New Reports versus Original Reports


Userlevel 3

Is it just me or is the New Reports framework much worse than the original old reports framework? 

  • In New Reports in order to get real time updated data you have to refresh the data then wait for up to two hours.
  • In New Reports if you want to export data, after refreshing and waiting in step one above, you then have to wait longer for an email to arrive. Once that email arrives it then makes you click on a link to go back to the platform to download the report. The report then is a compressed file regardless of what size the actual file is. 
  • In New Reports, there really aren’t any “new reports” per se. Ok yes maybe a couple but hardly what I would call new over the old.

What was the intended upgrade or incentive to transition for old reports to new reports? Please don’t tell me that it’s all about having the ability to do custom column sorting or the addition of maybe a couple new filters. In my opinion, the reporting capabilities are lacking tremendously in the platform. And the New Reports are a step back. Why have so many steps and delays just to get at the data?

Ok I know you just came out with Docebo Learning Impact, but my understanding is that is at an additional cost. Why not improve the capabilities of the reporting instead of leaving it as it is with all the limitations and then say, well you can upgrade and pay more for this other new thing. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Sorry, just needed to voice my opinion about where things really need improvement. Please get back to the roots of the platform with improving the core foundation of features instead of constantly turning on a bunch of new “light switches” of new features. The “electrical panel” is being neglected.

Thank you

 


12 replies

Userlevel 6
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@MarkMBT I think the new reports framework was basically a facelift to bring the UI up to the new standards. I agree that having to refresh the data and how it exports the report was a pretty big step back so I still use the old reports sometimes if I need something right away -- I’ll be :disappointed_relieved:  if and when they take that away. I imagine that I’m like most of you in that I rarely use a report as is straight “out of the box.” I always have to manipulate it in some way. And, I frequently run into some snag with getting the information I need sometimes requiring two reports and then Excel or Google Data Studio to slice and dice into something useful. I think there are lots of suggestions in the Ideas Portal to improve reporting. Maybe there’s a Docebian in the community that can give us hope that reports are going to beefed up in the near future.

So I just thought of something as I was writing this. I have a scheduled report that goes out to Team leads for course completion status. This is created in the New Reports. I haven’t actually checked this but I’m assuming that the report is refreshed when it’s sent so I guess I am saying schedule your reports when you can to get around the manual data refresh thing. I’m off to test this to be sure but none of my team leads have come back to say the reports aren’t right so I think this is how it works:wink:

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I think the face-lift on how to pull the report and how they are presented is good. The design aligns with all of the other areas Docebo is updating.

Adding a comment then a question on top of the questions @MarkMBT asked …

In the new reports it tells you, this data will reflect information from yesterday (or whatever timeframe it says) and to get fresh data you have to wait…. which makes me worried and brings me to my question … is this what was going on in old report anyways, but they weren’t transparently communicating about when the data is from? Am I getting upset about running a report and it having old data, when that's what I’ve been getting all along?

I haven’t tested this , but now like @Cindy McElhinney,  I’m off to go test some old reports.

For complete transparency on my part, I have not moved away from old reports. I have only tested new reports a few times and was very disappointed with the results. I am actively telling my Power Users and Admins to only use the old reports and not the new ones. I already mentioned to my CXM, they are going to have to take the old reports out of my cold dead hands. :cowboy:

Userlevel 3

I’m the same, still using the old reports mostly. However everywhere I read, the old reports will be going away at some point. The old reports I have seen are real time as you would expect. In the New Reports, even if you schedule a report to be sent out, it does not refresh at the time you send it out. It is only once per day on an automatic schedule. I’ve never seen any other LMS platform behave in this way. https://www.docebo.com/knowledge-base/creating-managing-new-custom-reports/

Also with the old reports it would send the report as an attachment if you wanted to with scheduling. That is no longer available in new reports. 

Userlevel 6
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@MarkMBT Yes, so you’re right, old reports always refreshed. New reports not refreshed. And I hadn’t got around to testing the scheduling so thanks for letting us know that refresh does not happen before a scheduled report is sent. I was incorrect in my post above in that the scheduled report we have for team leads is set up in the old reports. Quite frankly if old reports goes away, for this reason for this one report alone, this would be a very big deal for us. The team leads get a report everyday during onboarding of their staff to track completion. For some installations including ours we have to manually select to refresh on new reports -- that is, it doesn’t happen automatically every night. (I wonder if the auto refresh is only for Enterprise -- we are Growth Plan). Anyway, me having to manually refresh everyday during onboarding is just not at all ideal. Now I am with @Dahveed they will have to take old reports from my cold dead hands:laughing:

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I like the dashboards but there are just not enough of them. Does anyone else use them ? 

I did like the branches dashboard and then realised it was so good because I had set time options incorrectly - now I have fixed the courses and they dont show as overdue the nice picture I had has disappeared. 

I can only see that I would need to manually manipulate the reports to get pretty pictures now 

Userlevel 5
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We will be starting our implementation in a couple weeks..  I have been living in the demo environment for about 3 months to get familiar with navigation of the platform.  This manual update was quite alarming to me as in my experience I am used to making volumes of data updates and running reports to reconcile and review for accuracy repeatedly.  Having to manually refresh every time before viewing a report is inefficient and counter productive.

I inquired as to why this is in place, and the reason was that there were customers with use cases where large volumes of data was being reported, and the real time reporting slowed them down.  It was because of that, that Docebo went to the idea of data Lakes as it generates large data quantities quicker.  Personally I would think that these large data sets are in the minority of reports being pulled by Docebo customers and that those could run in the background and get emailed out when processed vs impacting and inconveniencing the customer population.

I also find the overall report engine to be very lacking.  You can only report on certain elements that are made available in the custom menu, and not all fields in the system are available to output.  We should have the ability to literally build a report from the ground up and choose our own filters and dimensions.  Having to identify if we want a course report or a user report and then be provided a base framework is very primitive.  There needs to be greater access to all objects and all fields within the system should be able to be pulled in to a report IMO.

We haven’t even started implementation yet and I am already beyond frustrated at the fact that I can’t build certain reports I know we will need purely because of system limitations which will prevent me from performing my job 

 

Userlevel 1

WE too are disappointed the the New Reports has lost the functionality of Real time data AND being able to choose the time of day a schedule report runs. 

Since the Ideas Portal has been retired, where we can post our wish list to be considered?

 

Userlevel 1

@MarkMBT I think the new reports framework was basically a facelift to bring the UI up to the new standards. I agree that having to refresh the data and how it exports the report was a pretty big step back so I still use the old reports sometimes if I need something right away -- I’ll be :disappointed_relieved:  if and when they take that away. I imagine that I’m like most of you in that I rarely use a report as is straight “out of the box.” I always have to manipulate it in some way. And, I frequently run into some snag with getting the information I need sometimes requiring two reports and then Excel or Google Data Studio to slice and dice into something useful. I think there are lots of suggestions in the Ideas Portal to improve reporting. Maybe there’s a Docebian in the community that can give us hope that reports are going to beefed up in the near future.

So I just thought of something as I was writing this. I have a scheduled report that goes out to Team leads for course completion status. This is created in the New Reports. I haven’t actually checked this but I’m assuming that the report is refreshed when it’s sent so I guess I am saying schedule your reports when you can to get around the manual data refresh thing. I’m off to test this to be sure but none of my team leads have come back to say the reports aren’t right so I think this is how it works:wink:

@Cindy McElhinney I like where your head is at with “schedule your reports when you can to get around the manual data refresh thing”  But no...the reporting feature states,, actually warns,  that the “Last update of reports' data” is once a day at a preset time. 
Another lost functionality in the new report portal is not being able to choose the time of day it runs. (I guess it doesn’t matter if there is only one data refresh  :(  ) 

Userlevel 4
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One thing I’ve noticed is that when you schedule a New Report, the attachment will be compressed (i.e. you get a ZIP file, which needs to be extracted before you can open the actual report). I’m not sure what the reason is for this, but it creates a blocker for using e.g. no- or low-code solutions like Zapier to process those scheduled reports. With Zapier, for example, a trigger can be set up based on a new email received. The Zap can take a CSV attachment to that email, and parse the data inside. If there is a way to unzip the file in Zapier and then parse the data inside, it’s certainly a lot harder.

This is not a major problem for our team – we’ve since upgraded our stack so that reporting data is synced to our Business Intelligence systems via the API; and also we now have Docebo Connect, so our direct use of Zapier is very limited. That said, I did find it curious, and the thing about scheduled reports is that sometimes you want to address them to external stakeholders, some of whom may encounter this problem I just described. I imagine there must be many occasions where a ZIP file is genuinely better, but it would be nice to have a toggle for situations where compression creates more problems than it solves.

Userlevel 6
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There is an idea for real time refresh, open for votes. I don’t know why anyone thought a data lag for LMS reporting was a good idea. Many systems serve a world-wide community and “overnight” is relative. 

 

I agree with all the comments and have complained to our account reps about New Reports every chance I get. It’s basically useless, as there few if any additional features that are worth waiting the processing time for. I use Old Reports exclusively. The interface change is cosmetic. Had I known how awful Docebo’s custom reporting capabilities were when evaluating the system (which was difficult because we had a limited amount of data to report on) I may well have chosen another LMS. I’ve worked on many different LMS platforms and Docebo’s reporting is by far the worst.

I would simply like to be able to schedule a NEW REPORT at a specific time of day / time zone, like you could with the (OLD) REPORT function,

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