups do? Would save the bother of U13 cadets not being allowed on and would also mean that all comms can be moderated centrally if the proverbial hits the blades.

Announcements yes, chat/messaging no.

[AlexCorbin]

Ability to push Sqn announcements will be awesome! Will there be notification to emails when they are sent?