Today’s portatour® Anywhere update provides some new calendar features for you:

Find suitable day for customer appointment

Some of you certainly know the situation that a customer wants an appointment with you and you would like to suggest several days on which you already have other appointments near that customer to avoid unnecessary detours. In this case, portatour® can now help you.

Find the respective customer in the customer list, open the customer’s detail page and click the new Find suitable day button in the “Upcoming appointments” section.

You can now see the usual calendar view, however including some upgrades:

• The headline shows the customer’s name for whom you are searching suitable days for an appointment.
• The “detour” in driving time and distance, which the customer would cause on that day, is shown for each calendar day.
• In addition, colors (green, yellow, red) visualize the detour to allow a better overview. Green means a detour of less than 30 minutes, yellow means a detour of 30 to 90 minutes, red means a detour of more than 90 minutes.
• You can also see if the customer is closed on that day – e.g. no business hours, holiday or call block. In such cases the color will be gray.
• By clicking a line in the calendar, you can immediately create a new appointment for the required customer without having to search the customer again.

You can view the detour up to one year in advance and it works in the daily, weekly and monthly views (use the cogwheel button on the top right for switching between the views).

Use the new Map link to view the daily routes of specific days on the map for which portatour® has already calculated a schedules. In addition, the required customer will also be shown on the map to show their distance from the route. Hint: Use the cogwheel button on the top right to switch between the schedule with beelines and the schedule with routes.

For days further in the future that do not yet have a specific schedule, portatour® uses appointments that have already been entered in the calendar to determine the detour. In such cases you will obtain good estimates as the specific daily routes have not yet been calculated.

For empty days – i.e. no schedule and no appointments are available – the “detour” means the drive from the home address to the required customer and back. In such cases no color will be shown.

In general, please note:

• When calculating the detour, there are no time checks if the required customer can be fit in on a day, taking into consideration the existing appointments. As soon as you enter the appointment for the required customer in the calendar and update the schedule, portatour® will do its best to optimize time. In conflicting cases you can decide yourself if you want to move other appointments or reduce the duration of the appointments to provide enough space.
• If a day consists of portatour® call suggestions only – i.e. no fixed appointments are included – the detour information is less relevant. As soon as you enter the appointment for the required customer and update the schedule, portatour® will always align the schedule to this new appointment and, if necessary, suggest other, closer customers to fill the day.

New calendar options

Click on the cogwheel button on the top right of the calendar view to go to the following window:

As usual, choose between daily, weekly and monthly views in the Period section.

Under View you can choose between Plan (=appointments and call suggestions only), Reports (=call reports only) and Combined. The combined view provides a combination of appointments, call suggestions and call reports. The new feature is that an appointment or call suggestion for a customer will only be shown in the calendar until you enter a call report for that customer on that day – i.e. the customer was actually visited. Subsequently, the view will only show the call report for clarity reasons.

The Label section is new and allows you to choose the labelling of individual appointments, call suggestions and call reports in the calendar. Choose between Subject first, Location first and Only location. “Subject” also contains the customer’s name.

We hope you enjoy the new features and look forward to receiving your feedback on feedback@portatour.com.

Today we have uploaded a new portatour® version to our servers. The following three innovations are now available for you:

Consideration of appointments also on weekends

As of now, portatour® has only calculated the schedule for those weekdays for which you entered working hours in the options – typically Monday to Friday. From now onwards, portatour® will automatically calculate a schedule for “days off” in case you have entered an appointment in the calendar on those days. For example: In case of a trade fair on a Saturday a schedule with driving times to and from the fair will be calculated.

Hints:

• portatour® will only automatically add further customer calls to those additional days if there is enough time available between two fixed appointments and if you have actually saved business hours for your customers on those days.
• Appointments that are “flexible on the day” or “with leeway” will, as before, not be scheduled on days off since portatour® does not know working hours during which the appointments would be allowed to take place. Thus, enter a specific start time for these appointments.

Mass deletion of all call blocks for selected customers

You can find the new button “Delete all call blocks…” in the customer mass editing mode. This button deletes all existing call blocks for the selected customers. To do so, use the selection mode in the customers list or filter via the “Extended search” mode to select the required customers.

New “Actions” button on the customer detail page

Go to the customer detail page to find the new “Actions” button.

In addition to the already known “Delete customer” button, portatour® now offers the following new features:

• Duplicate customer: A new customer is created who represents a copy of the original customer. Appointments, call reports, call blocks and read-only fields will not be copied. The new data record contains a new portatour-ID, the external ID is empty, and the word “COPY” is added to the customer name. We recommend a renaming. The process equals the manual creation of a new customer by re-entering the original customer’s information. Use this quick possibility if, for example, you want to create several customers in the same building (= same address) or subsidiaries of a corporate chain with identical settings (business hours, scheduling parameters, …).
• Transfer customer: The possibility of transferring a customer (incl. their appointments, reports and call blocks) from one portatour® user to another already existed in the mass editing mode of several customers. This feature has now been integrated into the customer detail page in order to simplify the transfer of individual customers.
• Move appointments & reports: This button enables the transfer of appointments and reports from one customer to another in order to simplify the clearing up of customer doublets. Search the target customer in the selection box and confirm the transfer. Hint: Make sure you have manually taken over possible other fields and you actually delete the customer with no appointments and reports before proceeding to the deletion of a customer.

Some features may be missing if you use portatour® in combination with a data host system or depending on your administrator’s permission settings:

• “Duplicate customer” requires the permission to create customers.
• “Transfer customer” requires a multiple-user-license of portatour® Anywhere, the permission to transfer data and is not available for portatour® in combination with data host systems (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, Connector).
• “Move appointments & reports” requires the permission to change the call report history and is not available for portatour® in combination with data host systems.

We hope you enjoy the new features and look forward to receiving your feedback on feedback@portatour.com.

Today’s update expands the import capabilities of portatour® further: As of now, an import of call reports and customer reservations is possible from Excel-, CSV- or ODS- files.

Import call reports

Use this possibility if you change from another CRM system to portatour® or if you want to synchronize portatour® with an existing CRM system. You find the import assistant in the Menu > Options > Section “Data management” > Import data > Reports.

The tips for the import of appointments regarding customer reference, external ID, file template, restore points and API also apply for the import of call reports. Please read and consider them!

“Include customers in schedule” via import

If you want to include certain customers in the schedule independently of the call interval, portatour® offers the “reservation” feature. In addition to the manual reservation in portatour® on the customer detail page or via mass editing, it is now possible to create and delete a reservation also via customer import.

In the customer import assistant on the “Scheduling fields” page, the new field “Reservation: Include in schedule” is available which you match with a “Yes”/”No” column of your import file. This column should specify whether the customer should be included in the schedule via reservation. In addition to “Yes”/”No”, the values “1”/”0″ or “true”/”false” are also allowed. If you leave this field empty for a customer in your import file, the current reservation status of this customer will remain unchanged.

We wish you a lot of success with the new import possibility and would be happy to hear your feedback under feedback@portatour.com .

Hints:

• The import feature is not available for users who use portatour® in combination with Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Connector. In those cases, call reports are automatically synchronized anyway.
• In addition, the import feature via the assistant is not available for an enterprise account if the import permission has been deactivated in the options by the administrator.

In addition to German and English, portatour® Anywhere will also be available in the French language starting today.

This is how you switch languages: Click Options in the menu, then go to the left section “My settings” and select Program settings. Switch to the desired language in the drop-down menu in the “Language and region” section and save.

If you are a company with two or more field reps, the administrator can change the language per user directly in the User management. If your company uses the portatour® API for the export of data, the header row and the formatting of data fields will always be displayed in the language configured for the administrator login who accesses the API. This means it is irrespective of the language of the user whose data are being exported.

Hint: The French versions of the user manual and the online help are currently being prepared and are expected to be published during Q1/2016.

Feedback is welcome

We look forward to receiving your feedback on feedback@portatour.com in case you find any typing errors or have any other comments on the French translation.

New: Section “Data management” in the options

The new section “Data management” has now been included in the options. This section centrally summarizes all features a user needs to import, export, adjust, delete and restore data.

Hint: This section might contain less features if you automatically synchronize portatour® Anywhere with a host system (Salesforce, Dynamics, Connector) or if your administrator has restricted the respective permissions.

We have good news for all companies who want to transfer appointments from another system into portatour® Anywhere: Starting from today, this will be enabled by the new Appointment Import Assistant. Click “Appointments” in the main menu, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Import”.

If you have imported customers into portatour® before, you will quickly find your way around the new Appointment Import Assistant, as the handling is the same: You select the desired import mode, upload the file with your appointments (supported formats: Excel, CSV, ODS), carry out the field assignments, check the import preview and then start the import process.

What you should consider in any case when importing appointments:

• Customer reference: Appointments that represent calls at existing customers must be assigned to the respective customers during the import. Only this assignment ensures that the automatic scheduling will work correctly and subsequently call reports will be attached to the correct customers. The assignment of an appointment to a customer works either via the customer’s “Portatour ID” or the “External ID”, the latter of which you can choose during the customer import (see also New key field: “External ID”).
• Time of the appointment: The time of an appointment is defined by the three fields “earliest begin”, “latest end” and “duration” (in minutes); you have the choice to omit “latest end” or “duration”. If you fill in all three fields and the duration is shorter than the period between “earliest begin” and “latest end”, then portatour® has a scope for optimization during scheduling. If you want to define an appointment as “flexible on the day”, set the “earliest begin” to 12:00 a.m., the “latest end” to 11:59 p.m. and the “duration” to the desired duration of the appointment, e.g. 30 minutes. Your working hours and your customers’ business hours will be automatically taken into account by portatour®.
• Address: If an appointment has a customer reference, the customer’s address will be automatically used as the address of the appointment during the import. This means you only need to import addresses for appointments if the appointment does not have a customer reference (e.g. internal training) or if the appointment shall take place at an address different to the customer’s address. Addresses will be automatically geo-coded during the import process.
• External ID: If you do not only want to import appointments once but also intend to update them lateron in this way, then import “External IDs” for your appointments, e.g. a unique and stable data record number from your host system. This “External ID” will serve as a key field during future import processes.

And a few more hints for the import of appointments:

• Use the export of appointments to obtain a file template for the import. If you export your appointments as an Excel file, you can edit that Excel file and re-import it. This allows you to mass edit appointments.
• Click the blue (i) symbol next to the individual field names in the import assistant to obtain explanations and hints on importing for the individual fields.
• You can also work with appointments that last several days – e.g. for trade shows or holidays. However, this case does not allow any leeway. To simplify matters, omit the duration in minutes in such cases.
• A restore point will be automatically created before each import process with the import assistant. In case an import has not provided the result you expected, you can go to options and reset to the data that was saved before the import by clicking “Restore”. Please note that all data input since the creation of the restore point will be discarded.
• If you have an enterprise account (2 users or more) you can – analogous to the customer import – also use the API interface for the import of appointments. This allows you to automate the process. The technical documentation is provided for your administrator in the options under “API”. In case you need support when using the API, please book our API workshop.
• Please consider: The more you import fixed appointments, the less room for optimization portatour® will have for automatic scheduling based on call intervals, i.e. for maximizing the number of customer visits and minimizing your travel time!

We wish you a lot of success using the new import possibility and look forward to receiving your feedback on feedback@portatour.com .

Hints:

• The import feature is not available for users who use portatour® in combination with Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Connector. In those cases appointments are automatically synchronized anyway.
• In addition, the import feature via the assistant is not available for an enterprise account if the import permission has been deactivated in the options by the administrator.

The following update is interesting for the IT administrators of all those companies who synchronize portatour® Anywhere with their existing ERP/CRM system via the API.

In addition to the “Portatour ID”, which is assigned automatically to each customer record by portatour®, you can now add an “External ID” to each customer. Typically, you will use the customer record ID from you existing ERP/CRM system.

The ID fields (Portatour ID, External ID) can be used together or individually in order to enable a clear assignment of imported data records to existing customers during subsequent data update imports. Of course you can still use custom fields as keys for data update imports. However, using the new field “External ID” offers the following differences:

• Just like for the “Portatour ID”, portatour® also guarantees for the “External ID” that no duplicate IDs do exist in a user’s database. Custom fields do not offer this validation.
• As for the “Portatour ID”, portatour® also prohibits the subsequent modification of the “External ID”. Thus, once the “External ID” has been set for a customer, it remains stable and can neither be changed via the user interface nor via an import or the API.
• The “External ID” is displayed in gray on the bottom right of the customer detail page. This enables a better identification of customers, especially for support cases within your company.
• The “External ID” must not be longer than 40 characters and only allows letters, numbers, and the following special symbols: ‘-‘, ‘_’, ‘{‘, ‘}’, ‘.’
• The “External ID” is case sensitive, i.e. the ID “ABC123” does not equal “abc123”.
• By knowing a customer’s “External ID” you also know the URL of the customer’s detail page in portatour®. It is https://my.portatour.net/a/Customers/Details/H<ExternalID>. You replace <ExternalID> with the data record’s “External ID”, e.g.  https://my.portatour.net/ a/Customers/Details/Habc123 in the case of “abc123”. This allows directly linking to customers in portatour® from you existing system.

We recommend to import a customer’s “External ID” immediately during the first import. To do so, simply assign the respective field in the import assistant.

In case you already have customers in portatour® and want to add an “External ID”, then carry out an “update import” during which you use an existing field (e.g. customer number or Portatour ID) as a key field and at the same time allocate the field “External ID”.

Be careful when allocating “External IDs” as they cannot be changed retrospectively. In case you make a mistake, you can only go to “Options” and select “Delete data > External ID” and thus remove the “External IDs” from all the data records of the user.

Conclusion

You decide whether you want to use the “External ID” or not. The “External ID” offers a stricter handling of keys. A preview of the coming portatour® updates makes the use of the “External ID” highly attractive though: We are currently working on the possibility to import appointments. The “External ID” will make it easy to implement the relation between appointments and customers.

With today’s update of portatour®, it is now possible to export the current schedule as Excel or CSV file.

Go to Schedule and scroll to the bottom. Click the new button Export > As File. Select the desired format and click on Download.

The downloaded file contains all lines shown in the current schedule: suggested visits at customers, fixed appointments, drives, breaks and waiting times, departure and arrival for each day. Also, a summary for each day and for the whole plan is included.

By choosing the option “include customer data” or “include appointment data”, the exported lines for appointments and customer visits will include all data fields of the related customers or appointments respectively.

Exporting the schedule is a useful feature for everyone who wants to archive the schedule, forward it to third parties or process it electronically.

Hints:

• For the automated processing of schedules in enterprises with 2 or more field reps, exporting the schedule is now available as part of the API. Read the API documentation to find all details on the new “ExportSchedule” function.
• The options “include customer data” and “include appointment data” are not available for users who lack the permission for data export or who are using portatour® Anywhere in combination with a host system (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, Connector).