Good afternoon, Midrealm!
As part of the new services that we have rolled out for everyone, several questions have risen that I want to share with you all.
Reporting System
As many of you have already discovered, we have a new officer reporting system in the services portal that allows users to file and view reports for themselves and any deputies that they have. The design idea behind this is a unified place that works the same regardless of the office a report is being filed for. Each office type will have its own set of questions that the Kingdom Officer would like answered. The reporting system works in three basic steps:
- Selecting the year, quarter, and office the report is for
- Answering the office specific questions
- Submitting the report
The act of submitting does some things behind the scenes that are not readily apparent to the person submitting the report. First, the last report date of officer for that office is updated. Second, and this is the piece that I wanted to address in the second part of this missive, is that an email is sent to the officers above the officer in the reporting chain. Also, an alert goes out to the seneschal of the group associated with the office. If you do the math, top level offices will get alerted for every office submission all the way down to the canton officers. For offices like the marshals and seneschals, this can be a lot of email alerts. This brings me to part two of this missive…
How to Filter Google Mail
Since we based the midrealm.org emails on Google Mail, there is a lovely feature that allows you to filter email that comes into your account and do interesting things with it to help you manage your inbox. Originally, I had intended to create a video specific to Midrealm Email, but it applies to ANY Google based email account. I found a video on YouTube that does a GREAT job of showing how to set up and filter mail in your account and cut down on the “noise” from the automated reporting alerts.
How to Use Gmail Filters and Labels by Simpletivity
What I would suggest is that you create a filter to a new label (I use Officer Reports) for everything coming from [email protected] (a dummy account that we set up just for this purpose and is common practice with automated alerts like this). This will allow you to not see in your inbox those alerts but still go an look later, bulk delete, or send to another label. Some officers want to know every detail up to the moment, and some want to go at it later. Our thought process behind the design of this system was flexibility. Everyone has different ways they want to consume information and we wanted to provide a versatile set of tools to allow you to do so, and not have to retool how the system works when the next officer comes in after you.
I hope the video helps you with managing your inbox either here on midrealm.org or in any Google mail based account you may have.
As always, if you run into difficulty, please send an email to [email protected] and one of our Helpdesk team will assist you.
Thank you for your time and happy filtering!
Master Rijckaert vanUtrecht, OP
Kingdom Web Minister