Release Notes - 29 September 2020

Read the list of new features, improvements and issues resolved in this release

Updated over a week ago

Overview

This release is one of our largest ever, and features some significant improvements to the user experience, as well as additional functional improvements throughout.

New features

The left hand navigation menu has been overhauled, including a new interface, general usability improvements, and the introduction of a workspace context menu

  • Almost all of the items that you previously accessed from the navigation menu are still there, however the order and locations of some items have changed (please keep reading for further details)

  • A new workspace context menu has been introduced in each workspace, i.e. jobs, which consolidates various functions for the given workspace including view management, favourite views, and links to secondary spaces such as reports, imports, exports and settings

  • The new workspace context menu also includes a context switcher in some workspaces; The jobs workspace includes the ability to switch to a projects context (which now serves as the entry point to access projects), and the settings area allows you to change context to any configurable entity, i.e. assets, customers and so on

  • Reports are now accessible from the workspace context menu in each workspace

  • Home is now accessible by clicking on the logo at the very top of the menu

Creating, exploring and managing workspace views has been improved with the introduction of a range of new default views, functions and a new interface

  • The display and management of views has been relocated into the new workspace context menu as detailed above

  • Each workspace now includes a range of new default views to help provide better visibility of your data. Each of these default views is favourited out of the box, however you can un-favourite them if you would prefer to only show your custom views

  • All of your favourite views are pinned in the context menu for any given workspace, including a count for the number of results for that view (please note that the counts are not available in the contractor portal, or when regions are selected)

  • Any of your views can be edited from the context menu, including the ability to update them when changes are made, favourite, un-favourite, share or delete them, or set one as your default

  • New views are now created from the context menu

  • Workspace columns can now be ordered, and upon doing so can be saved to your view (please keep reading for further details)

  • In addition, admin users can now un-share global / shared views

Quotes have been extended with the introduction of terms and conditions, and the ability to automatically populate the quote expiry date

  • When enabled, terms and conditions allow you to define an arbitrary block of text that will appear at the bottom of all quotes

  • When enabled, it is now possible to automatically populate the quote expiry date as either x days from the date the quote is created, or a fixed day of the month after the date of creation

Invoices have been extended with the introduction of terms and conditions, and the ability to automatically populate the invoice due date

  • When enabled, terms and conditions allow you to define an arbitrary block of text that will appear at the bottom of all invoices

  • When enabled, it is now possible to automatically populate the invoice due date as either x days from the date the invoice is created, x days from the date the invoice is issued, or a fixed day of the month after the date of creation

The regions addon has been extended to support automatic region association for all major entities, including quotes, jobs, invoices, projects, sites, assets, customers and workforce

  • Previously any quote, job, asset or site that was created or updated would be automatically associated to any region where its location fell within a region boundary. This behaviour has now been extended as follows

  • Invoices are associated based on the location of the job from which the invoice is generated

  • Projects are associated based on the locations of all jobs to which the project is linked

  • Customers are associated based on the locations of all the customer's sites, as well as the primary address and billing address of the customer

  • In practice, now that all major entities may be associated to regions, this means that when you select a region from the main navigation menu, or restrict someone to only seeing data in a particular region, data will be restricted to the selected region across all workspaces

  • Please note that the counts for favourite workspace views are not available when a region restriction is applied from the main navigation menu

Feature improvements and changes

Exploring your data in all major workspaces has been simplified through a few usability improvements

  • The search input has been relocated to the very top of each workspace, and is always on display rather than being hidden behind a search button. In addition, when you navigate between spaces (i.e. jobs -> assets), the search field is pre-focussed, making it much faster to find what you're looking for

  • The workspace filters, column selector, and row grouping selector are all now hidden by default, and shown simply by clicking on Sort and refine. Once you have expanded the Sort and refine panel, this will remain open

  • Workspace columns can now be re-ordered at your discretion, and upon doing so will trigger the ability to update or create a new view. Please note however that some workspace columns, notably ID, customer, location, subject and some monetary value columns will now always appear in the same position across all views. These columns can be hidden but you can't change their order / position

Several new workspace columns and filters have been introduced

  • The regions / layer filter that is available in the quote, job and invoice workspaces has been moved to a secondary filter, and renamed to 'Region boundaries'

  • The invoice workspace now includes an unread email column

  • The customer workspace now includes a total invoice balance column and filter

  • The job workspace now includes a has accrued charges filter

Workspace imports, exports and reports have been relocated to the new workspace context menu

  • Several workspaces have an import feature which was rather hidden. This is now available in the context menu

  • The advanced export feature that was previously a part of the reports space has now been separated out into a dedicated export area accessible from the context menu in each workspace

  • The basic export function that was previously accessible next to the column selector is now available in the workspace column header itself

  • The reports for each workspace that were previously accessible via the main menu are now accessible from the context menu in each workspace

The notifications panel has been restyled

  • The notifications panel has now been restyled to open in a modal overlay rather than taking up the whole screen. This is a stepping stone to a broader change to notifications in an upcoming release

Settings navigation has been improved through the introduction of the new workspace context menu

  • Rather than accessing the various settings areas from a single landing page, each area is now available from the settings context menu and can be accessed in a number of different ways

  • If you select the settings area from the main navigation menu, you will be taken directly to admin settings, which includes all high level settings areas such as company configuration, usage and billing and so on. Here, you will also see universal settings areas that are applicable across multiple areas, such as export templates, notifications and so on

  • If you are looking for settings specific to a particular entity, jobs for example, you can simply change to the jobs settings area from the context switcher in the settings context menu header. Here you will see any settings areas unique to jobs, such as job types, as well as any universal settings areas that are applicable to jobs, such as export templates, notifications and so on

  • To help find what you're looking for, you can also access settings specific to a particular entity, assets for example, by clicking on the settings link in the assets workspace

  • In addition to the above, there are a couple of other minor changes to note: Email settings have moved into company settings, and all descriptive text has been rewritten

The regions addon has been extended with the settings area overhauled and migrated to HTML, including the ability to

  • View and manage all configured regions, including traversing the region hierarchy

  • View summary data for how many quotes, jobs, invoices, assets, sites, customers and users are associated to a given region

  • Define the boundary for any given region by drawing / editing the boundary on a map

  • Define the boundary for any given region by editing or uploading geoJSON directly

  • In an upcoming release we will introduce the ability to associate regions to some entities (i.e. sites) directly from the regions configuration area

  • Please note that modifying an existing region boundary does not automatically recalculate which existing entities (i.e. jobs, assets etc) fall within that boundary. This functionality will be introduced in an upcoming release.

The asset management addon has been extended with all settings areas overhauled and migrated to HTML, including the ability to manage types (aka classes), lifecycles / statuses and custom fields (aka data groups)

  • All type, lifecycle / status and custom field management functionality has been retained, however there are a few superficial changes to be aware of

  • Classes have been renamed to types

  • Data groups have been renamed to custom fields

  • When managing asset types, there used to be three distinct super types / categories: Master, Asset type and System type. These are no longer selectable, and instead all top level asset types are simply displayed together. Please note this has no impact on your assets or configured types

  • When viewing an asset type it is now possible to see how many assets are associated to that type

Bug fixes

  • An error that occurred when sending an email from the customer inspector has been fixed

  • An issue where projects wouldn't export if there were no jobs associated has been fixed

  • An issue where some tasks wouldn't display comment counts has been fixed

  • An error that occurred when sorting invoices by the total inc tax column has been fixed

  • Some non-functional links in the contractor portal have been removed

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