We’ve been working on a major improvement to the parts of system admin which let you manage drop-down lists, and this is now available in all systems.
For anyone who has updated custom tabs and fields, outcomes, drop-down lists, or evaluations in system admin, you’ll notice a change straight away. Our update makes it easier to add and edit items, as well as to change the order of items that are already there.
We’ve prepared an information sheet showing the main controls that you’ll find in the updated pages. There are also some short videos explaining different aspects which you can find in section 52.4 of our help pages (you need to be logged in to a Lamplight system for this link to work). Our help pages have also been updated – you can find a wealth of information, including how general lists work, and working with custom tabs and fields. (you need to be logged in to a system for these links to work).
We’ll be having a video meeting for any system admins who want to come and find out more on Monday 3rd January from 10 a.m. to 10.30. Do let us know if you’d like to join in, and we can send you the details.
Here are Lamplight we’re always keen to find ways to make your experience of our system better, and support easier.
We’re rolling out a new option for some support calls and other planned meetings which allows you to share your screen with us. We’ve wanted to do this for a while because it means that when you have a problem you can show us exactly what is happening, but we never want to ask you to download new software onto your system, or create an account with a third party service.
We’ve now found Amazon Chime. To use it, we can create a unique web link which you open in a new web browser tab. We can then share screens, either showing you what is on our screen, or asking to see yours. There are no downloads or extensions to add, you don’t have to login to anything (you just type in your name and click ‘next’), and we can only ever see what you show us. We can’t access your data independently, nothing is recorded or stored, and we cannot take control of your system. Once the session ends so does the screenshare.
We will only ask to do this when we think it would be useful in resolving your issue, or for showing you something in Lamplight. It will always be your choice whether we do this or not. If you do want to, we will email you with details of the web link. And we won’t contact you out of the blue and ask – this will always be in the context of a question you’ve asked us, or on-going implementation or training.
We have been trialling it over the last few weeks and it has worked well, helping us to resolve issues faster and make training sessions more interactive.
If you are looking at activity records this morning you may notice a cosmetic change to the filter bar. We’ve done this to make it a little more obvious that you can click to change what you see in the table.
It was accompanied by a couple of minor changes to groups. You can now filter activity records by up to 24 months (rather than 12 previously), and you can also specify “up to 5 of…” for multi-select fields.
We’ve cut a third off the price of our reporting training day in central Birmingham on Monday 18th November. Birmingham is a new venue for us which sadly has not had as much interest as we’d hoped. Although it is undersubscribed the venue is still booked, so we’ve decided to let our Lamplighters reap the benefit and offer remaining places at a discount.
We have reduced the price to £145 per person, so if you’ve been thinking about training, or would like to hone your skills, now’s the time! This still includes training in an IT suite with all materials provided, and a two hour support pack to help you put your learning into practice.
On the day we will cover the best ways to get information out of Lamplight, and how to check the quality of data being put into the system. After this your support pack gives you two hours of 1:1 phone support where we help you to apply the learning to your own system and build the reports and lists that you need.
This offer is for our training in central Birmingham on Monday 18th November at Highbury Apprenticeships, Quayside Tower, Broad Street, B1 2HF.
To book a place, just email us: hello@lamplightdb.co.uk.
You can find out more about open training on our website: http://www.lamplightdb.co.uk/open-training-days/.
An update last night sees some improvements to outcomes. We’ve changed the layout of the main ‘activity > add > outcome’ screen slightly to make it clearer. If you are using an established outcomes framework that includes descriptors for individual scores, you’ll see there are now drop downs that give you the meanings of the number scores.
If you have any ‘calculated outcomes’ – where Lamplight works out a sub-total or total score for you – you’ll see in individual profiles you can now view these on their own radar chart (which works best when there are several sub-totals) – but the animation showing change over time may also be helpful.
Also on outcomes, if you show full details in a data view, Yes/No outcomes will be shown as ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ instead of 1 or 0 (though you’ll need to edit and save the data view first for this to take effect).
There’s also a new option in the relationships section of data views: ‘Name and contact details for download’. This gives you the same information as the ‘Name and contact details’ option – the address, phone and email of the related profile. The difference is that it separates it with a | symbol (the one next to Z on regular keyboards), and empty fields are included. This all means that if you use the view and download it, you can use the ‘text to columns’ functionality to split up the data and it’ll all be lined up properly (choose ‘delimited’ and enter the | symbol as the delimiter).
A couple of other tweaks in this update:
We’ve been working on major changes to your Lamplight help pages. Over the past few months they have doubled in size with more pictures and searchable pages to support you to get the most out of your system. We have also been adding in our video collections.
We’re excited to say that we’ve now rolled this out. There is a new ‘help’ tab on the main menu which will take you straight there. We hope you find it helpful!
A couple of changes have just gone live:
We’re currently working hard on a completely new and re-written help system – coming soon!
We have just finalised the last Reporting Open Training dates for 2019:
The price is £220 + VAT per person, and we provide all training materials and a computer to work on. It also includes a 2 hour support pack for use after the training to help you apply what you have learned to your organisation’s specific reporting requirements.
To book, email hello@lamplightdb.co.uk.
We will be adding more dates and venues for 2020 soon.
For more info see the Open Training page on the website.
There was a small update with some fixes and updates to the system this morning.
One that you may notice is that by default sending emails cc is no longer available as an option. You can enable this in system admin > global settings > communication settings if you really need it. But as cc emails are one of the most common ways that data breaches can happen, removing it by default makes accidents a little less likely without significantly reducing functionality.
Other changes include:
Calling all our northern customers. The last few places for the Edinburgh reporting training on 10th September are up for grabs. Are you getting the most from your data? Would you like to learn more about the different ways you can get information out of your system? Are there more efficient ways to run your regular reports?
For just £220 per person, all places come with a 2 hour support pack for 1:1 phone support after the training, helping you apply the learning and build the reports and lists that you need.
If you have any questions or would like to book a place, please email hello@lamplightdb.co.uk.