Self-Service Reporting Tools for Administrators

Access to this product feature is dependent on your institution's Watermark agreement
Base | Faculty Accomplishments | Reviews, Promotion and Tenure | Web Profiles

This article will cover the tools available to you to, as a Faculty Accomplishments Administrator, to manage Self-Service Reports with ease.

Before you begin to learn more the tools available to you, keep the following in mind:

A general guide to creating a Self-Service

Self-Service Reports are useful for creating:

  • Annual activity reports.
  • Promotion and tenure documentation.
  • Standard university CVs
  • Discipline-specific reports.
  • Standardized reports(e.g. accreditors, marketing departments).
  • Responding to data requests.
  • Reviewing data for a faculty member to determine if there is any missing or inaccurate information.

This article will cover the tools available to you to, as a Faculty Accomplishments Administrator, to manage Self-Service Reports with ease.

You and your faculty may already be familiar with the Customizable CV tool, which allows users to create and edit formatted reports using their own data. These reports are completely flexible, allowing users to add and reorder sections and maintain complete control over the formatting, filtering, and grouping of activities within that report template — all without any work request processing by the Watermark professional services team!

Once you are familiar with how these self-service tools help users who need to generate custom reports on their own activity data you will find it useful to explore the self-service reporting features that are designed for users who run reports on other users’ data.

These features make it possible to use Self-Service Reporting for purposes like:

  • Annual activity reports
  • Promotion and tenure documents
  • Standard university CVs
  • Discipline-specific report templates
  • Standardized reporting to specific audiences, like accreditors, your university's marketing department, etc.
  • Responding to requests for specific information
  • Reviewing data for missing or inaccurate information

"Preview" Report as Another User

As you're building a new report, you may want to see at-a-glance how the report would look for various users based on the data they have in Manage Activities. For instance, users in your College of Fine Arts may have very unique data as compared to users in the College of Natural Sciences. The "Preview As" icon in the report that is available after expanding the Options tab allows you to do just that.

This is especially useful when building and proofing a report that needs to run well across users who capture data with very different structures.

A report creation page showing a formatted preview of a professional report with sections such as Professional Positions, Education, and Licensures, along with toolbar options for web profiles, sharing, formatting, filtering, grouping, excluding sections, and exporting to PDF or Word, with a Save Report button available.

Maintain Awareness of Restrictions

Your Faculty Success instance may have screens or fields that are only available to certain areas. For instance, faculty in the College of Business must select an "AACSB Classification" for their publication records for those records to appear in certain AACSB tables. In most instances, those AACSB-specific fields will be restricted to users in the College of Business.

Read more about screen and field restrictions

Rather than having to refer to your Configuration Report to identify these restricted fields while building a report, we have introduced the "dagger (†)" character to denote fields that have access restrictions. To identify the restricted fields, follow these steps:

  1. Click on "Filter."
  2. Identify the fields with a dagger (†).
  3. Hover your mouse by the field with the dagger for a note to appear identifying the type of restriction in place for it

A report creation page showing a Publications section with a filter panel expanded, displaying multiple filter options such as contribution type, current status, peer‑review status, editorial review, and classification settings, along with an Apply button.

A screen that is restricted to a particular college or department will also have a dagger (†).

It is completely possible and recommended to build reports that include restricted screens and fields. You may take more time to ensure that everything shows up the right way for each group you intend to run the report on. As a rule of thumb, when including a screen or field with restrictions, use "Preview As" to ensure everything shows up correctly for users with, and without, access to that screen or field.

We also recommend...

  • Avoiding grouping and filtering by restricted fields
  • Excluding blank sections when running (exporting) the report so that users without access to the restricted screens you’ve included in your report won’t end up with headers for blank sections

Export Your Report for a Group of Users

Suppose you've just built an annual activity report, and you want to share that formatted data with an external audience. The "Export" feature allows you to do that.

A report creation page showing a Publications section with an Export For Group panel open, including options to select scope, choose items for export, and additional export settings, along with buttons to export the report as PDF or Word.

To select users for whom to export and export your report for them, follow these steps:

  1. Click on Group from the Export feature.
  2. Select the scope.
  3. Select a value from the "Selections" field. The values available will depend on the scope selected.
  4. Click the "+Add" button to include your selection in the export. Each time you add a selection it will appear in the box below. If needed, expand "Options" if you want to exclue or include faculty with disabled accounts and/or blank sections.
  5. Select "Export PDF" or "Export Word" to export the report for the selected users in the desired format.

first select the scope, then select an option within that scope, and click "Add". Each time you add a selection, it will appear in the list below.

A report creation page showing a Publications section with an Export For Group panel open, including options to selecting scope and section with add button.

You can also remove selections, or individuals within a selection, using the trash can icon.

A report creation page showing a Publications section with an Export For Group panel open, including options to deleting options.

Once you have finalized your selections, you can export using PDF or Word format. When exporting reports for multiple users, Faculty Success will generate a .zip file containing one PDF or Word document for each individual user, based on your selections.

Note: A self-service report is run for a single user. As such, a .zip file containing one document for each user selected is generated.

Share Self-Service Reports with Other Users

Once you configure a Self-Service report, you can share that report with individual users or specific groups of users to allow them to run that report themselves. In some cases you'll be able to built report templates yourself that historically you would have worked with the Watermark work request team to create.

A report creation page showing a Publications section with the Share panel expanded, displaying multiple share‑to options such as College, College Administrator, Department, Faculty, University, and Individual, along with checkboxes for selection and an Apply button.

The Share panel allows the university administrator to choose segments of users with whom to share self-service reports.

Administrators can share Self-Service Reports with individual users or with groups of users based on the security roles assigned to them. Note the magnifying glass icon, which when selected will show you a list of users assigned to that particular security role.

Users with whom you share a given report can open the report, view the criteria and different options selected by the user who created the report, but none of these options are editable (except the date range). If the user wanted to duplicate the shared report and make adjustments to their own personal copy of the report, they can do so from the Reports menu:

A reports list page showing multiple report titles with their creator names, along with a menu expanded for one report that shows options to delete, duplicate, or rename the report.

If a user who has access to a shared report wants to contact the user who originally created and shared the report, selecting the name under "Created By" on the Reports menu will launch the user's email application with a new email addressed to the report's creator.

The sharing functionality is available to users who meet the following criteria:

  • Have the Self-Service Reporting: Formatted - Sharing permission in their security role. (By default, the top-level administrator has access to this permission. If you would like to expand this to others, please submit a work request with the names of the security roles who should have access.)
  • Have a security role scope that is not “self”
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