EP 89: Generic Inquiry Library Preview (Podcast)

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0:00 Introduction
2:21 The original Query Quarry idea
5:07 Settling on the GI Library name
6:22 What’s in the GI Library of the Building Generic Inquiries & Pivot Tables course
9:06 Ideas for future improvements after the launch
11:51 How to join the Course and get access to the Generic Inquiry Library
14:05 Wrapping up

Transcript

Tim 2:19
Today is Friday, June 17th, 2022, and this is Episode Number 89: Generic Inquiry Library Preview. So I’m going to preview, in this episode, something that I’m adding to my course, and the thing I’m adding is, I’m calling it a “Generic Inquiry Library.” It’s just me on this episode; I was lined up to talk to someone earlier this week about user groups and their experience doing a NetSuite User Group here in Ohio. Now, we’re still going to do that conversation, but the day we were supposed to record earlier this week, across Ohio there were widespread power outages, so power was out here in Columbus, where I’m at; it was also down out down in Cincinnati, about two hours away, where the person I was going to interview is at, so we cancelled the interview. And I figured now would be a good opportunity to just use this week to talk about the Generic Inquiry Library that I’m adding to my course.

Tim 3:28
Now, originally, before I built the—this is for the ‘Building Generic Inquiries and Pivot Tables’ course that you can find on the top of AUGForums.com at ‘Courses’—and, originally, I was thinking to build something that I was going to call ‘Query Quarry’. It’s kind of hard to say the first part of that; ‘Query’ is for Generic Inquiry, and then the ‘Quarry’, the idea was, if you don’t know what a quarry is, think of it like a mine, but typically for rocks, not something like gold, but, you know, think of it like a mine. And the idea was, you know, the way you get data out of Acumatica is with Generic Inquiries, so that’s the ‘Query’ part, and it’s like a mine; you need to kind of get down into the data, get dirty, just like you do in a mine, in order to surface the data, and get it out of the ground, so to speak, get it out of Acumatica; once you do that, then you can do interesting things with it, and so that was the idea. The original idea was ‘Query Quarry’. But, I decided to build the course first, because I realised that it’s not that useful to have a bunch of sample Generic Inquiries if you don’t know how to use Generic Inquiries, or how to build them, how to modify them. There’s a lot of out-of-the-box Generic Inquiries in Acumatica; a lot of people don’t even know they’re there, so there’s another thing to cover in the course. And so the idea with the course was to empower you to know how to use that tool, and then layer the samples in on top of it.

Tim 5:06
So I decided to do away with the ‘Query Quarry’ name, because it’s hard to say, and it’s maybe overly thought, or overly clever. There is a little bit of a nod to Query Quarry, though, in the new thing that I’m building—see if you can spot it for those of you who are in the course—but I decided to come up with a simpler name, and actually I did a an email blast out to the email list to see, give people some options and see which name they preferred. I gave six choices: Generic Inquiry Examples, GI Examples, Generic Inquiry Samples, GI Samples, Generic Inquiry Library, and GI Library. 61 people responded, and 25 people voted for GI Library. The next closest was 17 people voted for Generic Inquiry Library. So, that seemed to be the popular choice there, so I’m going to call this the GI Library, but, you know, I think, within the course I call it the GI library, and when I’m talking about it, like I’m doing on this podcast episode, I’ll call it the Generic Inquiry Library.

Tim 6:22
Now, I found that even though I started with the course, things kind of naturally evolved into the Generic Inquiry Library. Because after building the foundational knowledge area of the course, what I call the Foundational Knowledge Area, I then have a second area that I call the Tips and Tricks Area, where there are some video training lessons on specific tips and tricks. But, the more I did Tips and Tricks lessons, the more I found that it was all about the examples. And so it wasn’t so much any more about the video part and learning how to do the example, it was just about having the example to look at. So I think once you have that base knowledge in place, then it kind of, it comes down to, Alright, let’s have as many examples as possible. That’s why I’m adding this third area into the course, the GI Library Area.

Tim 7:17
So, it’s taking a little while to build; we had to do some PHP coding on the website to add this into the course, but I’m happy with how it’s turning out, I think it looks nice and clean, and I think it’s real simple to browse, you just scroll through the examples. I made sure to have screenshots; eventually I might add in little video demos, which is kind of what the Tips and Tricks lessons have turned into; they’re almost like a demo of the solution, and then it quickly shows you how to build it. Well, now the idea would be, maybe we’d have a demo and just download it and import it into your environment.

Tim 7:56
So the idea is to allow you to browse easily and see the screenshots of it to see which one do you want to import into your own environment, then you’d also be able to—and this is something we do have working—you can click into a specific Generic Inquiry and get the download links there, and then also add comments to it, so you can have a running conversation on a specific Generic Inquiry, and maybe you have some questions about something you’d like added to it or a question about how it’s working. There’s a, kind of a social component there. So I think, you know, what my goal with this is that I put out examples on a regular basis, just keep adding to this Generic Inquiry Library, and then you still have a way, it’s almost like a private forum. So it is all within the course; you do have to be in the course in order to access this, but, you know, we can have conversation about the specific Generic Inquiries that are there. And then of course, you know, I’m still taking suggestions for ones that people want added into the library.

Tim 9:06
Now, later, I want to launch this, just get it going, get people accessing it, downloading the Generic Inquiries—there’s some tricky things there with, well, not tricky, it’s just kind of mundane things you have to—my plan is to have an XML file for each Generic Inquiry available for download, but I need a download button for each version of Acumatica, because the XML files are a little bit different between the versions. So that’s just, it’s a lot—it’s mundane work to generate all that stuff. But I’ve got someone helping me with the back end of that now, and we’re making good progress on that.

Tim 9:45
So I’m gonna launch it with the list with the screenshots with the ability to comment on individual Generic Inquiries, have a conversation about it. And then later I’d like to add in a search component to the GI Library, categorize things maybe by module or by edition, like construction, manufacturing, etc. But for now, just launch the list and start adding to it, because I think the examples are really important, but not just to have an example, but be able to ask questions about it and have a conversation on it. So that’s it. That’s the Generic Inquiry Library preview; hoping to launch this within the next month or two, by the end of the summer, basically, is my goal to get this launched, and for those who are in the course, you’ll just have access to it, just part of the course.

Tim 10:40
I did think originally that maybe I would do a separate course for this specifically, but, you know, I’ve got too many ideas for courses. I’d like to do one on Power BI, maybe at some point. But, I’m learning that there’s a lot of work around launching a course and marketing it and not confusing people with so many courses, so I’m just adding the Generic Inquiry Library into the existing Building Generic Inquiries and Pivot Tables course. And so I’m going to focus on that, and I’d still like to do something with Power BI in the future, maybe even something with Velixo, but I’m kind of leaning towards maybe just adding everything into this one course; maybe I rename the course at some point. But, there’s just all sorts of interesting data things that you can do with Acumatica, Generic Inquiries as the base. And so I think it might make sense just to keep adding things into the one course. Not entirely sure on that, but for sure, with the Generic Inquiry Library, this will just get added into the existing Building Generic Inquiries and Pivot Tables course.

Tim 11:51
So, that’s my heads up on that, just using the opportunity this week, since the power outage killed my planned episode, thought I’d still get an episode out and let you know it’s coming. So if you’re not in the course, you can check out augforums.com/courses; you’ll see a link in there for the monthly webinar that I do. It’s a 30 minute webinar, explains the course, plays a sample lesson from the course, and also gives you a coupon code for $300 off the price of the course. And if you join the course, once the Generic Inquiry Library is included, or added to the course, you will get access to it.

Tim 12:31
I think there’s just so many different ways that you can pull data out of Acumatica with a Generic Inquiry, so many different techniques; the way you can group things, the way you can filter things, the clever ways you can use parameters, the way you can use pivot tables—just so many different ways to do things and so many different modules to pull from. You can pull from that financial data, the distribution data, manufacturing, CRM data, and there are clever ways that you can link things together. And so I’m really looking forward to just continuing to add to this library with creative examples of Generic Inquiries. Because no one wants to have to build everything themselves, right? I think that a lot of people get into Acumatica and they’re frustrated, pretty early on, by the lack of out of the box reporting. And so the idea here is to meet that need. Of course, these are Generic Inquiries only; these are not the report designer, the printable reports, but just helping you to get to the data, and giving you samples to look at. And then it’s all in the course format, so you take the course, you learn how to build Generic Inquiries, and then you just use the examples to broaden your skill set and allow you to build more Generic Inquiries using the the examples that you have in the Generic Inquiry Library.

Tim 14:04
So that’s all I’ve got. Let me know what you think. I’m going to actually turn on for, I believe the first time on this episode, page, AUGForums.com/Episode89, I’m going to turn on the comments feature on that page. It’s actually the same comments feature that I’m enabling in the Generic Inquiry Library area. So feel free to add a comment to this episode. Let me know what you think, let me know your own ideas for Generic Inquiries that you’d like to see added to the GI Library, and I’ll get working on adding those.

Tim 14:45
All right, well, that’s it for now. We’ll catch you on the next episode of AUGForums.com Real Talk. Thanks for listening, and take care.