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Scoutbook Acquired By Bsa


fred johnson

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http://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2015/05/27/scoutbook-creator-shawn-jackson-sits-down-for-a-quick-chat

 

BSA is about to start pushing ScoutBook.  So far from what I see, it will be a long time before I'd suggest any of my scouting units use it.  

 

What do you think?  

 

Test drove it for a while. No where near what Troopmaster coupled with the mytroop websites by SOAR can do. Better graphics than TM/SOAR but the functionality is weak. Would agree with your assessment.

Edited by Bad Wolf
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Bad Wolf ... Agreed.  We use SOAR.  It's great.  We stopped using Troopmaster as no one really needed the data.  We enter the merit badges and ranks directly in ScoutNet.  It produces a nice pick sheet PDF file for shopping at the scout shop.  There are a few key roster and advancement reports from ScoutNet we can run on demand.  Plus, it's the official source.  Nothing like getting the key data from the horses mouth.  

 

We've been doing this for years and it's really all we need.  The rest just seemed like busy work ... so we stopped.  IMHO, I think we are better off this way.  

 

Of course, without SOAR we'd be hosed ... and no ... I do not work for SOAR.  

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I have to ding Troopmaster.  Their messaging app had a hiccough last year, and it's never recovered.  Mysterious dropping of some eMails to some people.  We have to use spreadsheets to be sure that everyone gets troop communications.

 

New advancement chair taking over.  He'll get to decide if we switch.

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I have to ding Troopmaster.  Their messaging app had a hiccough last year, and it's never recovered.  Mysterious dropping of some eMails to some people.  We have to use spreadsheets to be sure that everyone gets troop communications.

 

New advancement chair taking over.  He'll get to decide if we switch.

 

Ours is working fine. We found that if everyone who has TM did not update their software the problem remained.

 

All fixed now. Has been since about two weeks after it happened.

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We finally have gotten our records in TroopWebHost in the shape we need them (after moving from Troopmaster).  I hope we aren't forced to Scoutbooks.  I can't take another move of that much data. 

 

Forced? Who would force you? BSA has enough problems.

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Well, we could be forced to enter records into Scoutbook before buying advancement patches......

 

Well we have to do that with Internet Advancement now....if we want the free ranks. Thanks to TM that's a simply file to import.

 

Thanks to technical people, the various systems can export data for import in to BSA systems. If BSA starts to get preachy on what we can/can't buy it will be yet another "change" they are trying to force on units. I don't think they have the time or inclination to push something like this.

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I looked at a bit a long while back... looked at all of those tools I could find.... although I don't recall it well specifically so it didn't shine.. but that was probably because I was looking from the perspective of cubs

Determined they were all nearly worthless at the cub level.  No real need to track anything, and that seems to be a major focus

We do need communications and calendar tools, which it seems to do ok.

 

I'm looking forward to see what BSA does or doesn't do with it....

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We use TroopMaster and SOAR. They're both a hack using archaic technology. However, the reason we've been asked to use scoutbook is because it will help the council. That doesn't seem to imply it will help us, so we're not interested.

 

Scoutbook doesn't have a website part, costs twice as much as TroopMaster (for us), and doesn't integrate with SOAR. So we have no reason to use it.

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