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Scoutbook integration is coming


Scouts USA is preparing to migrate off ScoutNet Internet Advancement and over to Scoutbook so we are currently working on integration with Scoutbook that will allow you to smoothly send your awards records directly to Scoutbook.

What does this mean to me?

We’re monitoring the Scoutbook forums and nobody is exactly clear on when Scoutbook becomes the official source of record for entry. In fact, a lot of the chatter died down in Q4 as the BSA decided to stop the Scoutbook-lite rollout and make Scoutbook the official tool. Since then the BSA moved forward to the Scouts BSA rollout and assumed their IT would sort things out.

What do I need to do? Continue pushing your records to ScoutNet. It’s our understanding that IT has been synchronizing ScoutNet and Scoutbook for over a year so that process should continue for how. We think they may officially remove ScoutNet in the summer of 2019. We’re keeping all records in Scout Manager so if they mess it up we’ll still have you covered.

Every unit needs to establish a Scoutbook account for official record keeping. Just like in Internet Advancement, you’ll need to have each of your scouts represented. It’s very likely that your council will do this for you (again unclear), but in our testing we’ve been able to create our own scout entries.

Ensure you enter BSA id’s for all your scouts into Scout Manager. The BSA is finally getting serious about the BSA ID. We’re excited because it means it will finally be super easy to identify scouts in the system of record.

How will my advancement records get to Scoutbook?

We’re still working through the details, but we’re considering a nightly process where there’s nothing extra for you to do. During our testing we’ve noticed that Scoutbook performance suffers during certain times of the day and mid-morning outages are common so we’d like to avoid hitting it directly in real time and impacting the Scout Manager experience. It may also make it difficult for you if there are failures on their site (also common). We think a fully automated solution that runs in the off-peak hours will work best for everyone.