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.

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.

Managing what Staff are working on

 Once the number of employees in a professional office rises above half a dozen, one of the issues that arises is managing what people are working on, and how they may allocate work to others without management knowing about it.

In order to manage this process you can start by ensuring you assign work to individuals and make it clear that they cannot re-assign it without approval.  This may work, but when things get busy and there is a lot to do discipline can break down and work begins to be handed off again.

You can try to control this up front by specifying what work can be done by what staff, but this then places the emphasis on management or supervisors allocating the work and maintaining it.  Another simpler method will be to monitor the work each member of Staff is doing and then just point out to them when they are working on tasks they should not be.  All that is required here is to run a report at the end of each week, selecting the previous week or weeks, and scanning down the work information for each member of Staff.  You will find that the anomalies will jump out at you, and you can then have a word with the individuals and correct the situation.  Over time, this method will lead to everyone working to the jobs that are assigned to them.

If you want to be more prescriptive about the work you assign to staff you can use the Project Staff features in Time Manager.  This is very quick and simple to carry out and has a number of additional advantages:

• Staff are more focussed if they know the work they are meant to do
• Staff are only presented with their work, not a whole list of stuff to pick from
• It is simple to add an additional member of staff to cover if another is on leave or off sick
• It concentrates your mind as a manager to think about who you want to do a piece of work

If you haven’t already tried the Project Staff allocation features in Time Manager give them a go – they may make your life, and your staff’s work life, more pleasant and productive.

Tell me what you want, what you really really want…

 

Sorry if I enticed you here under false pretences!  This is about software.

Now Time Manager is becoming more feature rich I thought it was a good time to step back and take a look at some of the less obvious issues.  The first one I want to look at is speed vs. look and feel.  The majority of Time Manager users find the responsiveness good, but we do have some large users who feel the software could do with being snappier.  These users tend to be inside a corporate network where high levels of overall traffic cause fairly sluggish response.

Over the years of developing Time Manager we have always tried to make it look and feel modern and slick.  To this end many of the tools added to the web pages carry some overhead to accomplish this.

Just one small example:

We changed from using standard asp buttons to using image buttons.  These look much nicer and can have pictures as well as text on them.  However, each button needs to be downloaded, like every other part of the web page.

Similarly, we have standardised on using a grid control from Telerik which looks far nicer than the standard grid control and offers a range of extended features.  However, each of these additions adds overhead to the page, makes the page size larger and hence slower to download to your browser.

Therefore, I am proposing to change some of the controls on certain pages – the Time entry page where Projects and Activities are selected, for instance – so they look simpler but operate more quickly.

The current Event entry page looks like this, with image buttons and the Telerik grid for selecting Favourites.  To see these as a bigger images just click on the image and they will show maximum size in a new window.

The proposed alternative is this, with standard buttons and a standard grid for selecting Favourites.

This second version reduces the bytes sent to your browser by 20%, and we are looking at reducing this even further with more fine tuning.

I would like your feedback on whether this is an acceptable course of action for us to take.  Please click on this link and select your answer.  If you want to tell me more, add a Comment.

Configuring Time Manager under Windows Server 2008

Generally, installing Profess Time Manager has been a pretty simple operation under Microsoft’s earlier operating systems (Windows Server 2000/2003/SBS2003).  With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 (and to some extent Windows Vista and Windows 7) this has become more problematic as these are shipped with IIS7 and not IIS6.

To get an ASP.Net 2.0 application, such as Time Manager, operating on these requires some additional configurations.  This is made more complicated by the fact that Windows Server 2008 comes only as a 64 bit operating system, and so needs a couple of extra tweaks.

The process of configuration contains a number of stages, and is more detailed than I would want to include in this blog, so if you want to find out how to configure Time Manager (or indeed any other ASP.Net 2.0 application under Windows Server 2008) click here to download a PDF document explaining the steps you need to take.