Category Archives: Dynamics-CRM

Major map update 2019

While map updates in recent years have “only” ever updated the map material including traffic flow data, there is much more in today’s software update. In addition to updating the data, we have invested a lot of programming effort in the map display, address geocoding and route calculation.

The advantages for you as a user

  • Faster geocoding when importing customers
  • More accurate geocoding even with incorrect address spelling
  • Faster schedule calculation when the GPS location is used as the departure point
  • More realistic travel times in the schedule
  • Visually more pleasing presentation of maps
  • Faster switchover from beelines to the route view on the map

More realistic driving times in the schedule

Since 2015, portatour® has used historical speed data to calculate driving times. This data is collected by navigation systems and mobile phone providers by measuring the movement data of millions of drivers and is made available for the respective road sections.

What’s new with today’s update is that portatour® estimates driving times to be considerably slower than previously on those road sections where traffic flow data often show traffic jams or heavy traffic.

As a result, roads with a high probability of traffic jams are avoided when calculating the schedule or are planned with longer travel times than previously. The schedules are therefore even more realistic and robust for dealing with unforeseen traffic situations.

You will already notice a difference with today’s first schedule update.

Recommendation: Set Driving Speed to “normal”

If you have set the “Driving Speed” to “slower” in the portatour® Anywhere Options, we recommend that you now reset it to “normal” so that portatour® does not estimate unnecessarily long driving times.

Additional information

  • This update currently only affects customers from German-speaking countries (i.e. Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and English-speaking countries (i.e. USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia). Other countries will follow shortly.
  • If you use portatour® in combination with Salesforce, for technical reasons, the maps will be updated together with the next release of the portatour® for Salesforce-App. We’ll be sure to let you know!

Your feedback is welcome!

We hope you enjoy this software update and look forward to your feedback at feedback@portatour.com.

New maps 2018

We have just updated the map data and traffic flow data on our servers.

Changes in the road network and driving speeds may affect driving times between customers, so we recalculated them for you in portatour®. Some users might notice the change, when updating the schedule for the next time.

New maps 2017

We have just updated the map data and traffic flow data on our servers.

Changes in the road network and driving speeds may affect driving times between customers, so we recalculated them for you in portatour®. Some users might notice the change, when updating the schedule for the next time.

Filtering in the portatour® Report

Until now, the statistics of the portatour® Report have always included all reports created in portatour®. Since last week’s update, you can now filter certain report types directly in the portatour® Report.

To do this, click the black funnel icon. This is available in the portatour® Report in the following three sections: “Customer Call Reports”, “Daily Summary of Last and Current Week” and “My Key Figures of the Last 90 Days”.

An additional line appears with the report types that can be filtered. In parentheses, you can find the number of reports affected by report type. If you do not want to include the customer calls of a given type in the statistics below, remove the checkmark for the respective report category. All the values in the statistics shown in blue have an effect on filtering.

There are a total of six report types in portatour®. The following procedure describes how to create reports of these types in portatour® Anywhere:

  • Customer Call: By clicking “Called Now” for a customer or “Took Place” for an appointment. The prerequisite for this is that reports for customer calls are enabled in the Reporting options (setting: “Ask Every Time”, “Open Automatically” or “Create Automatically”).
  • Missed: By clicking “Missed”  for a customer or an appointment. The prerequisite for this is that reports for missed calls are enabled in the Reporting options.
  • Other: By clicking “New Report” for a customer or “Took Place” for an appointment without location, for example, to log phone calls.
  • Start of work: By clicking “Clock In” in the Reports menu.
  • End of work: When you click “Clock Out” in the Reports menu.
  • Day off: By clicking “Report Day Off” in the Reports menu.

Note: In portatour® Anywhere, when you create or edit a report, you see the report type displayed in the form’s title bar . When you export the reports as an Excel or CSV file, you find the report type in a column as a number (0-5) and broken down into a second column for the display name.

New Maps 2016

We have just updated the map data and traffic flow data on our servers.

Changes in the road network and driving speeds may affect driving times between customers, so we recalculated them for you in portatour®. Some users might notice the change, when updating the schedule for the next time.

September 2015 Update

Today we have installed a new update of portatour® on our servers or released it for download respectively. Please find detailed information in the following two news:

Automatic extension of the planning period in case of overnight stays

The planning algorithm of portatour® has been upgraded to trigger an automatic extension of the planning period in the case of overnight stays on the way, which guarantees that the schedule will end at the home location. This increases the schedule quality.

Example: On Wednesday you update the 1-week schedule, i.e. until the Tuesday of the following week. On top of that you allow overnight stays away on the weekdays. In this case portatour® automatically extends the planning period until the Friday of the following week to guarantee that the schedule ends at the home location.

This will already be hinted when setting the planning period in Schedule > Scheduling parameters:

Scheduling-Parameters-Extended

Hints:

  • If the planning period is set to less than one week, i.e. between 1 and 6 days, there will be no automatic extension. Thus, we recommend a planning period of 1 week.
  • Users of portatour® in combination with Salesforce, Dynamic CRM or Connector have to install the latest version to be able to use this new feature (Download for Salesforce, Download for Dynamics CRM).

Restrict period for the export of call reports

Up to now, it was only possible to export all call reports in one go from portatour® Anywhere. From now on, the export feature optionally allows the input of a period to make sure only the reports of that period are exported. This reduces the file size and speeds up the process. For the export go to Reports in the menu, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Export button.

Export-Reports

Hints:

  • The portatour® Anywhere API also allows the limitation of the exported reports from now on. Use the new parameter maxPastDays in order to enter the number of the required calendar days in the past, e.g. maxPastDays=7 in order to only export reports of the past 7 calendar days. If you export the reports on a regular basis, we recommend to use this new parameter to speed up the process and reduce the transferred data volume. Please refer to the API instructions for more information.
  • The export of call reports directly from portatour® Anywhere is only possible if you use portatour® Anywhere without a system hosting the data (e.g. Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, Connector). If you have a data host system you can export the reports from there.

Extended permission system

Companies who have used portatour® with two or more field reps already know the classification of users into the authorization levels “user, supervisor and administrator”. With today’s update of portatour® you can now toggle access to over 15 portatour® program features based on the existing authorization levels.

Manage Permissions

This is where you administer permissions:

  • If you are the administrator of a portatour® Anywhere account with two or more field reps, click Menu > Options > Permissions.
  • If you are the administrator of portatour® for Salesforce, install the latest version (download for Salesforce) and then administer the portatour® permissions in Salesforce via portatour® > Options > Permissions.
  • If you are the administrator of portatour® for Dynamics CRM, install the latest version (download for Dynamics CRM) and then administer the portatour® permissions in Dynamics CRM under Settings > portatour® Administration > Anywhere permissions.

This is the effect of restricted permissions:

  • If you set a permission to „All Users“, the feature can be utilized by users, supervisors and administrators. This is the default setting. No restriction is applied.
  • If you set a permission to “Supervisors & Administrators“, this feature can only be executed by supervisors and administrators – in fact even when the supervisor or administrator logs into another user account. This means the supervisor or administrator may even access the respective program feature in a user’s account if the actual user has no permission for it.
  • If you set a permission to “Only Administrators“, the previous bullet point applies to administrators only.
  • If you set a permission to “Nobody“, the feature is deactivated for everyone, even for administrators.

The purpose of restricted permissions:

  • Maintaining data integrity: If – for example – you automatically and regularly import your customer data from your company’s ERP system, it might make sense to restrict the deletion and editing of customers or the manual import of customers in portatour®.
  • Requiring consultation: Restrict the affected feature if you consider it necessary for users to consult a supervisor or administrator before changing certain data and configurations (e.g. execute data restoration, change report settings).
  • Hint: Only restrict the functional scope for users to the extent you consider indispensable. Excessive restrictions will have an effect on the usability of portatour®.

Please note:

  • The restriction of “Edit call report history” means that no call reports may be created, edited or deleted for past days.
  • The restriction of “Transfer data” means that no customers (incl. appointments and reports) can be moved or copied between users via customer mass editing.
  • Changes of permissions in Salesforce and Dynamics CRM will only have an effect after the next synchronization with portatour® Anywhere.
  • There is no permissions administration available for single user licenses. They can still use all program features as usual.

We are pleased to offer an additional instrument for adjusting portatour® to your company’s requirements by providing the new permissions administration. Do you have feedback? Simply send an e-mail to feedback@portatour.com.

Getting more out of portatour® with the new application check

Automatic route planning software can only be as good as the data and settings it is fed with. In addition, the software only achieves its full potential if it is used properly.

We from the portatour® team want you to achieve best results with portatour®. Therefore, we have added the “Application Check” feature to portatour®. At the push of a button portatour® automatically checks more than 35 criteria regarding data quality, scheduling parameters, territorial characteristics and usage hints. Over the past years, our team has identified the typical road blocks which frequently arise during the introduction of automatic route planning and summarized them in a comprehensive criteria catalogue.

As a result of the application check you receive an inspection report with detailed information which criteria have been met and where improvements are recommended. Click the respective line to learn which specific problem has been identified, its effect and how you can solve it, and – for enterprise accounts with several users – which users are affected.

Application Check EN

This is how you get to the portatour® Anywhere application check:

  • If you are an administrator or supervisor of an enterprise account click the new menu item “Organization > Request report”.
  • If you are a field rep request the portatour® report as usual in the options. From now on, it will contain your personal application check at the end.

PS: Please install the latest version of  portatour® if you use  portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM). After that, the administrator can also start the application check directly from Salesforce or Dynamics CRM respectively.

In-house feedback button

When you introduce portatour® in your company it is – especially in the initial phase – decisive for success to tackle users’ questions and problems quickly and easily. In order to better ensure that, corporate clients with purchased licenses now have the possibility of configuring a feedback button in portatour®. As an administrator you simply go to the “Program Settings” in the options menu and enter the e-mail address to which the feedback mails shall be sent – e.g. to the internal project supervisor. The feedback button will always be displayed for users on the bottom left corner of the screen.

In case users have questions about using the software or scheduling, they can simply click the feedback button and describe their problem. The current portatour® report is automatically attached to the feedback mail and contains both the current schedule and the new application check. Optionally you can also attach files, e.g. screenshots.

Feedback EN

In case the project supervisor cannot answer a question, the supervisor can send it to the portatour® support team under support@portatour.com who is available as “2nd level support”.

P.S.: Please install the latest version of portatour® if you use portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM). The configuration of the feedback button is carried out by the administrator in the portatour® organisation settings.