Release Notes - 2022. 11. 28.
Since the October release, most of our time was spent doing customer support: discussing and prototyping custom deployments, providing general technical and usage advice, developing new support tools, doing data restructuring, onboarding users, demoing the system to potential customers, and of course discussing and implementing feature requests and usability improvements.
Reports
The Competence Table report was the first one we added to Horizon Planner, all the way back in March 2021. Its main purpose is to provide an overview of resources with certain capabilities. Thanks to the great feedback we got from our users, we were able to significantly improve the usefulness of this report.
On the UI front, the major improvement is that the report received a tag filter. It can be used to narrow down the list of resources, who will appear in the generated spreadsheet, by their tags. In addition to this, we can finally create preconfigured Competence Table reports for customers, to make reporting more convenient.
In the generated spreadsheet, you will notice that instead of putting all capability information into a single column, Horizon Planner now generates three columns for each selected capability:
- The first one shows whether the resource has the given capability or not.
- The second column shows the expiry date of the capability, if the resource has the capability and it has an expiry date.
- The third one shows the capability level, if the resource has the capability and a level was specified for it.
Organizing the data in the spreadsheet this way gives users a lot more filtering options, and the potential to extract additional value from the report.
On top of all these improvements, Competence Table reports can now also have custom columns with tag-related data. For example, if resources have “Department” tags, the report can include a “Department” column, showing which department a given resource belongs to.
The Assignment Table and Assignment Overview reports also received updates. The most important new feature is that both of these reports can now optionally include the airport information for both activities and resources. It gives users a convenient solution to overview travel requirements, filter assignments or even carbon emissions by location, and to calculate additional metrics and KPIs for more efficient future operations.
Support & maintenance
Because of the unusual amount of support work mentioned in the intro, we felt it was necessary to commit a significant amount of our time to improving our support capabilities and thus our efficiency.
Most of these tools will be invisible to our users, except for the fact that we will be able to respond to support questions faster – often within minutes of receiving the email – and do complex data manipulation in the database more efficiently.
One thing users will notice though is that Horizon Planner can now be put in read-only mode. Implementing this feature took a fair bit of time, but we hope it will be worth it. The major benefit of this feature is that for example time-consuming database maintenance and data manipulation tasks can now be executed by our team without taking Horizon Planner offline.
We were also busy improving our ability to deploy and maintain Horizon Planner in more complex scenarios, and we updated all software libraries and tools Horizon Planner relies on for a slight improvement in performance and security. We have a few significant technology – and hopefully performance – updates in the pipeline, but we just couldn’t push everything into this release.
Usability
As usual for every release, we also implemented some usability improvements and fixed a couple of minor styling issues in the application.
The most notable changes are:
- Report dialogs don’t reset their state after report generation.
- It is now possible to copy holidays from one resource to another in Timetables view, using the Clone & Edit action in the holidays’ context menu.
- The activity can now be changed in all role creator dialogs.
- We added role creation actions to the “New” menu in the command bar of the Gantt chart.
- Users can now choose from multiple sort options (Capability, Resource, and Expiry) in the Expiring Capabilities list on Dashboard view.
