Last spring David Fisk in the Maine MEP challenged us to find a way to make MIS2000 data available to a greater variety of reporting tools. He was trying out all sorts of tools and online services and mapping applications as ways to organize and direct their recruiting and services effort during blueberry harvest. He had been telling people how to run a report via WebSnap, save off the data, and then refresh their reporting tool to see the new data. My first attempt at something better is described in this blog post from last fall. It was a step in the right direction because it eliminated some of the steps the users would have to take to get fresh data, but it was still pretty cumbersome. David went on to try using Microsoft's OneDrive to address more of the issues, but it was still far from perfect.

Last summer Alabama had a completely unrelated problem that wound up having very similar needs as David's problem. I'll go more into the Alabama issue in a later post, but suffice it to say that it forced me to develop a more general way to get raw data out of MIS2000 easily, securely and programmatically. By "programmatically" I mean that it can provide data to another program rather than to a human. This is really what was needed to allow David's reporting tools to access the raw data in MIS2000.

So we did some proof of concept projects in November that culminated in being able to run any kind of Snap Report as if it were what's called a "Web Service" so that just about any kind of program can use the data but we still have good control of security. David is finally able to do what he wanted all along - use sophisticated tools like Microsoft's Power BI to provide his recruiters and service providers with up to the minute information without having to ever leave their dashboard. They just click the Refresh button whenever they want to fetch new data.

You can download some of David's actual documents here, here, and here. And I've provide screenshots below: