5.0.026 received for Testing

The latest build of our Profess for Windows software (Office Costing and Contract Manager) has just been received from the development team.

Denoted the release number of 5.0.026, this build sees work mainly in Contract Manager modules – including Contract Manager core (Payments and Cashflow) and the new Property Manager module (with additional work on Attributes).

There’s 44 items in this release, so testing will take a good week or two.

We will publish the complete list of changes as and when the software has completed tested and we issue notification of its readiness on our FTP site.

And after 5.0.0026?

The next scheduled version will be 5.0.026(2), although we have not finalised the content of that sprint as yet, although it is currently denoted as an interim build and currently contains small changes and fixes to minor, lower-priority defects.

It is expected that work on 026(2) will begin approximately 2nd week in February, depending on the time take to pass 026 through our test regime.

Q: Do I Need To Upgrade Every Release?
A: No.

While it is worthwhile (but not essential) maintaining major release numbers such as 024,025,026 etc., there’s no need to upgrade each minor increment (denoted by release numbers in parenthesis, e.g 026, 026(2), 026(3), 026(4) etc.) unless you are waiting for work contained therein.

Even then you could jump from 5.0.026 straight to 5.0.026(4) if necessary without having to load the interim builds (2 and 3 in this example).

What’s the upgrade process?

Each build will contain a ReadMe file with instructions for upgrading. In summary the process is:-

1. Take a backup of your SQL database(s)
2. Load the Windows software via the Setup program
3. Up-script your SQL database(s) to the new version
4. Perform your own acceptance test(s)
5. Review and distribute upgrade notes to end-users

And, of course, if you encounter any difficulties or have any questions, please do call our Helpdesk on 01531 821 199 or e-mail support@profess.co.uk

Using distribution lists

This is my third post in the series on Time Manager 2010 Quarter 3.  Today I’m going to keep it simple and show you how to set up distribution lists.  Even though this is a very easy process, it has powerful implications because it means you can now send reports to multiple email addresses simply, and can schedule reports on a regular basis and have them automatically distributed.

To view the video just click here.

To view the other two videos so far in this series you can click on the links below.

Simple report scheduling

Scheduling reports

Next time I am going to roll my sleeves up and show you some of the more powerful features available through the Alerts and Scheduling engine.

Scheduling reports in Time Manager Part 1

In my last post I told you how, in the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager reports could not be sent to a separate Scheduling and Alerts engine.  Today I am going to extend that concept and tell you a little about how reports can be scheduled.  You can view a five minute video of the process by clicking here.

Offloading reports to another process is only of limited use.  However, setting up a report once and then running it at regular intervals becomes much more interesting.  It allows you to pass a great deal of administrative work out to the alerts engine.

An example might be a productivity report you run once a month on the third of each month for the previous month.  Instead of having to remember to open Time Manager, select the report, select what data to appear on the report and run it, you can now set this up as a scheduled report and have it delivered to your inbox automatically.

The video will show you more about how scheduling of reports works.

Next time I will tell you about distribution lists and some of the other alert functions which do not rely on reporting.

Running reports offline

This is the first blog post about the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager.  This is going to be fairly brief, as I just want to tell you about how, with the introduction of the new Scheduler engine, you can now send reports for offline processing.  This means you free up the system for other work immediately instead of having to wait.  The report will be sent back to you as an email attachment.

All well and good, but you can also send the report and say “Run this next Monday at 5 a.m., and then every Monday from then on”.  That means, for example, you can have a Missing Timesheet report sitting on your desk when you get in Monday morning.  So instead of spending the first ten minutes of the day running reports (or forgetting until Tuesday), the work has been done for you.

The first video showing how to do this can be seen by clicking here.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about Alerts and scheduling other kinds of operations offline.

Time Manager 2010 Quarter 3 is (almost) here

I am pleased to announce that this quarter’s release of Time Manager is almost here.  Version 2010.3.1113 will be uploaded to the hosted server this coming Sunday, 14th November 2010, and will be available to download from our ftp site by Monday morning the 15th.

This is a major release of Time Manager, containing a whole host of new and improved features, as well as a couple of fixes.  You can view a full list of the changes by clicking here.

Below is a brief summary of what we consider the most exciting new features.

Report Scheduling and Alerts

This completely new addition allows you to run and schedule reports offline, create distribution lists and schedule any report to run at regular intervals.
Alerts can be selected to email individual staff if they have not completed their timesheet for the previous week.
Other functionality will be built into the next quarter’s release, but we want it to be functionality useful to you, so we are waiting for your suggestions on what you would like to see added to the Alerts list.  Maybe offline recosting of time, maybe offline flexitime calculation.  It’s down to you, so start thinking and let us know.

Billing and Billing auditing

Calculation of time billing sneaked in during the previous release, but we have now extended it to create automatic audit entries if you change a timesheet that has already been billed for.  All of this can be controlled by you, turning these features on and off to meet your particular requirements.

Additional control over Reports

We have added some additional flags to control what appears or does not appear on reports.  You can now choose to include archived Projects and Staff, as well as only report on Approved time entries.

Leave requests in hours

Leave can now be requested in hours as well as days, and this can be set on individual leave entries as well.

Project Targeting

A lot of new work has been done on Project targeting, making it both faster and more robust

I am enthusiastic about the list of new features and improvements in this release, but I don’t want to go on too long here.   Keep checking back on the blog pages as over the next few weeks more details of this new release will be posted here first.

Release videos

As in previous releases, a series of videos are currently in production to walk you through the great new features available.  The first of these, on Scheduling and Alerts will be posted this week, and I will post a Blog entry here when it is available.  So check back regularly to see when this is released, and find out what this new version of Time Manager can offer you.

Time Manager Alerts

I am just putting the finishing touches to the initial release of the Time Manager Alerts functionality.  This is a major enhancement both for Time Manager and to a smaller extent Profess.

The feature will be available in the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager which is still pencilled in for the end of September.  Hosted users will find this installed and available automatically.  Installed users of Time Manager will need to install and configure the Alerts service.  Full documentation will be available on release.

At present the following functionality is available:

• Run any report on a schedule and send back to yourself or a distribution list.  You can enter flexible selection criteria that are evaluated at the time the report is run.  This means you could run a report for This Month, or Last Month, This Week, or Last Week and it would use the dates that apply when it is run.
• Calculate and distribute Missing Timesheets.
• Calculate and distribute Missing Timesheets by Team Manager.  This is nice and simple, just set it up once and leave it run.  The calculation takes care of who to send the report to for all members of a managers Team.
• Look for and inform individual staff if they have not Submitted or Completed a Timesheet on time.

Other alerts can be added in, but these are the ones users have requested so far.

If you have any ideas for alerts that would be useful both to you and others, please get in touch with me so we can decide how achievable they are, as we are actively looking to add new alert functionality.

PROFESS & CM 5.0.025(4b) just released

The very latest build of our Windows application, Profess Office Costing / Profess Contract Manager is now available for download on our FTP site for those having taken out an Annual Maintenance Agreement for these products.

Call our Helpdesk on 01531 821 199 to find out more about getting new builds off our FTP site, or to request a CD-Rom edition.

The build sees a lot of work on our latest addition to the portfolio – a Roads Costing integrated add-on. But work also continues unabated on Contract Manager with a mix of additional enhancements, fixes and changes. Here’s the full list for build 5.0.025(4b)…

• ROADS COSTING: Area-based (multi-level) Budget screens & functionality now included
• ROADS COSTING: Functionality added to permit adjustments to Time Cards
• ROADS COSTING: Order Activity Maintenance screens extended
• ROADS COSTING: Project & Order form windows now include RC Order Activity and Area plus Fin.Codes can now be validated
• ROADS COSTING:There has been a range of enhancement to the Roads Costing Time Card window (see notes for detail)
• ROADS COSTING: Income & Charge Codes added to the Stock Browse and update form window
• ROADS COSTING: Stores & Stock menu options now available in the standard Profess Contract Manager system for licenced users
• CONTRACT BROWSE: You can now specify Client filtering at User level – ideal for internal Client logins
• CONTRACT: Final Contract Sum from Final Cert value now controlled by a Variable (see notes)
• CONTRACT: Re-writing of some calculations in an earlier build meant that a refresh had to be forced – rectified in the update SQL script
• CONTRACT: Funding Source and latest Start & Finish Dates can now be added as columns to the Project Browse
• CASHFLOW: Fix to fault where Invoice Actual was set to nil when the CF line was opened – corrected
• CASHFLOW: Period could not be changed on the Cashflow Period windows irrespective of Start Date – rectified
• PAYMENTS: Payment period no longer defaults to the Current period defined in Variables
• PAYMENTS: New option to force display of Finance Codes alphabetically on Payment windows
• RECORD LOCKING: Record Locking facility can now be turned off
• PROJECT: Start Date is disappearing (at least on Est.Start Date when set to duration) – now rectified
• VARIABLES: Weekly Variables can only be assigned from Yearly Variables once after which these must be manually maintained

The Roads Costing module is being lead by North Ayrshire council but is benefits from our experience with the development of a bespoke Roads Costing system developed for West Dunbartonshire Council.

Interested in Roads Costing, or think your Highways/Transportation department might be. Then call me – Carl – to discuss on 01531 822 622.

Tips on Speeding

I am not normally the one to offer technical tips for Time Manager – I leave that to the Helpdesk and the techies in the back office here at Pillar.

But there’s one area I feel really needs reiterating and that is the impact of flexi-time recording on Event entry, particularly on slower connections or networks.

Here are my top 2 things to do right now if you have speed issues and yet still wish to use Time Manager’s zero-entry innate flexi-recording facility.

1. Turn ON ad-hoc manual Recalc.
   This will stop recalculation of flexi every time you enter a new Event, and give you control of when YOU want to refresh the flexi balance. Stopping the flexi calculation will increase the speed it takes to write an Event to file/screen as there simply is less for the system to do.
2. Reduce the breadth of the Flexi re-calc
   Get Time Manager to only look forward enough to reflect what you actually find useful.

I explain both of these in a bit more detail below. But if you have any questions, e-mail us at support@profess.co.uk

And, don’t forget to cast your vote in the Speed vs Features debate.

Ad-hoc Manual Re-calculation of Flexi-time balance (Journal view)

This is controlled by a global setting (meaning the same will apply for all users of the Journal view, i.e. it is NOT a My Settings personal option), and can be located via menu path Administration > Validation {tab}: Update Flexi-time on entry of each Event.

Un-check this option to turn ON manual ad-hoc recalculation of the flexi-time balance; a new Update button will appear to the right of the Flexi summary line at the top of the Journal view (although you will have to Refresh for it appear straight away).

Now Events will be created and only the Working Hours updated (along with the standard validation). This makes entry much quicker, especially when entering time by dragging favourites into the Journal grid. Absolutely no flexi calculation will take place.

But if you want the Flexitime to be refreshed to show the latest picture, just hit the Update button to force a complete Flexi refresh along the summary line for the current week in edit.

Reduce the Breadth of the Flexi Re-calculation (Journal view)

Time Manager allows you to set how far you want the calculation to read into the future. Realistically, planned leave aside, most people will have noted that the current day’s Flexi balance will be displayed in lieu of how much time is booked today. The Flexi b/f from yesterday or last week is the true reflection of time in credit/debit coming into today, but until today is finished I won’t know what my balance is. So, by extension, why complicate unnecessarily by having Time Manager read a number of days into the future. So I recommend reducing the figure held in Administration > Validation {tab}: Extend Flexi-time Calculation X days beyond the end of the current week.

Personally, I’d set this to 3 merely to catch the start of next week, but only if I am using TM for forward planning work (where I place Events into the future and, thus see what my Flexi balance will be based on my prediction of how long I am working for). If I wasn’t doing that I’d set it to 0. However, remember this is a global value, so the rule applies to ALL users on the database.

And, of course, you might not get the setting right for your office straight away. But certainly try and reduce the number to see if you get improved performance without any loss of functionality.

Keeping your server up to date

I had a recent support call which came up when  a User upgraded to the latest version of Profess Time Manager.  A weird error was being thrown, and I could not reproduce it here or on any of our test servers, even when running with the user’s data.  I finally tracked it down by following the error message and finding that we were relying on a function only present in ASP.Net Ajax SP2.

Once I found that, the solution was simple.  Download from the following url and apply the latest version for your specific operating system:

 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5b2c0358-915b-4eb5-9b1d-10e506da9d0f&displaylang=en

While the answer was quick, it did take me 30 minutes trawling through a trace log to find the issue, and it made me realise that there are a lot of servers out there that do not get patched automatically, and I wondered why?  If automatic updates had been turned on, this would have been updated immediately.

All of our servers, both live and test, and our hosted server, have automatic updates turned on.  Perhaps people really don’t trust Microsoft to ship reliable patches, but surely the alternative is worse?  Software that doesn’t work and security that is compromised.  I often hear the comment that IT Departments like to have control over what patches they apply, but unless you have a large and very knowledgeable IT Department, I would always prefer to trust the guys in Microsoft to get my server running sweetly – life is too short to have to understand ALL of this techy stuff.

So, just a little plea: Update early and update often.

Time Manager 2010.2.819 Release

An interim release of Time Manager is now available: Version 2010.2.819.

The main emphasis on this release is to fix a number of minor glitches which were missed in the previous release. 

The main fix is where you want to calculate costs and/or charges.  The new routine allows you more flexibility in whether you want to recost all or just part of the data, as well as speeding the calculation up significantly.  We have fixed an issue where selecting a date range caused an error if staff had not recorded any time for the period selected.  This issue is now corrected.

For a full list of the fixes and enhancements click here to view the PDF.

Time Manager 2010.2.819 is available for download on our ftp site and will be uploaded to the hosted server on Sunday 22nd August. 

With this interim release work is now starting in full on the Quarter 3 release still planned for the end of September 2010.  The initial effort will be concentrated on the Alert and Reporting engine, which will run in the background and produce and deliver reports to you on a schedule.  In addition, alerts such as emailing individuals a list of late Timesheets will also be available.