From now on you can create “Call Blocks” for customers. A call block is effective for a defined duration and has a reason, for example “from 23rd Feb to 27th Feb contact person John Doe is out of office”. portatour® adheres to the call blocks when planning routes and will not suggest to visit a customer during a call block.

Call blocks replace the preceding “Exclude from plan” feature and bring important advantages:

• Call blocks are always automatically terminated at a predefined date. You don’t have to remove them manually at this date and you can’t forget doing so.
• Call blocks allow entering a reason. This way you know – even in a month – why you have blocked a customer.
• Call blocks can be entered for future occasions. For example, you can enter that the customer is closed in summer next year.
• There can be multiple call blocks per customer. For example, to block a customer “closed in March and October”.

Call blocks can be found and edited in the customer detail view:

Call blocks can also be entered quickly from the schedule and the calendar. Open the context-menu of a suggested visit and select “new call block“.

If the newly created call block includes the date of a suggested visit, the schedule will show a red warning message and you should update the schedule:

Two tips regarding call blocks:

• Do you want to see all customers with a call block? Use the “extended search” above the customer list and set the predefined filter “call block” to “present”.
• Do you want to create call blocks for multiple customers in one step? Use the “extended search” to find the customers in question and then the “edit all” button below the list. In the mass-editing menu, click “new call block”.

Notes about call blocks:

• Expired call blocks are removed automatically.
• Appointments at customers will be included in the schedule despite a call block effective for the respective date. In other words: appointments still have the highest priority in your calendar.
• For customers who were previously set to be “Exclude from schedule”  an unlimited call block was added automatically.
• You cannot create unlimited call blocks. To keep a customer from being suggested in schedules, set the call interval of the customer to “none”.
• In a future update, call blocks will also replace the holiday-field of the scheduling parameters of the customer. We will keep you informed.

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) to access these features.

New context menu in schedule and calendar

The schedule view and the calendar view have been equipped with new context menus to let you reach often used features quicker. In the schedule, open the context menu by clicking the new “down-arrow” button in the right column.

Depending on whether the entry is a suggested visit or an appointment, a different menu will appear.

Hint: when using a mouse, clicking the right mouse button anywhere on the line will open the menu.

Appointments instead of “fixed visit suggestions”

Beginning with the update from 16th December 2014 portatour® allows directly converting a suggested visit into an appointment, either with a fixed time or “flexible on the day”. The former “fixation” of a suggested visit is now superfluous. To reduce distractions and to keep the menus quick and easy, this outdated feature was removed. Existing fixations remain and are shown (next to where the starting time is displayed).

Warnings to encourage updating your schedule

Should the schedule not be up-to-date because of changes that were not taken into account yet, you are going to see red warning signs. This applies to changed appointments, deleted customers, or new call blocks. In each case you should update your schedule to receive a schedule that reflects these changes.

Reservations: new symbol and improved list

Customers who are included in the schedule by reservation are marked with a new symbol: a star, shown left in the schedule.

To support a uniform look & feel, the same symbol is also shown in the customer detail view next to the buttons “include in schedule” and “remove reservation”.

Also the list of reservations at the top of the schedule view bears the star icon. The list of reservations can now show either the customers where a reservation has been created but which were not included in the schedule yet  (as previously) or a list of all reservations – both the ones included in the schedule and the ones still to include.

Quicker mass-editing of customers

Should you want to edit multiple customers in one step, you previously had to enable the selection mode, select the intended customers, and edit the selected.

These steps are now obsolete. A new button “edit all X” below the customer list immediately takes you to mass editing.

Prerequisite is filtering the customers using “extended search” in such way that only those customers you want to edit are listed.

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) to access these features.

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:

• Convert call suggestions to appointments
• Improvements to portatour® Report
• New Authorization Level: Supervisor

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have just updated the map data for Australia and Europe.

Changes in the road network 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.

We updated the map data for North America (USA, Canada, Mexico) on 26th May 2014 (today).

Changes in the road network 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.