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What is Xperios Fusion?
If you have logged into Xperios recently and noticed a browser tab where there used to be only an installed application, that is Fusion.
Fusion is Xperios in the browser. Over time it will replace the installed desktop application entirely — but not in one jump, and not before it is ready. It is live now with a set of features that work, and more arrive as they are finished.
Nothing is being taken away
The most important thing to say first: Xperios Desktop carries on working exactly as it did. Fusion is not a switch that gets flipped one morning.
You can use both. Anything not yet available in Fusion stays in Desktop, and the Desktop guide remains the reference for it. The two work against the same data, so a query you run in Fusion sees the same information as the screen you have open in Desktop.
Why a browser at all?
Three things get easier.
Nothing to install. No client to roll out, no version to keep in step across machines. Everyone is on the current version because there is only one.
It works where you are. A laptop at home, a borrowed machine at a school, a tablet between lessons. If you can sign in, you can work.
It updates quietly. Improvements appear without anyone scheduling an upgrade or waiting for a maintenance window.
What is in Fusion today
The first area to land is the one that touches everybody: getting information out of Xperios and doing something useful with it.
Queries — saved questions you can run whenever you like. Which teachers have no current DBS. Which pupils have not been invoiced this term. Which instruments are out on hire and overdue back. Once a query exists, running it is a click.
Reports — a query's results laid out to be read, printed or sent. That might be a grid you use every week, or a properly designed document with a letterhead and one section per school.
Dashboards — the numbers you want in front of you without going looking. Tiles on a page that show a figure, a table or a chart, and refresh themselves.
Those three build on each other. A query answers a question; a report presents that answer; a dashboard keeps it on screen. Set up the query once and it can feed all three.
Where to start
If you have never opened Fusion, start with a query somebody has already written. The Query menu lists what is available, and running one prompts you for anything it needs — an academic year, a term, a teacher — then shows you the answer.
From there you can sort it, filter it, total a column, chart it, export it to Excel, or save the view so you never have to set it up again. None of that requires knowing any SQL.
What comes next
More of Xperios moves across with each release. Where an area is not in Fusion yet, Desktop is still the place to do it, and this guide will say so.
If there is something you do every week that you would like to see in Fusion sooner rather than later, tell your account manager — that feedback genuinely shapes the order things get built in.
Read next: Queries, and everything you can do with them