Category Archives: Anywhere

Limit increase at workspaces for organization and user groups

This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with more than 50 users.

If you previously opened the workspace of your organization or user group, the full range of functions with customer list and report list was only available if the workspace contained a maximum of 50 users. This limit could now be increased to 250 users through performance optimization for large amounts of data.

Major August 2024 Update

After an intensive development period, we have rolled out a major update of portatour® today. To read details about the new features, scroll down or use the following links:

We wish you much success with using the new features and are looking forward to your feedback at feedback@portatour.com.

Single sign-on (SSO) with Microsoft: Setup

This news concerns administrators from company accounts with at least two users.

To enable your users to log in to portatour® with your company’s Microsoft account, two steps are necessary: Setting up Microsoft as a single sign-on provider in portatour® and assigning Microsoft users to portatour® users.

Setting up Microsoft as a single sign-on provider

  1. Go to “Workspace Organization” and open “Options”.
  2. In the “Security” section, click on “Single Sign-on Provider > Add > Microsoft”. The following window appears:
  3. Are you yourself Entra ID administrator of your Microsoft client?
    • If yes:
      1. Click on “Log in with Microsoft”.
      2. Log in with your Microsoft account.
      3. Confirm the requested permissions with “Accept”.
    • If no:
      1. Click on “Enter tenant ID manually”.
      2. Click on “Copy link” and share it with your Entra ID administrator to install the “portatour® single sign-on” enterprise application and to accept the requested permissions. During this process, your administrator will receive the tenant ID.
      3. Enter the provided tenant ID.
  4. Enter the name of your Microsoft client in the “Name” field. Typically, this is your company name. No verification takes place. The name helps you and your users to identify the correct Microsoft account if you have several Microsoft clients.
  5. Click “Save”.

Assigning Microsoft users to portatour® users

You have four options for assigning Microsoft users to portatour® users: By means of individual invitation emails, by means of mass invitation emails, by means of manual entry of the Microsoft object IDs or by importing the Microsoft object IDs.

Assignment by invitation e-mail

  1. Go to “Workspace Organization” and open the menu item “Users”.
  2. Click on the desired user to open the detailed view of this user.
  3. Click on “Send invitation” in the “Log in with SSO with Microsoft” section.
  4. The user receives an email with an invitation link. This invitation link is valid for 30 days.
  5. After clicking on the invitation link, the user logs in to their Microsoft account.
  6. After logging in, the assignment is successfully created. You can recognize this if the Microsoft user name (UPN) is also displayed on the user’s detail page.

Notes:

  • For security reasons, the email address of the Microsoft user must match that of the portatour® user for the assignment invitation to work. After a successful assignment, the email addresses on both sides can be changed without affecting the assignment.
  • To invalidate an invitation prematurely, click on the recycle bin symbol.
  • To send a new invitation, click on “Send new invitation”. The original invitation will then become invalid.

Assignment by means of mass invitation e-mails

  1. Go to “Workspace Organization” and open the menu item “Users”.
  2. At the end of the user list, click on “Edit all X”.
  3. In the column “Log in with SSO with Microsoft” in the section “X users have neither a linked Microsoft account nor an invitation”, click on “Send invitations”.

Notes:

  • In the user list, use the selection mode or the extended search to specifically restrict the users affected by this process.
  • The instructions for the individual invitation email apply analogously here.

Assignment by entering the Microsoft object ID

For this procedure, you must know the user’s Microsoft object ID. As administrator of your Microsoft client, you will find this in the user management of the Microsoft Entra Admin Center.

  1. Go to “Workspace Organization” and open the menu item “Users”.
  2. Click on the desired user to open their detailed view.
  3. Click on “Enter Microsoft object ID” in the “Log in with SSO with Microsoft” section
  4. Enter the Microsoft object ID of the user – preferably using Copy & Paste from the Microsoft Entra Admin Center.
  5. Click “Save”.
  6. The user can then immediately log in to portatour® using SSO.
  7. Optionally, click on “Send access link” so that the user receives the link to the SSO login page of portatour® via email.
  8. You can recognize a successful login by the user if the Microsoft user name (UPN) is also displayed on user’s detail page.

Notes:

  • Proceed carefully. When entering the Microsoft object ID, there is no check whether the user exists in your Microsoft client or whether it is the desired user.
  • In this case, it is not necessary for the email addresses of the user in portatour® and Microsoft to match.

Assignment by importing the Microsoft object IDs

If you have the Microsoft object IDs of your users as a file, use the user import to assign them to existing or new users.

In the import wizard, assign the corresponding column in your file to the “SSO Microsoft object IDs” field and then carry out the import in the usual way.

Notes:

  • The instructions for entering the Microsoft object ID apply analogously here.
  • If the “SSO Microsoft object IDs” field is missing, you have not yet set up Microsoft as a SSO provider in portatour®.
  • The name of the field also contains the name of the SSO provider you have specified.
  • If you want to assign several Microsoft users to one portatour® user, separate the object IDs with a semicolon ‘;’.

Deactivating single sign-on

Automatic blocking of a user

If a user is blocked or deleted by the SSO provider, the assigned user in portatour® can no longer log in via SSO after one hour at the latest. You do not need to do anything in portatour®. If the user was already logged in via SSO, they will be automatically logged out.

Remove SSO login for a user

If you no longer want to allow SSO logins for a specific user, click on the corresponding recycle bin icon on the user’s detail page to delete the SSO-assignment. Alternatively, remove the Microsoft object ID from the corresponding line at the user import.

Deactivating or deleting a SSO provider

If you want to disable login with SSO for all users, deactivate the corresponding single sign-on provider in the organization options.

You can then also delete the SSO provider. All SSO assignments of the users will be deleted.

Other notes on single sign-on

SSO login and login with user name & password

portatour® allows users to log in with both user name & password and SSO. If you introduce SSO, this is done for existing users without interruption and without the need for strict timing.

You can see both login options for a user in the user list. Manage them at the user’s detail view or via mass editing of users.

Deactivating login with user name & password

If you have successfully introduced SSO, you can deactivate the login via user name & password if desired.

In a user’s detail view, click on “Disable login” in the “Log in with user name & password” section.

Alternatively, use the mass editing in the user list. In any case, make sure beforehand that the affected users have already successfully logged in with SSO, e.g. by using “Search > Extended > Linked SSO accounts > possible (link to account used)”.

Multiple SSO providers

portatour® allows you to set up multiple SSO providers. This supports the following scenarios, among others:

  • Users from different organizations (countries, subcontractors, internal/external) work in portatour®, whereby each organization is managed in a separate Microsoft client.
  • You want to change the SSO provider. The transition is seamless for users, as both providers work in parallel.

Assign a unique name to each SSO provider. In the user detail view and in user mass editing, the respective SSO providers can be found in their own sections, in user export/import in their own columns.

Multiple SSO assignments per user

Several SSO assignments can be stored at a user in portatour®. This is useful for the SSO provider change scenario mentioned above.

Different portatour® users can also be assigned to the same user of a SSO provider. The portatour® user may also be located in different portatour® company accounts. In such cases, the user is prompted after the SSO login to select the desired portatour® user with which they wish to continue working.

This is helpful, for example, in a scenario where an administrator manages several portatour® company accounts and therefore has a separate account in each portatour® company account.

SSO in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

If you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as your data source system, SSO is not yet possible. We are already working on an update to support SSO.

Single sign-on (SSO) with Microsoft: Login

If your administrator has set up the login via Microsoft at your portatour® company account, then proceed as follows:

First login via link from email

  1. Open the email you received from portatour®.
  2. Click on the link in the email.
  3. Depending on the setup of your administrator, you will be taken to one of the two pages:
  4. If available, confirm the license terms.
  5. Click on “Log in with Microsoft”.
  6. Sign in to your Microsoft account.
  7. If your login was successful and your Microsoft account could be assigned to a portatour® user, you are automatically logged in to portatour®.
  8. If not, please contact your administrator.

Login via login page

  1. Open the page https://my.portatour.net on your device
  2. Click on “Log in with Microsoft”.
  3. Sign in to your Microsoft account.
  4. If your login was successful and your Microsoft account could be assigned to a portatour® user, you are automatically logged in to portatour®.
  5. If not, please contact your administrator.

Note:

  • If you use the portatour® app on your Android device, you may be prompted to update from the Google Play Store. This is necessary in order to be able to use SSO.

Extension of the user management

This news concerns administrators from company accounts with at least two users.

User list and user detail page

Click on a user in the user list to open the new user detail view. To get the context menu as usual, click on the “arrow down” symbol on the right or use the right mouse button.

Copy access link to clipboard

User details offers the new option of copying the access link of a user to the clipboard and then sending it to that user in a different way than email.

Selection mode and mass editing in user list

Below the user list, you will find buttons for starting selection mode and mass editing. The mass editing currently offers the functions to manage the login options of users, e.g. activate logins, send invitations and access links, deactivate logins.

Extension of the display of custom fields

Show longer field names

When displaying custom fields, field names were previously abbreviated from 10 characters. Now that mobile devices have become larger, it is only abbreviated from 20 characters.

Note: If you change the field names in the process, please note that the column names in the export file will also be affected. This must be taken into account if the file is processed automatically. A change of field names has no effect on the import.

Change the position of field names

Previously, field names were always displayed on the left and the field content on the right.

This behavior can now be changed individually for each field group in order to make better use of the screen space, especially for long or multi-line texts:

The following screenshots illustrate the effects of the three different settings:

Always left:

Above for multi-line text fields:

Always above:

Notes:

  • For newly created field groups, the setting “Above for multi-line text fields” is preset. This is also our recommendation.
  • This setting also affects the window for editing custom fields.

Display of field group names

If your custom fields are divided into several groups at reports, the group names are now also displayed in the views. The effect is particularly visible if reports are not truncated in the list views, but completely displayed instead. The user can set this in their own options under “Program settings > Customer list > Entire report” or “Program settings > Report list > Entire report”.

Territory optimization: Search for suitable home locations for a territory

This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.

If you are responsible for the field sales force, you may be familiar with the situation when you are looking for a new field rep for an unserviced sales territory: you consider in which cities or regions you would like to search for candidates and what impact different home locations have on the expected driving time in a territory.

The new “Home location suitability” function at portatour® provides an answer to precisely this question. And this is how you proceed:

  1. Start a territory optimization.
  2. Go to “Initial situation> Settings”.
  3. In the “Other” section, change the “Home location suitability” from “Do not calculate” to “Calculate”.
  4. Click on “Update now” in the yellow message to recalculate the initial situation.
  5. Go to “Initial situation > Map”.
  6. Use the options cogwheel at the top right to switch to “Display: Home location suitability”.
  7. Select the desired territory in the selection box below.

You will now see the customers of the selected territory colored according to a green-yellow-red scale. Green locations (5 stars) are very suitable as home location for the area, red locations (0 stars) are rather unsuitable.

By clicking on the respective location, you will receive further detailed information on the field rep if they would be responsible for the territory from this home location. This detailed information is also included in the automatic evaluation of the home location suitability.

Note: Calculating the home location suitability significantly slows down the calculations of the initial situation. Switch it off again in the settings of the initial situation when you no longer need this function.

Territory optimization: Extended overnight stay and driving speed settings

This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.

There are three new settings under “Initial situation > Settings” to adapt the territory analysis and optimization even better to your situation. The layout of this page has also been revised.

Users: Overnight stay > Willingness to stay overnight

When calculating the expected number of overnight stays, territory optimization takes into account all settings for overnight stays in portatour®. Nevertheless, in practice it can happen that the field rep spends the night away from home more frequently or less frequently, e.g. due to manual overnight stays at home location or in hotels.

To take this into account in the territory optimization, you can influence the number of overnight stays with the new “willingness to stay overnight” setting. “Low” leads to fewer calculated overnight stays and more driving time, “High” to more overnight stays and less driving time.

Under “Manual adjustments > User modifications”, this setting can be edited individually for each user. If you want to edit this setting individually in the initial situation, set “Editable per user” to “Yes”.

Note: Please note that changing the setting does not affect the number of overnight stays in all cases. If, for example, only a few customers meet the criteria for overnight stays away from home, increasing the willingness to stay overnight will not lead to more overnight stays, as more overnight stays are not required or permitted.

Users: Customer reachability > Maximum overnight stays from home location

In addition to the maximum distance or maximum driving time, this setting allows you to specify the maximum geographical extent of a territory. By default, a customer must be reachable with a maximum of one overnight stay from the home location – this usually corresponds to a distance of over 1,000 km. If you want to allow even larger territories in exceptional cases, set this value to “Any”. This will slow down the calculation speed.

Under “Manual adjustments > User modifications”, this setting can be edited individually for each user. If you want to edit this setting individually in the initial situation, set “Editable per user” to “Yes”.

Driving speed

portatour® uses historical driving speed data collected by navigation system and mobile phone providers by measuring the movement data of millions of road users and making it available for the respective road sections.

To deviate from these average values during territory optimization, use this setting. The changed setting applies equally to all territories.

Territory optimization: Further improvements

This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.

  • In the table views, clicking on the column heading “Users” displays the additional columns “Working hours” and “Share of working hours”.
  • It is now possible to perform user modifications and customer modifications in post processing. Use this option if you are satisfied with the optimized customer assignment, but would also like to evaluate and apply the effect of different customer or user settings.
  • When exporting territory optimization customers, there is a new selection option “Customers included in the result”. This means that customers that you have excluded in the initial situation are not exported.