SNF Lab Members:
Happy New Year!!!
We have deployed an initial version of the Coral Reporting Engine which
should be avialable to most of you using any web browser. There is a
link under the main SNF web page (
http://snf.stanford.edu)
under the "News: 1/1/05" section. Alternatively, you should be able to
reach this by pointing your browser to:
http://opencoral.stanford.edu/cocoon/xreporter/en-US/datasources.
Most of you should be able to access these reporting capabilities with
your normal Coral login name and your remote Coral password. THOSE OF
YOU WHO LAST CHANGED YOUR REMOTE CORAL PASSWORD OVER 6-8 MONTHS AGO
WILL HAVE TO RESET YOUR REMOTE CORAL PASSWORD IN ORDER TO SUCCESSFULLY
ACCESS THE CORAL REPORTING TOOL. I'll explain more about this later.
This reporting capability is built upon an open source package named
xReporter. We have established a modest set of initial reports and
expect that these will be augmented and refined over time. Most of the
reports allow you to specify a set of parameters ... such as beginning
and ending dates ... for each report. Once you login, you will see that
you have one data source named "Coral". Click that and you'll see the
reports that you can run.
Once you execute a particular report request, you will see it displayed
on your web browser ... with 50 rows of data displayed on each page.
Once you are looking at this data, please notice the "Excel" and "PDF"
buttons on the left side of the page. If you click the "Excel" button,
it will generate an Excel file and allow you to either open it or store
it. We believe that Excel files will be of use to many of you (and
please remember that Open Office on the Unix platforms should open and
read these files as well.) Similarly, the "PDF" button will produce an
Adobe Acrobat document appropriate for printing.
Most of you will see reports labelled "My Reservations", "My
Activities", "My Accounting", "My Current Equipment", and "Current
Equipment".
My Activities will show you all lab activities (equipment activity,
reservations, staff charges, etc.) over a particular time window. If
that time window is the current month (start of 01/01/05 and end of
02/01/05 ..... dates are typically entered with MM/DD/YY) it will show
your usage thus far in the month. That will include equipment usage up
until about 5 a.m. of the current day. Equipment that is still enabled
will not show up. Also, equipment that was disabled after 5 a.m. will
not show up until the following day.
My Accounting can be used to show billing information either for
previous months or for the current month (subject to the 5 a.m.
resrtiction mentioned previously). Please note: while the new caps are
in effect, the 10% charge for equipment usage exceeding 160 hours in a
given month is not yet functional .... so, for the moment, you'll have
to track that based on equipment usage listed in the "My Activity"
report.
There are also reports that allow you to print or examine your
equipment reservations, to check all currently enabled equipment, or to
check the equipment that you have that is currently enabled.
You may send your comments, questions, and feedback related to this
reporting capability to
coral@snf.stanford.edu. We will also plan to
have more complete "How To" documentation in the near future, but felt
that the basic usage should be sufficiently intuitive to be of use to
many of you as it stands. We certainly expect that we will generate
additional reports that seem desirable or appropriate. As this is a
siginficant new capability ... and one that will likely place a load on
our database hardware, we ask for your patience as we try to fine tune
this system to better meet your Coral reporting needs.
Unfortunately, I will be out of the office for serveral days this week,
but will hope to be in e-mail contact if you have any problems or
questions.
As this note is already rather long, I'll send our another message
explaining the details of why some of you who have not set or changed
your remote Coral password in the last 6-8 months may need to do so in
order to run the Coral reporting engine.
Thank you for your continued supprt,
John