{"id":124,"date":"2006-10-05T13:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-05T13:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/?p=124"},"modified":"2006-10-05T13:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-05T13:28:00","slug":"checking-in-at-times-of-danger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/05\/checking-in-at-times-of-danger\/","title":{"rendered":"Checking-In at Times of Danger"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, my administrator charged me with having  in place by Monday&#8217;s staff meeting a very simple online system that we can use for staff to check-in if we should have another disaster such as the tsunami. <\/p>\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t work to just have staff tell us their travel plans ahead of time because the staff is too large and plans change too easily.   We need a super simple, online way for staff to quickly and easily check-in to let us know they are safe, and maybe give contact information for where they are on their holiday.<\/p>\n<p>As I try to get my brain around what this should look like, We&#8217;ve come up with the following criteria. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Should be linked to our school web site or have such an easy URL that staff will remember it.<\/li>\n<li>Should allow one person to check-in everyone they are traveling with.  (Yes, this can lead to problems&#8211;everything related to user-entered data has potential for problems.  It is all a balancing game.)<\/li>\n<li>Should have a comments field.<\/li>\n<li>Should have a password, but it should be one we all know- fortunately we have one of those.<\/li>\n<li>Should allow administrators to easily sort to determine who is not yet checked in.<\/li>\n<li>The basic login should take them to a form that helps them search for their record.  However, users should be able to browse through the database in list view so that they can see that colleagues are safe.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I won&#8217;t allow users to delete records, but I may need to allow them to add a new user since our school is large and I am not automatically notified when someone new is added to our division.  However, that almost guarantees that users already in the database will re-enter themselves.  Maybe users should have to option to search by name or by their school email address.  Hopefully we won&#8217;t have both their name and their email address incorrectly entered into the database.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve checked out a number of applications.  I first thought to use <a href=\"http:\/\/scr.spreadsheets.google.com\">Google&#8217;s spreadsheet tool<\/a>, since Google&#8217;s servers are so stable.  However, it leaves the data too vulnerable.  It&#8217;s too easy for users to accidentally delete data.<\/p>\n<p>Next I looked at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zoho.com\">ZohoCreator<\/a>.  I love the idea of that tool, but I find it terribly confusing. Every time I try to use it I watch the demo videos, and I still find myself endlessly generating views and forms and never quite getting what I expect.  Despite my struggles with it, this tool could work.  It allows me to create a private database and then add users to it.  I can group the users and give different groups different privileges, so that staff could enter data, and administration could do more with it.  ZohoCreator has the added benefit that I can embed the form on a web page or blog and still have the data stored at Zoho.  We could add a page to our website and embed the form on it, making it easy for staff to use.<\/p>\n<p>Then I realized that we are able to access our FileMaker server via our web site.  The down side is that it is not pretty; the user is given a rather cryptic list of databases from which to choose.  Another challenge is that the passwords for accessing that are already set and not as easily remembered as I want.  However, I may be able to change that. <\/p>\n<p>Filemaker is an appealing tool because we already have it and I&#8217;ve been trying to increase my abilities to create databases using it.  It is powerful enough to allow us different access for different users.  I can make the pages visually easy to use.  I think it is the tool for the job.  I can easily set up something basic, and as I have time, I can improve upon it.  Wish me luck.<\/p>\n<p>I welcome words of wisdom regarding the project in general or Filemaker in particular.  I&#8217;ve taken good Filemaker courses, but I have very little experience actually creating databases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, my administrator charged me with having in place by Monday&#8217;s staff meeting a very simple online system that we can use for staff to check-in if we should have another disaster such as the tsunami. <\/p>\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t work to just have staff tell us their travel plans ahead of time because the staff [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssedro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}