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What's the best way of externally doing reporting? PowerBI? Other?

lrodman
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I need to get data out of my system and into some sort of better reporting dashboard. My power users are communicating with me about how much they hate docebo reporting, and we don’t have time to wait for docebo to revamp it.

 

Who here (I know @bfarkas) uses external reporting? That is, tools to run your data into better reporting interfaces for power-users to utilize. What’s the best and easiest? I’m willing to spend more in return for greater ease of use on my end getting it up and running. I need this deployed and I need it yesterday! Help!

 

I do already have working PHP code to pull usernames from iframe and to then query via api for data that is needed.

 

Thank you!

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Best answer by Bfarkas 5 March 2023, 22:54

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Bfarkas
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When it comes to external reporting, its generally all about your ecosystem. Most places are already using something that can do it, or have an ecosystem that an add-on can help, you brought up PBi, if your a microsoft shop that does make sense, some places are a tableau shop so that makes sense, and others have other tools, no need to re-invent the wheel. 

At the end of the day, to do most of what you will probably want at the scale you are looking for, you are essentially looking at using the docebo reporting engine to grab bulk raw data, and then bring it to a place that can read it, digest it, and build your dashboards off of it. Depending on precisely what you want that can turn into building your own databases so that you are just sending diff files that are manageable, but you can run into issues of disconnect there at times, so be careful.

The API’s for raw data can get tricky at volume due to restrictions on calls, but can be useful in combination with set reports.

 

lrodman
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Really I think I’m looking at exporting all courses and completions to an external engine, and then having a daily feed over. 
 

We are mostly a Microsoft and Amazon and Adobe shop over here. 

Bfarkas
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Basically yeah. The tricky part of that daily feed is how far back does it go. Reports get cranky at certain sizes, so depending on how you have your report structure setup for those daily files, past date is sometimes the best restriction to keep size down. That then brings in issues of like do you allow manual updates to completions that are old and don't sync over automatically. Built separate processes to manage that.

lrodman
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Yeah, I would just have the daily reports pull a single day and run at 1am or something every day. That sounds reasonable right.

 

I already have all the old completions in a folder since we just migrated to docebo, so that part’s pretty easy. There’ll be some patchwork whackamole with data in the past 6 months, but other than that I have a clean single data source 2012-2022.

Bfarkas
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So, we were doing 60 day hourly reports, and would get support tickets that were trainers updating attendance older than 60 days old, that we would trigger a full user refresh, or users who left and came back to get their accounts right, but you might not have either of those cases.

lrodman
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hm. wouldn’t there be some way to capture “all completions entered today” vs “all completions that have a completion date of today”?

 

good point.

Bfarkas
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If there is, would love to know it :)

lrodman
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We also use salesforce lightning, could that be a good place to do this? We do at some point plan to start pushing completions data to SF anyway. I figured MS PBI is probably cheaper even if we already have SFL. SF is $$$ AF.

lrodman
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The catch on SF is I want my power users - who aren’t permissioned in my SF - to see outputs. I presume I could run it all through my SF profile through APIs somehow, but maybe not.

Bfarkas
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We also use salesforce lightning, could that be a good place to do this? We do at some point plan to start pushing completions data to SF anyway. I figured MS PBI is probably cheaper even if we already have SFL. SF is $$$ AF.

Sounds more like you need a datastore or similar to just store the data centrally and then let SF or PBI or whatever to tap into it to read and report what you want in each system.

lrodman
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We have AWS and SFTP-files.com, do you suggest another? We have other datastores too. We use heroku but that’s very expensive and we are trying to get away from that.

Can’t MSPBI or SF store the data?

Bfarkas
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You really probably want to get a data/systems architect to evaluate your precise setup, short/medium/long term goals and figure out the best plan for all. The answer to all of your questions above is, sure you can, figure out the best path forward takes detailed analysis of your setup and organizational requirements. Structuring datastores for this kind of stuff is often its own specialty to accommodate different types of analysis regardless of systems.

lrodman
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You really probably want to get a data/systems architect to evaluate your precise setup, short/medium/long term goals and figure out the best plan for all. The answer to all of your questions above is, sure you can, figure out the best path forward takes detailed analysis of your setup and organizational requirements. Structuring datastores for this kind of stuff is often its own specialty to accommodate different types of analysis regardless of systems.

oh boy. ok.

know someone you like who knows docebo?

RyanBerardi
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We are “almost there” with a Power BI dashboard.  There are some API tools that are not functioning properly within Docebo (they are aware and working on it), however, there are a couple of workarounds our BI Analysts are using.  This is super exciting for us...having this dashboard allows us to really use user feedback in really sophisticated ways.

I’d also be remiss not to call out our recent increased use of Chat GPT to give us summaries of descriptive data.

lrodman
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We are “almost there” with a Power BI dashboard.  There are some API tools that are not functioning properly within Docebo (they are aware and working on it), however, there are a couple of workarounds our BI Analysts are using.  This is super exciting for us...having this dashboard allows us to really use user feedback in really sophisticated ways.

I’d also be remiss not to call out our recent increased use of Chat GPT to give us summaries of descriptive data.

Tell me more! 
For PowerBI, we are interested in hiring a consultant with some Docebo experience. If you’re interested in this let me know!

 

For ChatGPT what do you mean by descriptive - qualitative, like survey feedback? You’re also making me realize that I can probably paste in a 500-1000 line csv and say “summarize this data in 10 sentences or fewer”

RyanBerardi
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Hey @lrodman ...happy to share more.  The work of making a Power BI Dashboard actually resulted in us adding a staff member fully dedicated to this work and learning Docebo “like a boss” (very technical term...I know :-) ).   Until the API tools are fixed, are trying one of two things.

1. Have the API push a request into Docebo whenever a new course is made.  This request (you’ll have excuse my lack of technical expertise...our BI Analyst assigned to this project is my savior in this realm) will create a custom report with the fields that we need.  This custom report is then essentially .csv file that can be pulled into the Dashboard with variables that can be manipulated.  We want to do a super deep dive...I want to every answer to every quiz (multiple choice and text feedback) so that we can sort by departments, months, years, etc. to help us grow.

 

2. If the above doesn’t work, we could ask each user to create a custom report with fields that we give guidance on.  This is obviously a real pain, but COULD work if needed.

 

Chat GPT - 

I’d love to have more conversation with you, or anyone, on the massive amount of time this tool has saved.  We are just getting started with what it can do.  See my LinkedIn post here..

 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryan-berardi-57261761_chatgpt-3-has-everyone-talking-atd-activity-7037538481295761408-X1vZ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop (I go into my uses in the comments)

 

To answer your question directly, you can paste qualitative data and say, “summarize this...and by the way, make sure to call out any comments on the topic of ___, even if it wouldn’t normally stand out.”  You can also make your link publicly accessible, and tell it to “summarize the data in column __, but only if column is labeled, “ ____”

 

The Excel wizards may say, “Pivot Tables” can do most of this.  I agree, but that takes me another 5 - 10 minutes.  Those 10 minutes add up over the course of a week.

-Ryan

Bfarkas
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Hey @lrodman ...happy to share more.  The work of making a Power BI Dashboard actually resulted in us adding a staff member fully dedicated to this work and learning Docebo “like a boss” (very technical term...I know 🙂 ).   Until the API tools are fixed, are trying one of two things.

1. Have the API push a request into Docebo whenever a new course is made.  This request (you’ll have excuse my lack of technical expertise...our BI Analyst assigned to this project is my savior in this realm) will create a custom report with the fields that we need.  This custom report is then essentially .csv file that can be pulled into the Dashboard with variables that can be manipulated.  We want to do a super deep dive...I want to every answer to every quiz (multiple choice and text feedback) so that we can sort by departments, months, years, etc. to help us grow.

 

2. If the above doesn’t work, we could ask each user to create a custom report with fields that we give guidance on.  This is obviously a real pain, but COULD work if needed.

 

Chat GPT - 

I’d love to have more conversation with you, or anyone, on the massive amount of time this tool has saved.  We are just getting started with what it can do.  See my LinkedIn post here..

 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryan-berardi-57261761_chatgpt-3-has-everyone-talking-atd-activity-7037538481295761408-X1vZ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop (I go into my uses in the comments)

 

To answer your question directly, you can paste qualitative data and say, “summarize this...and by the way, make sure to call out any comments on the topic of ___, even if it wouldn’t normally stand out.”  You can also make your link publicly accessible, and tell it to “summarize the data in column __, but only if column is labeled, “ ____”

 

The Excel wizards may say, “Pivot Tables” can do most of this.  I agree, but that takes me another 5 - 10 minutes.  Those 10 minutes add up over the course of a week.

-Ryan

The other thing to keep in mind if you are doing power bi is before there was chat gpt, there were several intelligence api’s from microsoft that integrate in well, and can do things like evaluate open ended questions without some of the issues from chatgpt since they are architected different and been around a bit longer to become more robust. Used to use these to quickly understand open text without someone having to review and then make available in dashboards. 

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