Forum Discussion
NickDoha
Jul 02, 2020Copper Contributor
MS Shift Reporting Capabilities
Dear all,
Shift seems to be a very interesting to use to manage shifts and holidays in a team. However, I miss an important features: reporting on team members activities.
- Is it possible to know per person how many days they have taken and/or plan to take?
- How many hours they work per week, month, year?
I could not find anything.
Thanks for your help!
Regards
Nick
- You can most likely create a nice Excel template that you can use and keep on importing the information from Shifts export Excel file to it. That would make it easier.
Shifts is intended for managing shifts and employees - so it may not be ideal to other use cases (but it can fit many - like office presence and reserving seats there in back to the office). It is not also a HRM system, that keeps track of those how many days your have left or used.
However there are somethings you can do.
Graph API is a program interface that allows you to access Shifts information from an application or script. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0
You can use it pull off data and store it in a storage and then create your own reports. But it requires more understand and expertise in programming or you need someone to help you to create it. It will take some time, depending on your needs, but then you get all the information out and you could create some - for example - PowerBI reports out of it.
The other alternative is to use Power Automate. It is a bit easier, but still requires time and some citizen developer level expertise. You could use it to pull off information from Shifts and write them to SharePoint lists (for example) and again create your own reports.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shifts/
Out of all these - creating your Excel template to repeatedly process Shifts export Excel is the most easiest and quickest. Using APIs or Power Automate can help automate, collect and reorganize these so if the process is repeated lots of times it makes fully sense to do a more automatic solution.
- Have you checked the export-functionality in Shifts? You can get lots of that information via that way.
You can of course use Graph API to retrieve the info as well but I'd start with the Export report first.- NickDohaCopper Contributor
Thanks for your reply.
I did use the Export but the export gives you an excel file and you have to do the job yourself. So, this is the workaround I am using now but not a long term solution.
The whole point would be to have these functionalities already embedded into the app so the teams could actually now how many days off they have requested for instance or how many days left they have.
Not sure what Graph API is to be honest.
- You can most likely create a nice Excel template that you can use and keep on importing the information from Shifts export Excel file to it. That would make it easier.
Shifts is intended for managing shifts and employees - so it may not be ideal to other use cases (but it can fit many - like office presence and reserving seats there in back to the office). It is not also a HRM system, that keeps track of those how many days your have left or used.
However there are somethings you can do.
Graph API is a program interface that allows you to access Shifts information from an application or script. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0
You can use it pull off data and store it in a storage and then create your own reports. But it requires more understand and expertise in programming or you need someone to help you to create it. It will take some time, depending on your needs, but then you get all the information out and you could create some - for example - PowerBI reports out of it.
The other alternative is to use Power Automate. It is a bit easier, but still requires time and some citizen developer level expertise. You could use it to pull off information from Shifts and write them to SharePoint lists (for example) and again create your own reports.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shifts/
Out of all these - creating your Excel template to repeatedly process Shifts export Excel is the most easiest and quickest. Using APIs or Power Automate can help automate, collect and reorganize these so if the process is repeated lots of times it makes fully sense to do a more automatic solution.