Category Archives: Anywhere

End-of-year update 2014

As the year 2014 is closing we have released a substantial update for portatour® on our servers and updated releases of our integrations.

More information is available in these three news items:

We wish all portatour®-users a merry Christmas and a successful new year 2015.

Note: Between 23rd December 2014 and 6th January 2015 the majority of our team is on vacation and on stand-by-duty. Please bear with us that within this period it may take longer to answer emails.  

Convert call suggestions to appointments

The latest update offers a valuable feature addition for those who arrange their appointments in advance by calling the customer on the phone: converting a call suggestion into an appointment with a click. Should the suggested call be suitable for the customer, just convert it into an appointment with the click of a button. Updating the schedule is not necessary anymore. The appointment shows up in the schedule immediately. Converting a suggested call into an appointment works in three places in portatour®:

  • In the schedule (by clicking on the box in the call entry to the right)
  • On the customer detail page (in section “Next Call” by clicking the button)
  • In the calendar (by clicking on the suggested call)

Upon converting the suggestion you decide whether the appointment should be exactly at the suggested time or “a flexible appointment on the day“. We recommend using flexible appointments to give portatour® more room for optimization and to be able to react to unforeseen changes.

P.S. Converting suggested calls into appointments als works directly in Salesforce. As a prerequisite, install the latest release (download for Salesforce).

Improvements to portatour Report

By popular demand portatour® Report has been improved in four ways with the latest release:

  • Weekly delivery as alternative to daily: For those who find daily delivery via e-mail too frequently, switching to weekly delivery is now possible. To configure the e-mail addresses of recipients, there are now two text-fields in the reporting configuration: one for daily delivery, one for weekly delivery. The weekly report is generated and distributed on Sundays and includes – as usual – a review of the last week.
  • Request delivery via webpage instead of email: When manually requesting a report, you can now chose: either delivery via email or viewing the report immediately on a webpage. In the latter case you don’t have to wait anymore until the report is delivered into your mailbox.
  • Request reports from within user management: Should you have equipped multiple employees of your company with portatour®, you can – as Administrator or Supervisor – request reports directly from the user management options with a single click.
  • Automatic download of reports via API: This is good news for companies who are using the portatour® API: Starting now, portatour® Reports can be requested using the API in an automated fashion and can be archived directly in your file-system as HTML files.

P.S.: Should you be using portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM, update to the newest release (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM) before you can setup weekly delivery. Then, set the delivery configuration directly in the portatour® settings in Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, or Connector.

New Authorization Level: Supervisor

Should your company have two or more user licenses, then so far there were two authorization levels: User and Administrator.

Since the latest update there is another level available: the Supervisor.

Like the Administrator, the Supervisor can Log in as other users with a click.Beyond this, other administrative features are not available to the Supervisor.

The Supervisor authorization level is thus especially suited for back-office and inside-sales staff who support the field reps when route-planning or for managers of field reps.

P.S.: Should you be using portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM, update to the newest release (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM). Then, set the authorization level of a user of portatour® Anywhere directly in the portatour® settings in your CRM.

Entering call reports offline

As announced in our previous news item “using portatour® offline“, our developers extended portatour® further and you can now enter call reports offline.

If you haven’t done so already, enable offline-mode in the portatour® Anywhere Options: go to Program Settings and set the Internet Connection to “Refresh Offline Data“.

In the new version, you will find the buttons “Called Now” and “Missed” on the customer detail page even when you are offline:

Customer-LastCall

Click these buttons as usual to document your calls, including writing your call reports. Your changes are locally buffered on your device, indicated by a red line to the left:

Customer-LastReportOffline

When your internet connection comes back and you change to online-mode, the data will be automatically sent to the portatour® server. You will get a notification during and after the upload.

Good to know:

  • For appointments, the buttons “Took place” and “Missed” are now also available in offline-mode.
  • The changes buffered on your device will remain stored even if you restart your device or quit your browser. Nevertheless we recommend to upload changes timely. 
  • In offline-mode, one call report can be recorded per customer. By clicking on the pen-icon, it can be edited anytime before uploading it.
  • Should there be an error during upload, the respective call report will be shown to you together with the error message. Fix erroneous data and save the report.
  • Attaching files to call reports is not possible in offline-mode. Add missing files to call reports when you are online again. 

Using portatour® offline

Being in the field, you know the situation: there are places without mobile internet access. Still we want you to be able to access portatour® everywhere. This is why we are happy to announce that the newest version of portatour® Anywhere features an offline-mode. It is available on our servers starting today.

How to enable the offline-mode

The offline-functionality is disabled by default. To enable it, go to Options > Program Settings, set Internet Connection to Refresh offline data. Press Save.

Program settings - offline

From then on, your current schedule together with contained appointments and customers will be downloaded on your device automatically in the background.

Switching to the offline-mode

Should your device lose the mobile data connection, portatour® will show the following message:

Offline Warning

Press Reload if the connection did come back and you want portatour® to retry loading the data. Chose Offline-Mode when there is no mobile internet access.

Using the offline-mode

When you are in the offline-mode, you will see the last schedule downloaded from portatour® and stored as offline copy on your device.

Offline schedule

You also have access to all appointments and customer details listed in the schedule. As usually, just scroll down and click on the line for which you want to see the data. The yellow header  shows when the data has been retrieved. Schedule, customers, and appointments are in read-only mode when offline. To edit data, you currently still have to be online. Downloading this data is done automatically in the background every time portatour® detects that the schedule has been updated. For example, after calculating a new schedule. You don’t have to care about synchronization.

Switching back to online-mode

Once your device has established a data connection again, click on the top-right button “Offline” to leave the offline-mode. portatour® will try to reconnect to the server and if the connection can be established, you will be taken back to the online version of the schedule. Should the connection fail, the message “No internet connection” as described above will appear.

Feedback and next steps

We welcome feedback! Especially now, since this is the first version of the offline-mode. Should you notice problems, please report them. Write to feedback@portatour.com. Our programmers are working hard to develop and extend the offline functionality. Next on our list is entering call reports offline. Which offline feature would you like to see next? Write to us at  feedback@portatour.com.

Technical details about the offline-mode

 And now to the fine-print… 🙂

  • The automatic data download increases your data transfer volume. To keep this additional load down to a minimum, customer and appointment data are kept for a minimum of 12 hours on your device. They are “cached” and will not be downloaded every time. This may cause that you do not see the latest state of an appointment or customer when being offline. The schedule is not affected by this restriction, it will be downloaded every time you recalculate it.
  • Should you use the portatour® Android App and enable the offline mode, first ensure that the newest version 0.9.8 (Beta) or later is installed on your device.
  • Only for administrators: Should you “log in as another user”, no offline data will be cached on your device, even when offline-mode is enabled for that user

Showing call reports in your calendar

With today’s software update the calendar view of portatour® Anywhere received an additional feature: showing past call reports.

Calendar View with Reports

The call reports are distinguished by their grey color. In above example, call reports are shown on Monday and Tuesday. Click on the call report to edit the call report or to open the respective customer.

To configure what data should be shown in the calendar and for what time period, click on the cogwheel to the top-right of the calendar. There you also find the new Daily View.

Calendar View Switch

By setting the view to “Plan”, only the planned schedule and appointments are shown. Setting it to “Reports” only shows call reports. The option “Both” shows the planned schedule with appointments and the call reports. In the latter mode, only call reports will be shown for past days, even if there are past appointments or scheduled visits. This is to tidy up the calendar.

New “Multi Selection” custom field

Back in November 2013 we introduced the data type “Selection” (drop-down-list) to the custom fields (see our blog post). When creating a field of this kind, you or your administrator define a list of possible values. One of the values can be selected.

After hearing repeated requests from the portatour® community we added an extended form of selection: the Multi Selection. This new data type allows selecting multiple values from a list:

Multiselection

Tip: On Windows, hold the ctrl-key when clicking to select multiple elements.

P.S. Users of Salesforce must upgrade to the newest version of portatour® for Salesforce to use the Salesforce “Multi-Select Picklist field” as custom field for portatour® Anywhere. Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not support multi-select fields. 

File- and photo-upload directly within portatour® Anywhere

Do you want to add current photos to your call reports? Or do you want to upload Excel-Files or PDF documents to your customers? This is now possible directly within portatour® Anywhere.

Go to Options and create a custom field with type External file or External files. File uploads can be configured for customers, call reports, and appointments. If you don’t see the option for custom fields, it may be necessary to contact your administrator to set it up. Once configured, the file upload is visible at the respective input form, for example at the call report:

Report with File Upload

The uploaded files are not stored on our portatour® servers but on a server provided by you. The file server must support the WebDAV protocol and must be reachable via the internet. portatour® connects using an encrypted SSL-connection and will authenticate itself via a username and password. This is configured when setting up the custom field:

 

Userdefined Field External Files

Tip: There is a multitude of companies providing cloud-storage with WebDAV support on the internet. If you don’t want to host your own server, cloud-storage providers are a great option for both individuals and large enterprises and typically allow you to set up an account within minutes. Search for “cloud storage WebDAV” or “online storage WebDAV” to find a provider. Verify that WebDAV is supported before making your choice.

Technical details for uploading files:

  • The maximum size is 10MB per file.
  • The files are automatically organized within sub-folders. Per user and day, a new folder is created. File-names are automatically created and contain both the customer name and a unique ID.
  • If you export call reports as Excel or CSV files and uploads have been added to these call reports, the folder and name of the file will be contained in the exported call report. The same applies when exporting customers or appointments.
  • Custom fields with type “External file” support uploading exactly one file whereas “External files” supports multiple files. 
  • On iPhone and iPad, only photo-upload is supported, no other file types can be uploaded. This is a restriction set by Apple.
  • Handle files on the WebDAV-server with care. If files are moved, deleted or renamed on the server, portatour® will not find them anymore.

Special considerations for users of Salesforce and Dynamics CRM:

  • Uploaded files are stored on a WebDAV-server and not within Salesforce or Dynamics CRM. The location of uploaded files will be written into a text-field configured within Salesforce or Dynamics CRM.
  • Install the latest release of portatour® for Salesforce or Dynamics CRM.
  • To setup file upload, first a (hidden) text-field has to be added to the entity (account, event, …). The text-field must be at least 255 characters long. To upload multiple files, it must be a multi-line field. Then this text-field must be configured as custom field for portatour® Anywhere, setting the field-type to either “External file” or “External files”.

portatour® meets geomarketing: map with individual symbols and colors

True to the proverb: “a picture is worth a thousand words”, we have extended portatour® by two features for improved visualization of customers on the map.

Individual customer symbols

To better identify customers on the map, you assign meaningful symbols to your clients. This way you see at a glance, for example, the revenue potential of the customer or the industry.

Landkarte mit Kundensymbolen

To set the symbol, open the customer, click on the pencil above the address, and then click the new menu item “Symbol”. A text box will appear allowing you to enter any 1-2 characters. Click “Show symbol table…” for a choice of different symbols.

Edit Customer Symbol

Tip: Enable the “Selection Mode” to select multiple customers. This option can be found below the customer list. Then click “Edit Selected” to set the same symbol for multiple customers.

Consequently, the client symbol appears not only on the map, but at all places in portatour® where the customer name is shown, for example in the schedule, in the customer list or in the portatour® report.

Technical background information: portatour® uses the Unicode character standard to display and store symbols. Unicode is also used for the “smileys” appearring at many places in the internet. The appearance of the symbols varies depending on the device, operating system, installed fonts and browsers.

Note for Outlook and Salesforce-users: Setting the symbol is also possible in Outlook and Salesforce. Go to the customer call settings of a customer, you find the symbol at the bottom.

Color of a customer on the map

So far there was only one criterion for the coloring of the customers on the map: the current call urgency shown in the traffic-light colors red/yellow/green.

Now it becomes colorful: in the map view, click on option-symbol (“cogwheel”) and you can set the coloring yourself. Choose from both the built-in portatour® fields – call interval, call duration, etc. – as well as from custom fields that you can create yourself. For example, revenue or industry can be used.

portatour® automatically takes care of grouping and coloring on basis of the defined criterion. On the bottom-right of the map you will find the map legend icon. Click it to see the color mapping.

Map with Turnover

The call urgency of a customer is still visible: the lower part of the customer-marker on the map shows – as always – the urgency via a red / yellow / green color indicator.

 

We wish you a productive time using these new features and are looking forward to
your feedback, which you can send us to feedback@portatour.com .

P.S.: Users of portatour® for Outlook, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Connector must first install the latest version of portatour® to access the new functionality. Click the download-link or contact your administrator.