I really hated not having a dashboard where I could see a calendar of all my Changes. We make a bunch and I get an e-mail every time one is created. The problem is that sometimes their 2 weeks in the future and sometimes their tonight. By having a calendar, it's much easier to tell when things happen. I created my own Change Dashboard (looks at a Web Page) and my own Calendar (Crystal Reports). I have attached some really basic documentation to point you in the right direction. The web page was created with Word so it's nothing special but kinda cute. The dashboard (see 1st picture) and the Change Calendar (see 2nd pic) are shown below.
To make this magic work, I use a single report and pass an offset of -6 to 0 to +6 months. The Crystal Reports Server schedules this report 13 times so their created daily (6:00 AM for me). It creates a all 13 PDF file on the server and the dashboard has hyperlinks to open the files. All dates change automatically. There is vb code in the Word document so that next month all descriptions will change automatically. You will need Crystal reports Server set up to automatically create the reports for you. Personally, I use CRS to create many reports this way and really like it. I have a Word file on how to set up the server. I did not include every step in the process, I had very limited time to share this. I included enough to take out much of the pain and aggravation to get you going. A second Word files describes setting up the Crystal reports and what they do. I have a reports folder and it would include a CCC folder to hold the index.html file and its folder and then the contents folder under ccc holds the PDF files.
At 6:00 AM every day, the Crystal Reports Server creates a new set of 13 PDF files. The report shows anything with a status of Implementation or Closed.
It took a lot of work to make this so I hope someone else can use it. If nothing else it should not be too hard to use it as just the current month if you don't want to set up a Crystal Reports Server.
