Note: The following article’s target audience is portatour® administrators and supervisors with company accounts (2 or more users).

With today’s update, the familiar portatour® Report can now be issued not just for individual users, but also consolidated for the entire organization, as well as for user groups.

To get such a Report, in the portatour® Options, in the lower pane, under Organization, click “Request Report”. To get Reports for a given user group, click “User Management”, log into the desired user group, scroll down to the bottom and click “Request portatour® Report”. (Note: user groups are available as of 10 licenses).

In the Report, you will find the key statistics you are already familiar with from the Report of an individual user, with the key difference that the values of the consolidated users are either summed up or calculated as averages.

Notes:

• With this update, the application check is integrated in the company report or user group report.
• Those sections that are user-specific, e.g. a specific schedule, call reports or overdue customers, are not available in the company or user group Report. For detailed analyses, continue to use the portatour® Report for the respective users, which you can also request directly under User Management.
• The (automatic) sending of the new consolidated Reports by e-mail is not yet supported.

Please note: this article’s target audience is administrators of portatour® company accounts (2 users or more).

With today’s portatour® update, the customer import gets a new feature: the automatic transfer of existing customer records between user accounts.

With the following example, we would like to explain in greater detail what this means and what benefits this new feature provides. Let’s say you manage your customer data in an ERP system and transfer this data regularly into portatour® by importing customers. As part of a new segmentation within your ERP system, some of Smith’s clients will be assigned to Jones. Without the transfer of customers in portatour®, these customers will be created as new customers for Jones. All the information and reports previously entered by Smith will not be visible to Jones. In order to avoid this, you can either transfer the customers in question manually in portatour® before importing from Smith to Jones, or you use the new automatic customer import transfer feature.

The use of the automatic transfer feature is simple: on the new “Select transfer mode” page of the import wizard, you configure whether you want to copy or move customer data to other user accounts. If you leave the transfer in “do not transfer” mode, no automatic transfer will occur. In addition, you determine whether the data regarding customers — that is to say appointments, reports, and call blocks — will also be copied or moved along with the customer.

If the import file now contains customers that cannot be found in the user account, portatour® first looks in other user accounts in your organization to see if those customers are there. For the search, the key fields “External ID” and “Portatour ID” are used. If portatour® finds them, the customers in question will first be transferred from the other user account to the current user account – that means either copied or moved according to the settings – and then updated by the data in the import file. If portatour® does not find a customer, it will simply be created as usual. On the Import preview page, you will see information about whether and how many customers will be transferred from another user account.

If you have automated the import of customers via the API, the transfer function is also available. When calling “ImportCustomers”, use the new parameter “transferMode=Copy” or “transferMode=Move”. You can find more information about this in the API’s technical documentation in the Options.

Further information regarding automatic transfer:

• In the import wizard, the transfer function is only available if the user has permission to transfer customers. See Options -> Permissions.
• The automatic transfer feature is only available in the “update customers” and “update customers incl. deletion” import mode – but not in the “create customers” mode.
• Only the “External ID”, “Portatour ID” key fields, or both, are allowed. The transfer is not available if you use other fields as the key.
  
• When searching for customers in other user accounts, portatour® will also look in their recycle bins. In this way, you can freely choose the order of imports when a customer has to be transferred from User A to User B. If the customer is first removed by User A via an import in the “Update incl. deletion” mode (to be more precise: moved to the recycle bin), it will be still found during the following import of clients to User B, and then transferred with all its data. The only thing to note is that the maximum period before the recycle bin is emptied is 14 days.

With today’s update, portatour® has been extended with a “recycle bin” for customers. As of now, when you delete customers, they will be moved into this recycle bin as a precaution and kept there for 14 days before they are permanently deleted. You can restore customers in the recycle bin at any time – i.e. retract the deletion. You have now an additional “safety net” at your disposal in case you deleted customers by mistake.

To access the recycle bin, click on “Customers” in the main menu, scroll down to the bottom of the customer list and click the new button “Recycle bin”. If there are already customers in the recycle bin, they are listed, sorted by deletion date:

In the recycle bin, we differentiate between customers who were manually deleted by the click of a button in portatour® and customers who were automatically deleted during an import – via import assistant or API import. To change the selection, switch on top of the list between “Deleted manually” and “Deleted by import“.

To restore a customer, click on them and select in the subsequent context menu the entry “Restore“. In the context menu, you also have the possibility to immediately permanently delete the customer. To restore or permanently delete multiple customers at once, use the buttons below the list.

If you ask yourself now what advantage the recycle bin adds compared to the already known general restore function in the options: Using the general restore points, the entire data base is reset to an older data status – thus, all records are affected (customers, appointments, call reports, …), which can result in data loss. The recycle bin on the other hand allows the selective restoration of certain customers without having other entries being discarded. In the future, look in the recycle bin if you do not find customers any more, before resetting the entire data base to an older restore point.

Further details about the recycle bin:

• Customers in the recycle bin are completely ignored by portatour®. They are neither scheduled nor can they be opened, edited or exported.
• The retention period in the recycle bin is usually 14 days. It can be shorter if the limit of 3,000 customers is exceeded. In that case, the customers with the oldest deletion date are removed from the recycle bin early.
• If your customer records have “External IDs“, a customer is possibly automatically restored from the recycle bin if there is a customer record with an analog “External ID”. This protects you from data loss if you use the import option “incl. deletion” and you have deleted customers from a user account in this way by mistake. A correct, subsequent import automatically restores the customers from the recycle bin – including all entries the users already made at the customers in portatour®.
• The recycle bin is only available for customers. Deletions of appointments and call reports are still immediately permanent.
• Only users having the authorization to delete customers according to the permission settings have the right to restore customers from the recycle bin.
• Users who are directly linked to a data source system (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM) do not have a recycle bin in portatour® Anywhere. If a customer is deleted in that case, they are moved to the recycle bin of the respective source system.

Since 2014, portatour® Anywhere has an offline mode which allows you to access your schedule and to enter call reports even without internet connection. The offline mode has to be enabled once in the options. More on this in the help.

With today’s update of portatour®, the offline mode’s main menu bar was matched to the one of the online mode in order to provide a more intuitive usage.

Once your device loses internet connection and you switch to the offline mode of portatour®, there will still be a yellow banner on top of the pages informing you about the offline mode.

Once your device gains internet connection again, you will automatically be informed of that by the blue link “go online” being displayed. In the upper right corner of the menu bar, you will also see the red button.

Also there, you have the possibility to switch back to online mode by clicking “go online“.

Until now, portatour® has only been able to display a single day of the schedule on the map at one time. Since last week’s portatour® update, this restriction has been lifted. The simultaneous display of several days is now possible. See for yourself:

To do so, click the cogwheel icon in the top right corner and in the first selection box, in the option “Schedule: show 1 day” select “Schedule: multiple days“.

The customer visits on the individual days are displayed in different colors, with each customer symbol also containing the date of the visit. Optionally, hide the visits on specific days by clicking the respective days at the top of the selection of days.

You will see the suggested routes when you switch from “Driving routes: beelines” to “Driving routes: show” in the options. What’s more, now you can hide the driving routes completely from the same selection box.

We wish you much success with these new features and welcome your feedback at feedback@portatour.com.

Since last week’s portatour® update, you will receive the current urgency (not due, due, overdue) for each customer when exporting customer data. These urgencies correspond to the three colors (green, yellow, red) on the map.

Regardless of the format (CSV, Excel, ODS), the exported file contains two new columns:

• Current urgency ID: 0 is for “not due”, 1 for “due”, and 2 for “overdue”. Use this value if you want to further process the urgency programmatically.
• Current urgency name: Contains the text “not due”, “due”, or “overdue”

Note: The urgency columns are also included in the Excel OData export (available as of 2 user licenses), where they can be easily used for pivot tables.

Last week, portatour® was updated with a feature that many users have been waiting for: Drag and Drop in the Calendar. This means that you can now move appointments in the calendar with your mouse, or on touch-screens with your finger.

To access the calendar, in the main menu, click Appointments and then Calendar.

To move an appointment to another day or time, simply drag it to the desired timeslot in the calendar by clicking and holding the left-mouse button. When you release it, you are prompted to confirm the new timeslot. Alternatively, let portatour® choose a suitable time from a route-optimization perspective by selecting Flexible on the Day.

If an update of the schedule is required after moving an appointment, the red Update icon appears as usual at the top left. Click it to re-optimize your schedule.

Not only can fixed appointments (dark blue entries) be moved in the calendar. Call suggestions generated by portatour® (white entries) can now  be moved to another day or time using drag and drop, too. Upon moving, portatour® automatically converts the call suggestion into a fixed appointment, so that it will remain at the desired time regardless of subsequent schedule updates.

Drag and drop is also supported on touch screen devices (smartphones, tablets). Note that before you move an appointment, you must press it for at least ½ second to enable the drag and drop mode. The appointment appears with a shadow around it as soon as it is ready to be moved.

Scrolling up and down within working hours is also possible while moving calendar items. To do so, drag the appointment to the top or bottom of the calendar without releasing it — the calendar automatically starts to slowly scroll.

Notes:

• When you move an appointment, automatic forward and backward scrolling is not yet supported in the calendar. We are working on it…
• In general, you cannot move a call report by using drag and drop.

Other new features in the calendar:

• Toggle Timescale: If your visits are often shorter than 30 minutes and you like to work with the calendar’s day or week view , it’s a good idea to change the calendar’s time scale from 30 to 15 minutes in the calendar options (cogwheel icon at the top right). The appointments are displayed twice as tall in the calendar and thus contain more text – e.g. the complete customer name or the place of the appointment.
• Appointment List vs. Calendar: When you click Appointments in the main menu, you have always been presented with the list of appointments, from where you could then select the calendar view. Since the last update, portatour® remembers if you clicked to the calendar the last time, and if so, opens it directly instead of the appointment list. To navigate from the calendar to the appointment list, you can always click the new List button at the top right (between the + icon and the cogwheel icon).

Our developers welcome your feedback at feedback@portatour.com.

Last week, portatour® was enriched with a new feature that we are sure you will enjoy using: the selection of customers on the map – also with a lasso or polygon.

Here is how it works: open the map and in the upper-right corner, click the cogwheel and then select Enable selection mode. The map changes to selection mode, which you will recognize from a new bar at the top, as well as by the map’s darker background color.

You have three options to select customers:

• Individual selection: Simply click the desired customers, one after another. You will recognize selected customers by the customer marker’s blue border.
• Selection with lasso: To enable the lasso mode, in the upper-right corner, click the lasso symbol. Next, circle the desired customers by clicking and holding the mouse button. To complete selection, release the mouse button. If you want to select customers of another region with the lasso, once again, in the upper-right corner, click the lasso symbol . The lasso also works on touchscreens with fingers and/or pens.
• Selection with polygon: Click the lasso symbol. This time, click the required corner points of the desired region one after another. A polygon is thus composed. To end the selection, double-click the polygon’s end point or just click the polygon’s starting point.

Here’s an example of a lasso selection:

The total number of selected customers is shown in the button “Edit X selected customers”. Click this button to edit all selected customers in one go. You will be led to the mass editing page, which you already know from the customer list.

Hint: If you selected a customer by mistake, remove the selection by simply clicking the customer in question. If you want to remove the selection of all customers in one go, exit the selection mode by clicking the X-symbol in the upper-right corner.

Here are some usage examples for the new map selection mode:

• To redivide your territory by transferring customers of a certain region to another colleague. The selection mode is an alternative or addition to filtering by ZIP code.
• To share customers in a region with a colleague and geographically divide them into “can be scheduled in even weeks” and “can be scheduled in odd weeks”. See “One client – multiple reps: portatour® helps with coordination”
• To edit the business hours (=visit times) of customers in a certain region – e.g. mark certain days as “preferred”.
• To select customers for the next schedule calculation if you use manual scheduling with reservations instead of portatour®’s automatic planning.
• To count the customers in a certain region.

Hint: If you do not want to see all of your customers on the map but rather only those that meet certain criteria, use the extended search at the top of the customer list and then click the map button. In this way, the selection mode will only be applied to the filtered customers.

We hope you enjoy the new lasso and look forward receiving your feedback at feedback@portatour.com