Release Notes - 2022. 10. 03.
The 2022 October release of Horizon Planner brings several major features and usability improvements, including expiring capability email generation, easier activity creation, chart improvements, and support for uploading multiple files together. The application also underwent huge technical changes under the hood.
Expiring capabilities
We added a new Dashboard view to Horizon Planner in the July release, whose main content at this time is a list that shows all expiring capabilities of resources and lets users inspect and edit each of them.
We knew from the start that eventually users would need to use this information outside of the application. The typical use-case is sending email reminders to employees, management, or HR to ensure that expiring capabilities – for example certificates, licenses, visas – are renewed on time and don’t impede business activities.
In this release we roll out our initial solution to the described business case with the addition of an Expiring Capabilities dialog that generates an editable email template of one or more expiring capabilities and shows the email addresses of all affected resources. As can be expected, the dialog lets users conveniently copy both the email addresses and the created message. Overall, the user experience will be very familiar to everyone who regularly uses the Assignment Summary dialog.
The dialog can be opened with different configurations in Dashboard view. The command bar of the expiring capabilities list received a new “Show Summary” action that opens it with all the listed resource capabilities. The action menu of all items in the expiring capabilities list got three new actions: “Show Summary” opens the dialog for the given resource capability; “Show Resource Summary” opens it with all expiring capabilities of the corresponding resource; and “Show Capability Summary” opens it with all resources whose given capability is expiring.
We already have several improvement ideas for this feature, for example different grouping options, customer-specific email templates, even report generation, but we will be waiting for user feedback first, to make sure development progresses in the right direction.
Easier activity creation on Timeline view
Creating a new activity on Timeline view used to be fairly inconvenient, because first users had to find the project where they wanted to add the activity. Having to scroll the Gantt chart alone might have been okay, although not great, but when the chart is filtered – for example for a time window – it is quite likely that the project is not even visible and the filter needs to be adjusted or reset before the activity can be created at all.
Recently this usability issue reached the top of our priority queue and the current release finally resolves it.
The first part of the solution is an upgraded activity wizard, that received a new (first) stage where the activity’s project can be selected. If you start creating an activity from a project’s action menu – the only way until now –, then this stage of the wizard will be skipped, but you will still be able to go back to it and select a different project. Beware though: changing the project resets the wizard into its default state, so any changes you might have made in the wizard will be lost.
With the upgraded activity wizard in place, it made sense to also tweak the command bar of the Gantt chart to allow activity creation. Because of the limited available space, we decided to replace the “New Project” action with a “New” menu that now has 2 actions: “Project” for creating projects, and “Activity” for creating activities.
File attachments
From the start, the file attachments feature had a limitation: files had to be uploaded one by one. We originally implemented it this way because we thought in the vast majority of cases this is how the feature would be used, and so this solution seemed like the best trade-off with regards to complexity, potential errors, developer time, and value.
It turned out our assumption about usage patterns were wrong and users often need to upload several files at a time. So, for this release, we upgraded our file handling infrastructure in Horizon Planner’s server application, and as a consequence, we were able to lift the single-selection restriction in the file selector of the client application as well.
The only remaining limitation is that by default, the combined size of files that are uploaded together cannot be more than 32 megabytes. This upload size limit is configurable for each deployment though.
Full activity names on the Gantt chart
We had a long-standing feature request whose priority kept rising every month, namely to show full activity/mobilization names on the Gantt chart if there is enough space for it.
To enable this feature, we first needed to add new, efficient, available space tracking capabilities to our chart visualization library. The work we did since May on this library thankfully paid off again, as we were able to deliver the mentioned chart upgrades very efficiently. As a result, we can finally cross this feature request out from our issue tracker.
Usability improvements
We also made several smaller changes to Horizon Planner based on the feedback we received from our users:
- We added separators between the future, ongoing, and past assignments of resources on the Assignments tab of the resource Inspector.
- The activity editor now has a dedicated Notes tab with much more space for writing.
- We implemented new support tools to help customers manage their tags and resources.
Technical changes
In addition to the features already described, Horizon Planner also underwent fundamental technical changes over the past 5 weeks. The motivation for this work was that, as we mentioned in the previous release notes, we are starting a new production optimization project that will be built on Horizon Planner’s application framework.
This is not a technical post, so we will skip the details, but in short, we:
- upgraded all the tools and frameworks Horizon Planner relies on to their latest and greatest versions;
- reimplemented a lot of “legacy” code that used older coding patterns or tools we didn’t want to depend on anymore;
- heavily modularized the codebase to make as much of it easily reusable in other projects as possible;
- and of course, we did a lot of testing to minimize the chance of breaking features or introducing new bugs, especially on the user interface.
From a technical point of view, this is the most significant release of Horizon Planner ever.