Release Notes - 2021. 09. 02.
The past six weeks have largely been holiday season for our team, taking a rest before our final push to get Horizon Planner ready for public release - currently scheduled for the beginning of October. At work, we split our efforts between two major topics: i) finalizing application infrastructure and deployment, and ii) writing technical documents and completing our administrative tasks. In our remaining time, we worked on new features, UI improvements, and bug fixes. Read on for the details.
Major features
Infrastructure and deployment
We first started working on application deployment in late 2020, and behind the scenes we’ve been continuously improving our setup ever since. Over the past few weeks, this topic took center stage as we focused on adding the still missing pieces and closing all open issues.
The result of this effort is that ready-to-use Horizon Planner instances can be deployed in a secured environment on very short notice – normally less than an hour from the initial request –, including a file store, enterprise-grade log collection and analysis tools, a task runner with a user interface, and the necessary maintenance and support features.
We will soon release a dedicated, more technical blog post about this topic, so stay tuned if you’re interested.
Resource drag and drop on Timeline view
Up until this release, the only way of changing the resource of an assignment was to right click on the assignment in the Gantt chart, open its editor dialog, select the new resource, and finally submit the changes. Having this dialog-based editing workflow in the application is important and useful: it allows editing multiple assignment properties at once, and the dialog shows a filtered resource list, the CO2 estimate, as well as potential problems.
In many cases though, planners don’t need all this data, and a simple resource drag and drop from Timetables would work much better. This release finally adds support for this workflow. Combined with the “Show Resources” action in role context menus that we introduced in the previous release, planners finally have a very convenient way of finding the best resources for roles and assigning them.
Help
Horizon Planner was designed to be simple and intuitive to use, but we know that learning how to use a new software is always difficult. We offer training to new customers to help them get started, but there’s usually too much information to remember and understand in trainings.
In this release, we’ve added help texts to all our editor dialogs and to each step of our multistage wizards, that are intended to give a helping hand or a small reminder to users.
We are very proud of the quality of our customer support – when the aforementioned help texts are not enough, users are encouraged to contact us for assistance. Our aim is to continuously improve the built-in help by incorporating answers to frequently asked questions.
Assignment inspector
In Horizon Planner, the Inspector is the central place where users can get a quick overview of all business objects from projects to resources and capabilities. Until now, assignments were a notable exception, but that is finally implemented as well.
Assignments can be inspected using the Inspect action of their context menu in Timeline view - both the Gantt and Timetables charts provide this feature.
The assignment inspector will show both the project, activity, and role where the assignment belongs, along with the list of required capabilities, the assignment’s time frame, and the end date of the assignment’s busy time window if it’s different from the assignment’s end date.
Integration with 3rd party systems
We’ve been working on enabling integration with 3rd party systems for some time now. This feature consists of several layers, from the database, through the server application and the task scheduler, all the way to the admin UI.
By the time of this release, we not only implemented and integrated all these layers, we’ve also put them to work by integrating Horizon Planner with Unit4’s Agresso ERP system for a customer.
Minor changes and bug fixes
As usual, we’ve also implemented several smaller features and bug fixes. Here is a list of the more notable ones:
- The Inspector now shows both the type and name of the inspected business object, and it also displays its color if it has one.
- We’ve made table headers sticky, so users can always see them and have access to their context menus.
- Tag filters are more compact now and they are better integrated into their surroundings.
- We’ve tweaked the appearance of report cards and dialogs.
- Assignment Planner respects the default assignment color preference.
- We’ve also made several layout and styling fixes.