Hi all
Our agency serves a small town of 2,000 people. We still provide vacation checks to our residents. If they go on vacation, they can submit a form to us and we will either do a drive by or go around and check windows and doors, depending on their request.
I would really like to be able to enter these vacation checks in M43 and then use the data lake access to run a daily report against any active vacation checks. For instance, create a new report type called “Vacation Check” and set the event start date/time as the start date of the vacation check and set the event end date/time as the end date of the vacation check. Then create a data lake report that pulls out any requests that are active based on when the report is run.
The challenge, so far, is M43 does not allow future dates in the start/end dates for reports, at least as far as I know.
Has anyone else run into this type of need and found a way to do it with M43?
Good Evening:
The department where I work serves 28k plus people. We also offer vacation checks and thus far an electronic form or a paper one as we have been unable to locate a workaround in Mark 43.
Please share if you find a Mark 43 workaround.
Matt
We’re a new agency still in implementation and we’ll need this too. I have limited experience with the system, but these are my initial thoughts.
There’s an active and expiration date on Location Cautions. You could use the description field to drive your report (Security Check/Vacation Watch), but there’s not a notes field to define the requestor, contact, etc. You’d need to create a report with the requester’s info and address then extract what you need from the data lake.
If Tasks could be recurring with start and end dates that would work great. Maybe a feature request?
I also see that Alerts have beginning and end dates. Maybe a Security Check alert type can be created and assigned to a generic “Security Check” placeholder role. You could create a report as long as Alerts are replicated to the data lake. Alerts have a 256 character notes field which might be enough for the basics.
None of these options seem super elegant so I’ll be eagerly watching this thread for smart answers.
My agency does not do this, but I think your concept of creating a new report configured for this may be the best solution. I am not sure what structured data elements you require, but the initial report may include something like the address, event start and end time, owner contact information, and a brief narrative detailing the request. Perhaps these data elements can be collected within an unused report type (if your agency has any) that can stand alone. This may also be accomplished with an incident code on an offense/incident report. You could also create a label that provides reports that are associated to vacation checks. Then, you may be able to leverage the analytics module to build a report for addresses that have an “active” vacation timeframe based on the start/end dates. That dashboard could be cadenced to email a PDF every day/week/etc. to whomever is responsible for conducting the property check. You could do this externally with the data lake as well.
Subsequent data collection could be captured with supplements to the initial report. I am not sure what structured data elements you are looking to collect for the checks themselves, but if a supplement cannot accomplish what you are looking for then you could configure a fillable PDF that can be completed and uploaded as an attachment to a supplement report.
Just my thoughts. Hope it helps.
None of these options seem super elegant so I’ll be eagerly watching this thread for smart answers.
Add to that those are administrative entries, not typically line officer entries. I don’t think that is sustainable long term. My preference is to keep this at a level any officer can make an entry in the list as the vacation check requests come in.
However this was definitely outside-the-box thinking, I had not thought about this approach. That’s why I posted the question to the channel!
m not sure what structured data elements you require, but the initial report may include something like the address, event start and end time, owner contact information, and a brief narrative detailing the request. Perhaps these data elements can be collected within an unused report type (if your agency has any) that can stand alone.
I tried to work with Mark43 with this very approach a year ago. The challenge, at the time, was that the event start time could not be in the future. We get requests for vacation checks that do not start until one or two weeks from now so the “start” date for when we start the physical checks would not be clean, at least using the report event start date field. I’ll check in with M43 again and see if they have relaxed that restriction. If so, I think it would provide a more elegant solution by using a unique report type.
Good point regarding future dates. I am not sure whether that “rule” is configurable for the event or offense start/end dates.
Hopefully Mark43 can provide an elegant solution to record a future date range somewhere that can be leveraged in the analytics module or data lake.