Release Notes - 2022. 09. 01.
The new features in this release are centered around data availability and visualization. We addressed some explicit customer requests regarding data way in the past or spread across multiple organizations, steadily improving user experience. Yet our main focus was not on new features, but on background work, preparing for more hustling months ahead.
Timeline
On the top level, Horizon Planner partitions customer data into organizations. This has several benefits including more focused work, finer permission control and better performance. The price to pay for that is some amount of added complexity. We are working hard to hide that complexity from our users with clever UI, and handle it in program code instead.
Today we tackled one such problem (possibly the last one) by making sure relevant information is always visible on our charts, even when the data stretches multiple organizations. From now on the names of the resources assigned to an activity are always visible, even if the resource is in a different organization than the activity - and thus normally would be out of scope. Note that the user might not even have permission to see the assigned resource. Still it makes sense that at least the name of the assigned resources should be visible for a user that has access to the activity. To give more context we use a different style for these assignments and even show the organization of the resource.
Complementarily, a similar feature is implemented to always show activity names on the timetable of a resource. The same argument about the permissions holds here as well: if a user can access a resource, they should be able to see at least what activities that resource is assigned to, even in other organizations.
Refinements
The summer months, when our users typically go on holiday and we receive less feature and support requests, are the ideal time for us to prioritize refining Horizon Planner rather than adding new features to it.
After the previous release, we started analyzing the accumulated server logs to identify the frequently used but relatively slow endpoints of the server component of Horizon Planner. In the end we flagged seven endpoints that needed improvement – most of them used by the charts on Timeline view –, and through various optimizations, we managed to reach 1.5-20 times better performance. In practice it means that data will appear noticeably faster on the user interface, the application – especially the charts – will feel smoother, and the server’s workload will significantly decrease.
On top of these performance improvements, we also did our usual house-keeping and upgraded multiple parts of our software stack to the latest available versions to improve reliability.
KPI prototyping
Legacy Horizon Planner had several KPI calculation features, such as various capacity, demand, usage, and utilization charts. While these features were not requested by our customers so far, we expect that situation to change in the not too distant future, so we took the time to evaluate our implementation options and prototype some of the central parts of this feature.
We believe KPIs will be useful in both in-app and downloadable Excel report forms. Since Horizon Planner already has the tooling to generate Excel documents, our focus was on the more complex problem: performant KPI calculation and visualization inside the application.
It’s important to emphasize that the KPI feature is only in prototype phase at this time, and as such, it’s not part of the Horizon Planner release. A stable version of this feature will only be implemented when our customers request it, to make sure the actual KPIs, the user interface, and the configuration options are aligned with business needs.
Project update
MIL Innovations will soon start working on a production optimization project for a new client. We made the decision that the application should be built using Horizon Planner’s core framework, which means that the Horizon Planner team will be involved in the development work. We expect that in the short term, it will slightly slow down feature development for Horizon Planner as we will need to put more emphasis on the application’s core framework. We think this initial investment will pay off well in the years to come, as Horizon Planner will automatically benefit from the work – client and server improvements, component upgrades, maintenance, and so on – that’s put into the new project.
Minor changes
On top of the already described updates, we rounded off the release with the following notable changes:
- The Calendar tab in the resource inspector was replaced by an Assignments tab that shows all future and past assignments of the resource. We hope to continue working on this tab – and on the inspector in general – together with our customers to try to maximize the value of this feature.
- We tweaked the content of the Assignment Summary dialog, primarily to improve the legibility of the contacts sections.
- We implemented a couple of new application management tools that will help us gather data and answer certain customer questions faster.