Description
Today I received multiple reports from people in my organization complaining that they didn't get their weekly reports mailed to them. It seems that there was an issue listed in the status system which likely caused the issue.
Now, at this point you are thinking this is more of a complaint about the failure... it's not.... what comes next relates directly to improvements that would make all our lives easier.
When I checked my Scheduled Projects area... I noticed a few things...
- there is nothing in my "failed" filter (I assume this is because this relates to flat out failures, not temporary failures?)
- There is no way to see the "last sent" date/time
- There is no way to tell if the reports are delayed (and will send once the queue catches up) or or today's report failed completely
- There is no way to re-send reports from this interface (an no link to the reports) - so if I need to resend 30 reports, I have to go and find them all individually and send them one at a time
To Improve this tool significantly, there should be a way to:
- Have a column showing the last date/time the report was sent successfully (this will help identify which reports failed)
- Have a column showing the next data/time the report should be sent (this will help identify IF the report is just delayed, or outright failied)
- Allow us to select multiple reports using the checkbox selectors, and have an option at the top (along with tag, delete, approve and export to csv) to "resend selected" (this will allow us to bulk resend failed reports easier
- Provide a way to link directly to the report (for editing), this could possibly show up in the popup window where you can edit the schedule.. but it would improve our ability to find specific reports easier when starting from the scheduler) (on that note, it would also be nice to see links to all the existing schedules/ability to edit your own schedule from the Workspace interface - I still have users who create multiple schedules, but don't have access rights to the Scheduled Reports area, so I have to clean it up for them - not realizing they created multiple schedules)
Why is this feature important to you
It will provide much needed optimization to working with scheduled reports..
More visibility into items that failed / were delayed.. better functionality to resend failed items, and better cross functionality between building/editing reports and editing schedules.
How would you like the feature to work
Some features would be pure data, showing in the columns of the Scheduled Project interface... they don't even have to be turned on by default... they can be hidden unless shown by using the Config Columns.
Some would be a new functionality to force report re-sends (for one or more items - an important bulk management feature)
The last would be improvements on interlinking the Workspace Interface with the Scheduler interface, this would be the hardest to achieve, but would improve visibility, usability and workflows significantly.
Current Behaviour
Technically these would all add on to existing behaviour, and that wouldn't change... these are all net new features.
