ActivityInfo updated; version 2.5

Hi all!

First of all, we would like to wish you a Happy New Year! The first week of 2012 starts for ActivityInfo with a new release today, ActivityInfo 2.5 with several new features and updates. Secondly, the new website went online today, providing more information on how to use ActivityInfo. To directly login, use button “Login” in the upper right corner of the screen. To get you jumpstarted in the new version 2.5, hereby a quick overview of a few of the extra features online today:

Charts: Easily create piecharts, diagrammes and line graphs from your databases. Step-by-step guide

Attaching Documents: Upon entering new intervention sites as well as to older interventions, one can add attachments to the interventions, for example a document or picture. Step-by-step guide

Choosing Locations: When adding a new activity site, you now have the chance to select an existing school or village, allowing you and fellow cluster members to link several activities to a single school or village. This makes it possible to track assistance from a multi-sectoral perspective. Step-by-step guide

Cartography: The mapping section has been updated in an earlier release, but if you have missed it:

It is now possible to use different base maps (for example: health zones, administrative zones as well as different google maps, TIP: check google terrain maps in detail for elevation levels!), and add as many information layers as needed. One can display information of ones indicators in icons, piecharts or proportional circles. The created maps can be exported to powerpoint, pdf, as image or in word, to be used for example in reports or presentations. Step-by-step guide

Offline mode: Offline mode improved in an earlier release, but if you have missed this one too: It is possible to work online or offline when connections are not available and synchronize whenever a connection becomes available. Step-by-step guide

 

With kind regards,

the ActivityInfo team at bedatadriven!

New website

Today the new website has been launched online. The current website contains information about ActivityInfo, but over the next two months several pages and extras will be added. The website will be enriched with a comprehensive resources section, which will include: 1. Tutorials for ActivityInfo, 2. How-to guides with step by step procedures, 3. Case studies and 4. a Library containing information, best practices and standards regarding humanitarian information management, monitoring and indicators.

Furthermore, a French translation of the entire site will be online by December, currently the website is set in English only. Upon request extra language options can be added too in the future.

If you already have questions, do not hesitate and drop us a line!

Version 2.2 Released

Version 2.2 went live today, with new offline support for Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. The next time you log on you will be prompted to active offline mode, which will save your ActivityInfo data locally and allow you to synchronize with the server when you have a connection available.

For the moment, only data entry is supported offline of sites, but we will be enabling the use of more features offline in the coming months, starting with pivot tables and data entry for activities with monthly reporting.

Other features in this release include a new “project” attribute, which particularly helps cluster members indicate which project funded their activity, and “locked periods”, which allow database owners to lock certain time periods once reporting is complete.

 

Version 2.1 Released

ActivityInfo version 2.1 went live today, with major enhancements to ActivityInfo’s mapping functionality. With version 2.1, users can:

• Add multiple layers to a map, using graduate symbols or icons to show indicator values
• Use pie chart symbols to show the distribution of multiple indicators at the same site (for example, to show the distribution of beneficiaries between returnees and displaced persons)
• Cluster many sites together automatically or by province, territory, etc.
• Export to PDF, Word, or PowerPoint with beautiful legends
• Choose between Google road, satellite, and terrain basemaps as well as detailled RDC-specific base maps, such as the Zone de Sante basemap.

Humanitarian Action Plan 2011 DRC

Within the Humanitarian Action Plan 2011 for the DRC, with a foreword of  Fidèle Sarassoro, Humanitarian Coordinator in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the NFI (non food items) and emergency shelters Cluster expressed:

“The Cluster is also striving to facilitate the whole humanitarian community’s use of the ActivityInfo tool, an online data collection tool created by UNICEF for RRM and PEAR, then extended to all actors of the NFI/Shelter Cluster. Lastly, the work of the NFI/Shelter Cluster in the DRC (especially, its focus on NFI rather than the shelter component) awakened interest of the Cluster at the global level during the revision of the Sphère manual in 2010. The Cluster members in the DRC were called in during the revision of the corresponding section of Sphère.” (HAP 2011, page 11)

see for the entire report and link: http://www.rdc-humanitaire.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=780:humanitarian-action-plan-2011&catid=24:plan-daction-humanitaire&Itemid=68