Best Practices – Report Sharing and Editing

Here are some tips on report sharing and editing in Cloud and Private Host, which is much different than in 4.x.

If you plan on having multiple people involved in downloading and editing reports and budget forms, as well as sharing reports in Reporting, you should decide on a routine for this. A suggestion is to give one person, or a group of people, the responsibility of editing and sharing reports.

There are two ways to share reports:

• Share reports that are run: When you share executed reports, you send them to the recipients’ Archive or Email.
• Share report templates: For users that have access to the Live Reporting module, you can categorize the report template and share this category with other users.

When it comes to sharing reports and templates, there are a few things you should know:

• When you publish a report, the report template will be “official”. Other users can access the report template if you categorize it and share. Saving a report is just saving it as a Draft
• You can only share report templates that are categorized. This means you must create a Category and share this category with your colleagues or clients. This means you are sharing all the reports in this category. You can add and remove reports in the category as you like. See Manage Categories for more information.
• A report template in a shared category can be assigned to other categories by the users with whom you share your category. These categories can in turn be shared with other users than the ones with whom you originally shared your category. To “withdraw” the report template from other users, you must remove it from the shared category.
• Unsharing your category will not have any effect on shared categories that you do not own.
• Ownership of a report means that only the owner can change the name and delete that particular report. Anyone with Report Designer can edit reports and the last person to perform edits is considered the author of the report
• Anyone who you share a report with that has access to Report Designer can make edits to the report template and upload, and hence overwrite the existing copy.
  • There is no functionality that allows you to share report templates as read-only. In practice, this means that two people can work on the same report and whoever saves last will have the final version
• If a report has been shared previously, the old edition of the report in the users’ archives will be overwritten by the new edition.
• Unshare reports: Be aware that even if you didn’t originally share a category, you can still unshare other people’s reports in a category. This happens if you click a report in a shared category and click Categorize and then deselect the check box in front of the category (there will be a Remove text marked in red). If you the click Apply, this report will be removed from all users who have this shared category. This entails a risk because the owner will not be made aware
• When you click Send to Archive on a report that has already been shared with another user or group of users, you will get a warning that this report already has been shared, and if you would like to send the updated reports to the recipients’ Archive. This report will then appear as unread in their Archive.
• Report uploads are based on the report name and the user ID.

References

• The best practice would be to have one person or a group of people that work closely together in charge of the reports and the sharing of these.
• The best practice would also be to change the name of a report template if you know you will be making changes to it. For templates, only the person that downloaded the template the first time is considered the “owner” of the document and can change the name of it (or delete it). However, the owner of a report can assign a new owner. To see who’s the owner of a report, click the top part of the report and click it to see the back of the card.
• Also, make users aware that anyone can duplicate Whoever is in charge of the reports should make their users aware that if they will be making their own versions of a report, they should make duplicates and change the name of the reports and work on those rather than working on the “master” document. When you duplicate a report template, then it is copied and added to the list with the same status (draft or published) as the original report template.

In short,

1. UserA makes a report and publishes it.
2. UserB edits the reports and Saves it
   1. At this point, the UserA version has not been touched. If UserA opens the report, they will not see the change
3. User B publishes the report. This overrides UserAs version
   1. UserA now has edits that User B made
4. If UserA and/or UserB want to make report changes but not lose the original, they must Duplicate the report.