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As you know, UNCC blazed the trail in 1999-2000 when we initiated the effort in the state of Colorado to secure data collection via the Internet specific to the One Call center. Many of you are direct users of our established data format (File Upload Spec), and we have all reaped the benefits of a secure, stable, and always available system of Colorado Damage Reporting. In 2003, Common Ground Alliance asked for our assistance in producing a national pilot for reporting damages. Since then, our partnership has produced several versions of what is now known as Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT North America).
We thank you for your continued support by providing damage data to our system. At this time, we request your approval to share and upload your 2005 data into the national DIRT program. Please reply to me via e-mail by June 15th. It is very important to note that all non-responses will be considered as a vote to share your data with the Common Ground Alliance, DIRT North America.
As executive director of UNCC, I have the privilege of being involved in the evolution of DIRT with our membership very much in mind. CGA's Data Reporting & Evaluation committee along with our software engineers (contracted with UNCC) have spent the last four years refining and developing innovative features of this system. We are prepared to offer the DIRT North America along with industry standard secure web-based functions to our membership.
With this exciting news, UNCC and our membership will be taking a quantum leap forward to align ourselves with DIRT North America. You will be familiar with web form and data entry and Automated Data Loader & File Upload Spec since it originated in Colorado. These areas of DIRT North America are more robust now and offer a clearer and friendly user experience.
What's in it for you? We'll, here are a few other areas of DIRT North America that may be of interest.
* Query Wizard now offers 5 real-time with many reporting combinations of real-time pie charts, bar graphs, trend counts over year, quarter, month, etc.. You'll be able to instantly produce a pie chart of bar graph for use in a presentation, for example. In addition, you can output your own data into web, csv, or tab delimited formats.
* Executive Dashboard is a brand new feature that gives you visibility into key performance indicators (KPI) through simple visual graphics such as charts and tables (tabular data).
* Data Grant is a new feature that allows you grant/revoke access to your raw data for reporting purposes. This is purely optional.
* Role Based Security identifies users of DIRT North America as one or more of Company Administrator, Manager, or User. This hierarchical approach allows your designated Company Administrator to grant access and maintain a list of personnel from your own Company. This role allows you to enter data and/or edit data submitted by your company and generate reports on data submitted for your company. The Manager role allows for data entry, edit capability and report generation and the User role allows data to be entered into DIRT North America as well as viewing the data entered. There can be more than one Company Administrator and the user base for your company is unlimited.
There's also Company Administration (you manage your own company profile, add users), User Administration (personal profile), and the ability to browse the categories of damage/incident reports and file uploads.
Are there changes required on the part of UNCC membership? Yes, you will need to supply all of the DIRT required fields and you may not have some of them. We don't expect this to be a problem. We have worked with the committee to offer valid values of Unknown, Other, or Data Not Collected for use in cases like this. So, there's a chance that you may need to modify your transformation process to supply a few more values.
Is the URL of http://ebusiness.uncc.org
going to change? It will remain in place for some time. We have organized an immediate re-direct to take place in the event your browsers are automated processes use the current URL. Moving forward, our damage reporting URL will be
www.damagereporting.org/uncc
UNCC wants to make sure that this transition takes place as smoothly as possible for our membership, so we asked our Software Engineers to design a plan of migration. What came out of it was the concept of "Virtual Private DIRT". Virtual Private DIRT is a "container" of sorts that will host the UNCC participation in DIRT North America. We wanted to maintain our brand, color scheme, look & feel, and otherwise credibility. So, Virtual Private DIRT will give UNCC the opportunity to customize our "instance" of DIRT North America to look & feel like our very own. It's important for us to maintain our branding and consistency across all efforts. This is truly amazing technology that allows us collect data fields that are essential to Colorado, but are not part of the DIRT North American spec.
I invite you to visit DIRT North America at
https://www.damagereporting.org
and take a look at the Tools & Documentation section along with the Need Training section. Here, you will find the published 2004 Annual Report that really calls out why it is so important for us to participate at this level. You will also find the DIRT User Guide and the Spec. There are online training videos available (requires Flash program) to be viewed in your web browser for educational purposes. You may be interested in the Automated Data Loader, Data Grants & Query Wizard videos.
At this time, our migration plan doesn't require you to register with DIRT North America. We will communicate any registration steps if needed.
Hopefully, you have already submitted your 2005 damage data to the UNCC Colorado Damage Reporting Tool. Our development team will then be migrating your data if supplied into the UNCC database container in DIRT North America on or before June 30, 2006.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this application/data migration please do not hesitate to contact me at 303-205-6301 or
jdman@uncc.org.
J.D. Maniscalco
Executive Director
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