Kansas Department of Administration, Office of General Services
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Accounts and Reports


INFORMATIONAL CIRCULAR NO. 08-A-004  
DATE:  October 10, 2007
SUBJECT: Receive STARS Reports Electronically
EFFECTIVE DATE:   Immediate
A & R CONTACT: Dan Escher    (785) 296-6943    dan.escher@da.ks.gov
APPROVAL: Kent E. Olson
SUMMARY: This circular describes how to obtain STARS reports electronically.

Agencies now have the ability to receive STARS reports electronically.

By routing STARS report requests to a distribution record with a device type of “DSN”, agencies can have reports sent to a PDF file, retrieve the file, and view/print the reports locally.  These reports are stored as a PDF file which look like the printed report.  The file can be downloaded using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software and then viewed and printed using Adobe Reader.

There is an agency cost for DISC’s monthly storage fee which is currently $0.0075 per megabyte per month.  As an example, for an agency having 1 gigabyte (1000 megabytes) of storage, the monthly charge would be $7.50 ($0.0075 * 1000).

The following steps are necessary to use this feature:

1. Contact your Top Secret administrator to get access to the datasets:
qq.FMSTARS.Annn.DAILY.Dmmdd.Thhmmss.PDF (daily)
qq.FMSTARS.Annn.MONTHLY.Dmmdd.Thhmmss.PDF (monthly)

“qq” is your agency’s high level qualifier as assigned by DISC.
“nnn” is the STARS three digit agency number.
“mmdd” is the two digit month abbreviation and the two digit day the file is

created.

“hhmmss” is the two digit hour, two digit minute, and two digit second the file is created.

The daily datasets have a 30 day retention period and one will be created for each STARS cycle. The monthly datasets have a 120 day retention period. The agency high level qualifier can be found at http://www.da.ks.gov/disc/pubs/standards/s4423_08.htm.

2. Add a Report Distribution record in the STARS Report Distribution Table with a Device Type of DSN. Add report requests, matching the DSN distribution record, in the STARS Report Request Table for each report to be routed to dataset. For example, agency 173 could add a DSN distribution record on STARS screen 95 as follows:

AGENCY: 173
REQUESTOR: DATA
REQUEST NO:
REPORT ID:
DISTRIBUTION CODE: DATA

DEVICE TYPE: DSN
DEVICE ID:
COPIES: 1

All report requests entered by Agency 173 containing the word DATA in the requestor field would be routed to the agency data file rather than printed. Refer to the Reporting section of STARS Training on the Accounts and Reports website at http://www.da.ks.gov/ar/genacct/StarsTraining/default.htm for additional help with STARS reporting.

3. Download the dataset using your FTP software. We suggest using the same software used to download SHaRP reports.

4. Use Adobe Reader to view/print the reports.

If this feature proves useful to you we strongly recommend discontinuing receipt of the equivalent hard copy reports from STARS by inactivating or deleting those report requests in the screen 91 STARS Report Request table to achieve the maximum efficiency.

Please contact Dan Escher (as noted above) if you require additional assistance using this feature.

DJE