Getting useful data back out of MIS2000 is about as important as getting data into it. We've always offered a rich and powerful report development system and ways to deliver reports to different kinds of users, but delivering report data to another program is something we've been working quite a bit on recently. The best way to do this is using what are known as web services in the industry. I'll be writing more about those in a later blog post.

Our first implementation for pulling data from MIS2000 through the web without user interaction was done in the early part of 2016 to support Maine's Blueberry Harvest service effort in the late summer. David Fisk (ME's State Director) has played around a great deal with using a lot of data presentation tools like Excel, Maptive, and Microsoft's Power BI. He had developed a lot of impressive dashboards for displaying data pulled from MIS2000, but getting fresh data into them required running the reports manually using WebSnap and then saving off the raw data for import into the tool.

We worked together to simplify the situation quite a bit so that he could embed a single url into his dashboard that his users could click on to get the latest data. They only needed to save it into a particular folder and refresh Power BI to get the latest view. You can see how the data link would work by clicking on this link:

https://test.msedd.com/me/Framework/WebSnapASP.aspx?ReportName=StudentsServedFlag

David showed this to his users like this:

I'm hoping that next year we'll be able to better automate all of this so that his user dashboard will be updated by the click of a button.

If you'd like to explore using live data from MIS2000, let me know.