Release Notes - 2022. 02. 01.
Today’s release brings some major features and a lot of quality-of-life improvements to Horizon Planner. The capability management system of the application became more powerful with the addition of capability levels; improvements to our reporting system enable specialized reports for our customers; user login got easier with single sign-on; and much more.
Capability levels
Starting with this release, all resource capabilities can have an optional level attribute, which is simply a number denoting the resource’s level of expertise in the given capability.
Capability levels – if set – are displayed in Resources view on the Capabilities card as well as on the Capabilities tab of the resource Inspector. It’s worth noting that these resource capability lists also show the expiry date of capabilities, if they have one, to make sure all relevant data is immediately available to the user.
Having the ability to store resource capability levels in Horizon Planner is of course nice to have, but not overly useful in itself. We expect that capability levels will be the most handy when planners want to find resources with at least a certain amount of experience for a given assignment. To aid our users in such situations, we’ve decided to improve resource filtering in Timetables view by making it possible to select a minimum level for every capability in the resource capability filter.
We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback and improvement ideas on this feature – we hope it will eventually develop into a powerful component of Horizon Planner.
Customer-specific reporting
Horizon Planner needs to be able to seamlessly integrate into the existing workflows of a company, and its reporting capabilities are playing a significant role to achieve that. We already have some generic report templates that could prove useful for any company, and we plan to add more in the future. However this alone would not accomplish the high degree of integration we aim for.
Many companies have very specific needs in their reporting, and using a generic report for that could become inconvenient. The generic report might miss some important information, include some irrelevant information, or have too many parameters that have to be set up the exact same way every time for that report. Starting with this release, customer-specific reports can be prepared to provide all the relevant (and only the relevant) data for a customer with an easy-to-use UI.
Our approach was to allow customer-specific modifications to our existing generic reports. Those modified versions would show up in the list of reports in addition to the generic ones, but only for the company that requested it. For example a modified Assignment Overview report could have a default tag filter with tags that don’t even exist in other companies.
User notifications
Having visual feedback on all actions raises user confidence. One way to achieve that is to show a notification dialog whenever an action’s result is not immediately obvious on the UI – but frequently shown notification dialogs interrupt the workflow. An unobtrusive alternative is to use a message bar instead that provides the necessary feedback and then disappears automatically, without ever blocking the interface. So that is what we went for.
Notifications will show up at the bottom of the page in a calming green color if your action was successful, with a yellow background if we would like to warn you about something, and with a red background if an error occurred that you must be aware of. Actually the color of the message is often the only thing you need to pay attention to. Info and warning notifications will disappear automatically, but error messages must be dismissed manually. Besides our futile attempts to make you read them, it is also easier to screenshot an error message and send it to customer support if it doesn’t disappear in a few seconds.
Single sign-on
Warning: this section will be a bit technical. Feel free to skip it.
Since the very beginning, Horizon Planner supported two methods for user authentication: username-password and “legacy” – authentication proxy-based – single sign-on. In this release, we’ve finally discontinued “legacy” single sign-on support and replaced it with a modern, OpenID Connect-based solution that will be familiar to users who at least once clicked on a “Sign in with Google” button on a webpage.
Of course, all of our customers will be able to use their preferred identity provider for single sign-on, be it for example Microsoft or Google. In case you wondered, we will not take requests for using Facebook/Meta seriously…
We want to tailor every deployment to our customers’ preferences, so it’s important to note that all supported authentication methods are opt-in and authentication options can be reconfigured at any point on request.
Other features
On top of the already highlighted features, we’ve worked on many other improvements in various parts of the application.
The Gantt chart on Timeline view received a lot of attention, both in terms of visuals and functionality (which go hand in hand in this case):
- Mobilizations (i.e. the bracket-like indicators that are shown above overlapping assignment groups) now inherit the color of their assignments, if all related assignments have the same color.
- The name of the activity where a mobilization belongs is now shown above the mobilization indicator, and clicking on the mobilization indicator opens the activity in the Gantt tree if it wasn’t already open.
- Unfulfilled assignments are now shown with a striped background to highlight and better distinguish them from the ones that already have a resource.
- Assignments in the chart got new, “Inspect Assignment” and “Inspect Resource” context menu actions.
- We’ve added “Zoom” and “Zoom & Filter” actions to the chart’s context menu to make navigation and time window-based filtering more convenient.
Overlapping assignments and holidays – typical planning issues – were a bit hard to spot on the Timetables chart. To improve the situation, Horizon Planner now highlights rows that have such problems near the currently visible time window, using a red background. Additionally, the already mentioned “Zoom” actions were added to this chart’s context menu as well.
Dashboard view – where all employees can manage their own calendar and data – is still in proof of concept phase, but we anticipate that it will see lots of development time in 2022. As a start, we’ve completely overhauled its layout and styling, bringing it to the same level as the other views of Horizon Planner.
The absence of a search feature on Tags view made it very inconvenient to find a specific tag and see which business objects have it, especially when Horizon Planner contained lots of tags. We’ve finally rectified this deficiency by adding a “Find” action to the command bar of the view, which opens a search dialog where users can rely on auto-completion to easily find the tag they are looking for.
UI improvements and bug fixes
As always, we’ll round off the release notes by mentioning some of the smaller changes we’ve made to Horizon Planner.
On the user interface front, we have:
- replaced the misleading “Inspect” action with a “Show Capability” action on the Capabilities card of resources on Resources view;
- made chart sidebars narrower everywhere to give more room to the actual content;
- improved contrast and content separation on all views;
- made it possible to enforce that activities have an airport on an organization by organization basis based on customer preferences;
- updated reports to show the names of all resources who are accessible to the user, not only the ones that are in the report’s selected organization.
We’ve also worked on security improvements and fixed a few bugs. Among others, we have:
- made a security audit and now enforce stricter rules on parts of our API;
- fixed a couple of layout issues in the Inspector;
- fixed a bug in our file attachment services that caused problems when certain special characters were present in a filename;
- resolved an issue that caused downloaded file extensions to be incorrect in some browsers;
- fixed a bug where the user was unable to enter the application if she lost access to her previously selected organization;
- fixed the incorrect initialization of the busy window calculator in the activity editor dialog.