Advanced List Woes

Jess Moxsky · October 2021

I know I'm far from the only person asking for this, so I want to boost this idea asking for more robust query/reporting options in the K12 system. I can pull virtually any kind of list or report I need from Raiser's Edge and manipulate it to get exactly the information I need. If I can't build the query I want, I know I can reverse-engineer it from a report. K12 lacks this kind of functionality and it is sorely needed.

I consider myself to be a fairly advanced K12 user. I have implemented and administered multiple K12 systems and oversaw data sync between EE, RE, K12, etc. The advanced list builder is a monstrosity and a nightmare that requires not just a knowledge of your own data and how it is structured, but a knowledge of various idiosyncrasies in the system that make the learning curve impossibly steep.

I know that the expansion of the SKY lists has been fantastic, but they still lack the ability to get nearly as granular as I would like to be, or as I would be able to be if I was building a query in Raiser's Edge. It seems wild to me that this has not yet been implemented into the K12 suite when EE had a beautiful and robust querying function.

Hopefully this doesn't come off as too aggressive a rant - I LOVE working with the K12 suite and absolutely consider myself a general fan of the BB product ecosystem. But this is a pain point that seems to keep coming up over and over, and with nearly 300 votes in the ideas portal I am wondering why this doesn't already exist.

Kathy Hannon · October 2021

DITTO @Jess Moxley

I agree with everything you wrote!

Boyd Reilly · October 2021

Jess:

I'm addicted to using advanced lists and rarely use SKY lists except for the most minimal things. My collection of advanced lists, I'm guessing, is around 500. And, yes, advanced lists is missing in some elements.

Unfortunately, as I've been told the advance list is no longer being developed and, I believe I read or I have been told, will eventually be going away ?.

If you haven't already, you might want to look into the API. This, too, is missing many things but, at least, it is still being developed.

Thanks.

Boyd

Oona McKnight · November 2021

I also agree with everything Jess said!

Jess Moxsky · November 2021

Boyd Reilly:
Jess:
I'm addicted to using advanced lists and rarely use SKY lists except for the most minimal things. My collection of advanced lists, I'm guessing, is around 500. And, yes, advanced lists is missing in some elements.
Unfortunately, as I've been told the advance list is no longer being developed and, I believe I read or I have been told, will eventually be going away ?.
If you haven't already, you might want to look into the API. This, too, is missing many things but, at least, it is still being developed.
Thanks.
Boyd

That is a bummer for sure, but I will start digging around in the API forums I suppose. And I may reach out to pick your brain on some tricky advanced lists in the future!

Katherine Nolte · November 2021

I agree…Lately I've been finding that not all fields are available in Advanced Lists (example pronouns). It would also be helpful to have medical data fields available in Advanced Lists (for those that have “nurse" permission.

Kathleen Peak · March 2022

Hi Jess - I agree with everything you said in your post. I recently discussed these very issues with our customer success manager. It appears that BB is not investing in the advanced lists, but they are also not adding fields to the sky lists so we're having to join lists together in Google Sheets. This is not something we should be expecting of our K-12 admin assistants who are trying to get pretty basic information. I voted on your idea and will continue to emphasize this issue with our CSM. Have you had any luck with escalation around this issue?

Sarah Bienvenue · March 2022

Hi Kathleen, we love adding new fields and columns to our sky lists and are actively doing so. I highly recommend putting ideas in the community, or even just posting in the community with the columns and filters you're looking for and on which list.

Thank you,

Sarah

Brian LeBlanc · March 2022

Hey @Sarah Bienvenue - I didn't realize you took requests through the forum!

A few of the options that would be extremely helpful to us are:

Candidate lists:

Please include “Yesterday” as a filter option in all date range pickers (really this is for all lists, but especially candidate ones)
Ability to select more than one inquiry or application in a filter; we have inquiries going out several years and it's nearly impossible to filter to to the correct information without running multiple lists
Allow for columns to display No Show and Rescheduled flags from an interview

Student lists:

Allow for student lists for future years in addition to the current year. Right now we have no choice but to use advanced lists for this feature, and if advanced lists go away I have no idea how we'll be able to pull this list. We use this on a daily basis for tracking enrollments for the upcoming year.
Along the same lines of the Start school and Start grade level columns, include columns that will display the most recent school and grade level. Thinking here of being able to track withdrawals by the school level and grade from which the student withdrew.

Candidates for Review lists:

Allow for multiple committee review completion statuses to be selected (for example, display both Some Reviews Completed and All Reviews Completed on the same report)

Visits/interviews/events lists:

Allow for a column to display School Level and the parent phone numbers (email is great, but sometimes we need to call, and if it's right there on the list all the better)
Add an Active/Inactive filter

Visit and interview openings lists:

Add a filter for Full or Available (or, at the very least, add a column indicating that an interview slot is full if it is indeed full)

That's all I can think of at the moment; I appreciate you considering these! They would make our lives considerably easier.

Bryan Lorenzo · March 2022

@Kathleen Peak - the product managers do take a look at the idea bank for new fields to add. I've gotten a few added this way. Be sure to add, the ideas to the bank:

I added one yesterday if you'd like to +1 it:

Boyd Reilly · March 2022

I understand why BB is trying to move users over to their Lists. Lists are much easier to use and, honestly, can be used for most cases. Basic users will have little trouble learning these Lists, unlike the Advanced Lists that we have become the sole creators of because basic users have great difficulty learning.

The problem is that there are way too many cases where Lists won't do some of the more complicated things we are tasked with doing. I could give you numerous examples (as I'm sure most of us can, as well) where Lists just isn't cutting it and, unlikely, to in the future. Advanced Lists, in my mind, is one of the most powerful tools available in their suite and abandoning it is a mistake. There are far too many things I rely on from Advanced Lists that will make things more difficult in the future.

I would go as far to suggest that BB would be wise to keep, and continue improving, Advanced Lists. Perhaps BB could sell the Advanced List option as a separate module. I would think there is a viable market for it.

Thanks.

Boyd

John Ronan · March 2022

Sarah Bienvenue:
Hi Kathleen, we love adding new fields and columns to our sky lists and are actively doing so. I highly recommend putting ideas in the community, or even just posting in the community with the columns and filters you're looking for and on which list.
Thank you,
Sarah

Sarah, with all due respect, I don't think the main message is getting across here.

Nice as it is to have BB constantly adding new fields to these lists, they lack fundamental flexibility and power! [They are, in the true sense of the word, simplistic].

For example, It does me no good, if I need to display a field in a candidate list that doesn't happen to be available, and I need to add it as an idea only in the hopes that it will be added to the list on a future release. I need the information at that moment!

Getting my work done with such deficient SKY lists requires all sorts of Excel and Microsoft Access gymnastics, combining several lists [and types of lists] .

Advanced Lists, as clunky as they are, are the only way to get the information I need in a usable, coherent way when I need it. You (BB) will always be behind the curve of providing what we need if you are simply statically adding data based on “ideas” and “votes”…in future releases.

What we need here is full flexibility and access to the “objects” we deal with (students, candidates, courses, classes, etc.).

Once again, with all due respect this is something that was available 15 years ago in Education Edge!

Until BB fills that huge gap, advanced lists seem to be the only option. [SKY lists, as static and inflexible as they are, will never cut it].

I admit that advanced lists require some understanding of the underlying data model, which is perhaps beyond many of your users, but short of reworking SKY lists and dramatically increasing their level of flexibility and power, advanced lists are the only option.

The good news is that there are a few improvements to advanced lists that would make them significantly more useful. A couple that come to mind are:

Cover every type of object in the system. [Even the new ones]. [From what I understand of databases, there is metadata in there to help with this.]
Clean up the interface:
- Allow drag and drop of field display orders [get rid of “column order” in display. The order in which field display should be implicit in the order they are shown.
- Allow drag and drop and insertion of lines on the filter page.
- Handle enumerated fields better.

Jess Moxsky · March 2022

Handle enumerated fields better.

In my WILDEST dreams…. ?

Sarah Bienvenue · March 2022

Hi John, I was responding to Kathleen's comment in which she stated that Blackbaud was no longer updating SKY lists. I wanted to make sure that she (and others following along) knows that we are still actively updating them and are happy to receive feedback in regards to what is needed.

While I know it can be frustrating to have to make requests in the idea forum and the community when you need it right now, I can assure you that we're in here and watching what comes in and making changes based on that feedback, while we work on larger initiatives. Whether that feedback is advanced lists or sky lists, it's always good for us to know that more than one school is also interested in that same enhancement. It might not seem like it, but it makes the process much more efficient.

Thank you,

Sarah

Sarah Bienvenue · March 2022

Hi Brian, keep an eye out on the release letters for updates!

Thanks,

Sarah

Brian Gray · March 2022

As @john ronan said, SKY lists just are not able to do much of the work I need a list to do. In addition to everything he said, SKY lists can not be read via an API call. (I have written many programs that use the API calls to extract data from Core.)

In many cases, the API calls can't access data that an Advanced List can. In other cases, the Advanced List can do the work to relate data from several tables together quicker and easier than my programs can. In those cases, my strategy is to create an Advanced List and have my program read it to access the data.

On the flip side, there is some data that I can get through a SKY list that I can't find a way to access in an Advanced List. In particular, I can't find information about course recommendations and course requests in Advanced Lists. (If it's in there, it's well hidden.) I can easily get that info in a SKY list, but I have to manually export the SKY list to a CSV file to do anything with it programatically.

Brian LeBlanc · March 2022

john ronan:
What we need here is full flexibility and access to the “objects” we deal with (students, candidates, courses, classes, etc.).

This right here is the crux of the problem. I accept that exports of lists, regardless of whether they come from SKY or advanced lists, will always have some level of necessity. There will be times where you have to improvise to get what you need, because no database can work through every permutation. As I explain to our campus admin assistants, most of whom have never so much as run a SQL query (and I don't mean that as a knock; they're educators, not database admins!), EMS will tell you what the data is, but you're very limited in what you can do with that data without an export. That's not the problem; all databases are like that.

The problem is that all of the data should be available in one place. What place that is is somewhat irrelevant. Having it all accessible in a SKY list would be fine. But it's incomprehensible that certain data is only available in certain places. There's no logical reason that I can pull withdrawal reasons in a SKY list but can't display them in an advanced list, and likewise, there's no reason I can only pull information about future year enrollment in an advanced list and not a SKY list.

@Sarah Bienvenue, I'm happy to give you all props as much as I can. I've defended Blackbaud until I'm blue in the face to our staff, almost all of whom have a hard time understanding why (task X) just doesn't work the way they want it to. No cloud-hosted database is ever going to be 100% customizable. So please take this not as a criticism but as a suggested goal: please set the bottom-line goal of having all data available in one place. We can figure out the details of determining what we need and how we get it. But where things fall apart right now is when you have no choice but to use multiple exports to patch together data that's all in there somewhere, but not accessible in a single output.

I hope this makes sense and I truly don't want it to come across as banal grumbling, because I certainly don't mean it that way!

John Ronan · March 2022

Sarah Bienvenue:
Hi John, I was responding to Kathleen's comment in which she stated that Blackbaud was no longer updating SKY lists. I wanted to make sure that she (and others following along) knows that we are still actively updating them and are happy to receive feedback in regards to what is needed.

Sarah,

I don't mean to come across as snarky, arrogant, or generally nasty. I am terribly frustrated.

All the following is specific to Advanced Lists (ALs), aside from the list schizophrenia that Brian brings up…

Here goes:

With all due respect [again], why is it incumbent on us, the users, to find the holes in advanced lists? There is a data model and [even a [non-searchable and most likely woefully obsolete] picture of it. ]. Can't you folks read that data model, find what's MISSING from ALs, and add it?

I can't help but think that putting one engineer [ or summer intern] on a task for a couple weeks would be much more efficient that having your users find the holes piece by piece, grow frustrated, and wait 3-6 months for an update.

And, by the way, I don't believe BB should need a groundswell of user requests for an obvious hole in functionality.

Kathleen Peak · March 2022

Hi Sarah - thanks for this. In the past, I've put my requests in the idea enhancement portal but they never get added to the lists so I gave up. I will try posting them here too. Basically, I think that any field that has data entered into it should be visible in a sky list to choose. Thanks K

Kathleen Peak · March 2022

Thank you for this Brian. This is exactly what we need!

Asim Chowdhry · March 2022

Reading the responses below, it obvious there's a common concern and frustration when it comes to accessing data.

I'm 100% on board with change and ok with moving to the cloud. However, having EE on-premise gave us IT folks easy access to all data in the past, specially being able to reverse engineer queries in EE and manipulate it in SQL to access all kind of data was very empowering. As John also indicated below: "Once again, with all due respect this is something that was available 15 years ago in Education Edge!"

Advanced Lists (ALs), SKY Lists, lists, reports, etc.. are all different venues to access data; but, no central place and not very easy to get access to detail data without having to export data and manipulate in excel, etc.. ALs does give some flexibility; but, can get REALLY tedious and not same as traditional SQL, with some roadblocks. Not sure if anyone has tried; but, one can access the back-end SQL server (for the BBK12/edu environment) through VPN also. BlackBaud does give you access to several views / queries. However, it does require VPN access and a number of steps to connect through SSMS and/or ODBC; which, can also be tedious and not an easy way to access data.

I also agree with Kathleen; she actively put ideas but very rarely they get attention. So, it feels useless to post.

I've seen BBK12 really evolving over the years with continuous improvements being made. It's a huge undertaking to make improvements/enhancements to the product; however, data (as we all agree) is the backbone! Hence, EXTREMELY important and should be the main/primary focus for BlackBaud. That is, providing easy access through one central location and also easily be accessible via APIs (for automation) with limited development skill would be ideal

Kim Hughes · March 2022

And sky lists don't pull into PushPage the last time I checked. We are stuck with the format that SKY gives you for parent names in one cell, etc. Plus, I've had the order of columns move when exporting, so what's the point of dragging and dropping on screen if it doesn't stay when exporting. The ability to name the column with headers that you need for export is helpful on occasion as well.

Advanced List Woes

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