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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
If you are then you should also be receiving our newsletters and release notes as and when they become available.
The last one sent out was to inform users of the latest build details but newsletters also include special offers (some not found elsewhere on our website or blog) as well as news of any events we’re planning.
When you’re using the Search Facility or running a Report for a particular reference, did you know you can use the Ctrl+C(opy) and Ctrl+V(iew) to copy and paste – saves you having to key in the reference over and over.
So, for instance, in Profess, you might be looking for all the Projects that have a particular Charge Code; firstly you need to have the charge code on the screen (maybe through the Project Entry screen or on a Spreadsheet or other document), highlight the reference and use Ctrl+C to copy it, then go to Project Browse screen, click on the Charge Code column heading (to put the screen in order of Charge Code) then click in the Search field and instead of typing the Charge Code in from scratch, use Ctrl+V to paste it into the field.
You can use this facility in any application where perhaps the right-clicky thing isn’t available.
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.
You can now find Pillar Software Ltd. on the professional networking site Linked In via a new group.
LinkedIn is a fantastic way to make connections. Our Group is intended to provide short updates on the commercial side of things at Pillar as well as a forum for existing Profess, Time Manager and Contract Manager users, our partners, fellow professionals and stakeholders to exchange ideas and contacts.
The Profess Community is a very large and influential one and we want to help foster cross-communication for like-minded disciplines and professionals.
So we invite you all to join and help us help you get the most out of our wider community.
The latest update to Time Manager, release 2010 Quarter 2, is now available. This release contains a number of enhancements and updated features. Just a few of the main highlights are:
Additional enhancements and fixes to Project targeting.
New Activity Targeting option makes single level targeting easy
Simple clear function on event pick lists
Better error trapping if you try to run a report twice
Recosting of time now allows filtering, plus significant performance improvements
If you operate Time Manager on our hosted server the system will be updated this coming Sunday July 18th.
Where you are using an Installed version of Time Manager you can download the 2010.2 release from our ftp site from Monday 19th July, or call us to request a CD.
You can download the full list of enhancements and fixes by clicking on the following link:
Life as an office temp – that’s all just making coffee and photocopying right? Well that’s certainly the stereotype, and perhaps it’s true at the big corporations where temps are often treated as if they had no skills more advanced than finding the nearest Starbucks. But I’ve found, having done my share of temping first to fund a gap year and now a degree, that smaller companies tend to treat temps less as assistants and more as members of the team.
Since coming to Pillar for the first time in 2007, I have worked variously on marketing campaigns, web design, the helpdesk, and even producing video tutorials for Time Manager. I’ve had to learn fast, but I can’t think of anywhere else that I’d have had the opportunity to develop skills as diverse as video editing and writing HTML, or learnt to use software from Camtasia Studio to OnTime. In fact a couple of weeks here adds more to my CV than I’d imagine months would anywhere else, not to mention the satisfaction of being given responsibility for my own mini-projects.
An easy, mindless holiday job? Not so much. More exciting than making tea? Definitely.
Posted by Dave Penny 
Lucy Penny
Ian Matthews
Dave Penny
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