Release Notes - 2021. 10. 01.
Last month our main focus was on providing a seamless migration path from legacy Horizon Planner, so there are no new features this time. Just kidding, we have also added some major features (like the Assignment Summary dialog) and myriad usability improvements to polish as many rough edges as we could before public release – which is just around the corner.
Major features
Drag and drop and workflow improvements
Being an essential usability feature, we have added initial drag and drop support to Timeline view in the previous release. While that first version was sufficient for most use-cases, it didn’t make full use of Horizon Planner’s capabilities, such as resource availability and capability validation or CO2 emission calculation.
In this release, we have finally added all these features to our drag and drop implementation in the form of a drop dialog. When a resource is dropped on an assignment on either the Gantt or Timetables charts, a dialog will appear showing a short description of the assignment and error or warning messages if i) the resource does not have all the required capabilities for the whole duration of the assignment, ii) the resource is not available for the whole duration of the assignment, or iii) the estimated CO2 emission of the assignment would be too high (more on this in preferences later). If all checks pass successfully, the dialog will automatically disappear, otherwise the user will have to confirm the assignment.
Additionally, resources can now also be dropped directly onto the Gantt chart. In this case, an assignment creator dialog will appear with the role and date where the resource was dropped. Users can edit all properties of the assignment (even replacing the dropped resource), before creating it using the “Submit” button.
In an attempt to further improve the planning workflow, we have added two new actions to assignment context menus, namely “Show Resources” and “Unassign”. “Show Resources” adjusts the capability filter of Timetables to show only those resources who have all the capabilities that are required by the given assignment (just like the “Show Resources” action of roles in the sidebar). “Unassign” complements the “Delete” action by – as the name suggests – removing the assigned resource, but otherwise keeping the assignment intact.
We expect that the improved drag and drop functionality combined with these new (and of course the already existing) actions should significantly improve the whole resource optimization and planning workflow.
Assignment summary
Often there is a need to produce a text summary of a set of assignments for management, customers, or employees. Horizon Planner’s solution to this task is the new “Assignment Summary” dialog that can be opened from the context menu of mobilizations on the Gantt chart.
The dialog consists of two main components: a list of email addresses of assigned employees on the left side and a rich text editor with the pre-generated assignment summary on the right side. The “Copy Contacts” and “Copy Message” buttons in the top left corner allow the user to copy all email addresses directly into the “To” field of any email client, and the formatted message to any rich text editor or email client. Individual email addresses can also be copied using the “Copy” action from the contact’s action menu.
By default, the generated summary contains the name of the activity the assignments belong to, the overall time window of all assignments, and the list of all assignments – including the name, email addresses, and phone numbers of each assigned resource together with the assignment’s time window –, sorted by resource and assignment time window. We know that the generated summary may need to be different on a customer by customer basis or even include sensitive information. For this reason, we designed it to be easily customizable through customer preferences, and of course the whole summary is editable inside or outside of Horizon Planner.
In the future, we plan to enable emailing the whole summary directly from Horizon Planner.
Customer preferences
We have added customer preferences to Horizon Planner all the way back in June. At that point there were only a couple of simple, styling related preferences and all of them were company-wide. In this release, we have moved closer to the preference system we originally planned, namely company-wide default preferences with optional overrides for every organization. This way we can not only tailor Horizon Planner to a specific company, we can also customize it for each organizational unit within the company.
Together with this preference system upgrade, we have also added several new preferences:
- The busy window calculator preference specifies the busy window calculator method that should be used by default for newly created activities, as well as the base configuration for every busy window calculator method.
- The assignment summary preference defines how the text in “Assignment Summary” dialogs should be generated.
- The acceptable CO2 preference stores the maximum CO2 emission estimate for an assignment that is accepted by Horizon Planner by default, for example after dropping a resource on an assignment in Timeline view. Continuously decreasing the value of this preference should make it easy for companies to become more environment friendly over time.
Further improved filtering on Gantt view
On the Gantt chart we show projects, activities and roles in a single list. Setting up a single filter for this diverse set has its own challenges that we need to tackle to keep filtering simple and intuitive for our users. In a previous release we already added a complex logic to improve usability.
This time we made it possible to get a match when some (but not all) of the filter criteria would accept an activity while the remaining criteria accepts its project. For example one could search for an activity by providing the name (or part of the name) of its project and a tag the activity has. Even though the activity in and of itself wouldn’t match (because it doesn’t have the required name) and the project would also not match (because it doesn’t have the required tag), Horizon Planner will still find the result.
We realize that a drawback of this is that generally there will be more results for a filter. To mitigate this, we make sure that better matches appear first when there is a name filter. Otherwise results will appear in alphabetical order.
Chart upgrades
We have also made several improvements to our charts in this release.
The one we already talked about was to add drop support to chart surfaces, enabling assignment creation by dropping a resource on the Gantt chart.
We have also tweaked how chart items (assignments and holidays) look and behave. The most notable change is that resize indicators only show up when a chart item is selected. This improves usability on touch devices, where “hover” is not possible at all, helps highlight which item is currently selected, and also makes interaction options very clear. We have also changed how the selected item is highlighted, to make sure selection is always easily noticable.
Minor features
- Activities now inherit the tags of their project by default.
- “Submit & Add More” actions in dialogs have been given more descriptive names.
- The Inspector now remembers the selected tab for each inspector type.
- We have made several usability improvements to Admin view, to make it easier to add organization access to users and vice versa.
- Finished the database upgrade infrastructure.
- Implemented incremental data import from legacy Horizon Planner.
- Implemented an application that migrates legacy Horizon Planner’s file store to the new system.
- As usual, we have also worked on styling and infrastructure improvements.