Release 37 - What's coming to Your ESR

As part of Release 37 a number of portal changes will be made to further improve the look, feel and usability of the features already on offer via the portal.  These include:

• Renaming of Portlet Buttons on MyESR Dashboard for consistency.
• Re-size of Announcement Portlet to ensure the image uses the available space.
• Updates to Calendars In MyESR And MSS.
• Updates to the e-Learning Portlet Functionality.

The Oracle 12.2 upgrade, which will be undertaken as part of Release 37, also includes some new features which will be enabled as part of the release.  More details will be included in the supporting User Education but in summary the new features include:

• Universal Global Header & Simple Home Page.
• Redesign of the Proxy User Set Up pages.
• Use of Pictures for OLM Catalogue Items.
• New preview Questionnaire Administration feature.
• Transactions Where Future Dated Changes Exist.
• OLM Test Overview Panel.
• Mark Classes as Certification only.
• Subscribe to Certification and Enrol in Classes.

OLM Developments

One of the remaining Roadmap deliverables focuses on improvements to the design and usability of OLM for Learning Administrators.  These improvements have been developed in partnership with the national OLM SIG, and Release 37 will bring a number of changes to the forms and processes within OLM. In summary the changes cover:

• Catalogue Search.
• Creating Catalogue Items.
• Manage Classes.
• Enrolments and Subscriptions.
• Learning Objects.
• Learner Access.
• Learner Groups.
• Resources.
• Announcements.
• Customers and Suppliers.
• Learning Administrator Report.
• Certification Due Date.
• Learning History.
• Notify Button.

Gender Pay Gap reporting

New legislation introduced this year means Employers need to publish gender pay gap data annually. From April 2017 employers have up to 12 months to publish this information. The deadline to report is 30 March 2018 for public sector employers.  In order to enable Organisations to meet these requirements we plan to release a number of reports to ESRBI as part of Release 37. This is a complex requirement which is still under development; therefore release will be subject to the successful completion of the development and associated testing.

Gender Pay Gap analyses will be added to the Workforce Profile Dashboard to provide the data required for the Gender Pay Gap reporting requirement. The analyses provide an overall summary, a ‘by person’ summary and the full person and element detail for both ‘regular’ pay and ‘bonus’ pay requirements.

The Regular Pay Summary provides the mean and median pay gap differences as well as the differences between pay at each quartile as per the government requirement. The Bonus Pay Summary provides the average and median bonus value, as well as the percentage of female employees that received a bonus payment over 12 months when compared to those of male employees.

The analyses filter pay elements to a nationally set list by default to include and exclude pay as per the reporting   requirement. However, since Organisations may use local elements and use national elements differently, prompts are provided for each analysis to allow local inclusion or exclusion of elements as needed.

Downtime

The size and scope of Release 37, including the Oracle 12.2 upgrade will require an extended period of downtime and will impact all ESR users – Professional and Self Service.

User readiness and education

The ESR Education Team has developed HTML captivate lessons, which are now available to users on ESR Infopoint. 

These lessons will provide an overview of the look and feel changes in Release 37 and demonstrate new functionality where applicable.

Updates to the User Manual and e-Learning lessons for the areas impacted by Release 37 will be available from the beginning of January 2018.

For more information

For more information about the developments going in to ESR or wider functionality and capability contact your NHS ESR Account Manager or Functional Advisor.