Tools Used:
View Time Security, Dynamic Parameters for Crystal Enterprise 9.
Background:
With more than 166,000 students, an area of nearly 400 square miles, 241 schools and centres, over 22,000 employees, & an operating budget of US$1.6 billion, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is one of the largest employers in Virginia.
An early visionary in the application of technology, FCPS relies heavily on computers for instruction, staff communication, and information deployment. The network infrastructure includes over 800 servers that support internet access, email, and administrative support across well over 70,000 desk-tops.
Challenge:
When governments demand that public schools use more data to measure and evaluate programs and education; when they implement new initiatives like "No Child Left Behind"; and when the community wants more information about their schools ….. enlightened school systems like FCPS look to technology for answers to strategic and operational issues.
In fact, FCPS is considered to be a premier K-12 school district in the nation because it long ago recognized the importance of technology in education—not only to enhance learning, but also to track and improve its strategic and operational goals. FCPS first wanted to let its school leaders—principals, school board members, administrators, teachers—gain easy access to data they needed (such as school enrollment, attendance, demographics, standardized test results, course marks, and so on) at any time. FCPS also wanted to let school leaders create customized views of the data for planning, implementing, and assessing educational programs and operational strategy.
By making this information more easily and more readily available, FCPS knew that the decision makers would have a well-rounded picture of their school’s performance to help facilitate improvements. And, of course, to communicate timely and accurate information to parents and other interested people. "We wanted to give our school leaders a user friendly one-stop-shop across the enterprise to support their decision making and communication activities," said Mr. Policastro.
Solution:
Create a data warehouse with metrics and student information
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Use Crystal Enterprise technology to extract, analyze, assemble and deploy information
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Use APOS to implement row-level security and personalized cascading dynamic lists for filtering on-demand reports
FCPS was an early adopter in developing a data warehouse, called the Education Decision Support Library (EDSL), to give users access to enterprise-wide data. They chose Crystal products because their customer focus group felt that these products were easier to use than other competing offerings. The initial solution roll-out included worksheets and reports for use with Crystal Analysis Holos. FCPS users were starting to easily access foundation information like membership and demographic data. FCPS kept adding data for use in reports and worksheets. Users could now begin to see information like standards of learning (SOL) curves, course enrollment information, grades, and so on.
Another aspect to the solution centered on the school structure and how to disseminate the information. The schools within FCPS are structured around pyramids that exist within clusters. Different levels of school leadership have access to different sets of data. Rising authority meant people could see more; so viewing security was an issue. Still another aspect involved dynamic parameters—some of the FCPS reports contained a larger number of parameters. So, when FCPS upgraded in 2002 to Crystal Enterprise 9.0, they partnered with APOS Systems to implement a more effective solution.
First, APOS used their View Time Security product to implement report bursting through row-level security. In addition, APOS created dynamic filters so that users could further filter the instance down and focus only on the information they need. The filter construction screen that was presented to the users displayed only the choices that users could choose according to their security level. They could save filters and reuse the filters as often as they like on multiple reports. Users can, for example, view three different reports containing data for a specific school without having to repeatedly select that school. In other words, the dynamic filters gave users a personalized interface for report instances—based on values they were allowed to use. "For example, a principal only wants to see his school data, not the data from all the other schools. We have a lot of pre-generated instances which includes the structure that we have in the school system. So we used the APOS View Time Security product to limit what principals could see out of the generated instances. In addition, they could use the dynamic filters to build a filter that they could apply to the instance for other views," mentioned Mr. Policastro.
FCPS also wanted increased on-demand dynamic reporting capabilities to handle large numbers of cascading parameters: For example, the 5th parameter may depend on the 1st, 2nd, and 4th parameters to display an accurate option list. So APOS implemented its Dynamic Parameters product. Here, when users run an on-demand report, they get a dynamically-generated, personalized and cascading list with potentially multiple parents. They could choose values from these list and then run the report based on those values. "In a way, this gives our users something akin to a query system. They can choose anywhere between 12 and 16 parameters from which they can filter the data they want," said Mr. Policastro.
Results:
The FCPS solution is a complex system. "We have a large system, approximately 17 million rows. Correlating all this data is not easy. And the Crystal products have certainly met our expectations here. We wanted to put information in one spot and make it easy for a wide range of people—from casual users to knowledge workers—to gain access and use the information to suit their needs. The Crystal products helped us meet these requirements", said Mr. Policastro.
The APOS View Time Security and Dynamic Parameters Add-In software proved to be an ideal complementary solution to Crystal Enterprise. "These Add-In Software tools gave us the ability to let our users see what they wanted to see and what they were allowed to see without having to write a lot of code", said Mr. Policastro. "Besides, the APOS-Crystal relationship is as close to a one-stop shop as you can get", he added.
Why APOS?
APOS Systems Inc. is an SAP BusinessObjects software solution provider in the SAP PartnerEdge program. Named SAP BusinessObjects Technology Partner of the Year for the past three years, APOS has been a Crystal partner since 1996. APOS has acknowledged a key SAP BusinessObjects XI and Crystal Enterprise strength - its open architecture - and has designed and developed a variety of add-on solutions that offer customers additional capabilities within the SAP BusinessObjects XI infrastructure. When asked ‘why APOS’, Mr. Policastro said "Because Crystal Decisions recommended them. Besides, the APOS consultant knew his stuff. We have a very complex system and had some problems during implementation, especially performance issues. The APOS consultant not only helped us with implementing the APOS tools, but also helped us with system-level performance issues".
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Allan Pym, VP Sales and Chief Operating Officer
519.666.2020 or apym@apos.com