Due to many requests, the note field in the portatour® call report has been extended from 254 to 1,000 characters, i.e. it now offers four times the space for your text protocols.
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) in order to apply the extension.
We have released an update of portatour® on our servers and released new downloads.
You will find detailed information about the improvements in these two articles:
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.: Should you be using portatour® in combination with Salesforce, update to the newest release (download for Salesforce) to access these features.
We have updated our map material to the current state of 2015.
At the same time we improved the driving time estimation of the schedule calculation. For the first time, the driving time of a street segment will be estimated based on historic driving times collected by navigation system providers and mobile telephone carriers from the movement patterns of millions of drivers.
These improvements, together with 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.
Through this update, one part of portatour® changes: at Options there are Driving Speed settings. Previously, you were able to enter an absolute driving speed here (i.e. in miles per hour). From now on, you set how your driving speed relates to historic average driving data. For example, “on highways I drive 10% faster than the average”.
We are happy that this update improves the schedule quality considerably and adds additional optimization to the routes created by portatour® for you.
Hints:
In the Scheduling parameters of the Schedule you now have two new choices to select a Starting location: Automatic and GPS location.
Set on Automatic, portatour® will detect automatically if your route should start at your home location or at the last visited customer, as needed when updating the schedule during the working day.
Should you want to calculate a route from a different location – for example because you had a lunch break at a restaurant – you can now use the GPS location in portatour® Anywhere. This works on all devices with a GPS unit (all modern smartphones and tablets).
In the Scheduling parameters of the Schedule, set Starting location to GPS Location. Save and Update schedule.
Important: When portatour® first uses the GPS location your browser will ask you to confirm that portatour® can read the current location of your device. Confirm this with yes and give portatour® access to your GPS location. Should you answer “no”, portatour® will not be able to use GPS until you enable this manually in the settings of your browser. If you run into problems, contact your IT helpdesk.
Getting the current location can take – depending on device and GPS reception – several seconds. After successfully getting your location, you will see your current position on a map and the related address beside it.
Hint: By clicking on the map you can correct the starting location. By changing to “Manual” you can enter the address manually.
Save stores the found location and starts the schedule calculation.
The starting location remains on the “GPS Location” setting until you report a customer call. Then it will reset itself to “Automatic”.
With today’s update of portatour® for Dynamics CRM you get two new synchronization settings. Download the update now from our download-page.
When you first start to work with portatour®, you may see customers suggested for a visit who have recently been visited by you. This can be avoided by telling portatour® the correct date of the “last customer call” for a customer. If you already have this date stored somewhere in your CRM, then this new feature makes it easy to initialize it.
Navigate to “Settings” and then to “portatour® – Administration” and “Synchronization Settings”.
Choose from which entity portatour® should read the date of the last visit. In the following example, we are using a date field of the “Appointment” entity. Click “Edit query” to create a view and define the filter:
In this example I am looking for the date of the last appointment at this customer to use it as “last customer call date”. Only appointments from the last year should be included, I use the “Start Time” field to filter older and upcoming appointments out.
Hint: Limit the “last customer call date” to a time frame which is in a realistic relation to the “call interval”. For example, using the last year. If you allow dates far away in the past, customers who have not been visited for years suddenly become very urgent to visit and portatour® will primarily suggests to visit these outdated customers before anyone else.
The view must also contain a criteria relating the entities to an example account – in the above case, the appointments are related to the account “Koch, Simone”. You define the view as a template which works for one account, portatour® will then apply it to find the correct “last call date” for all synchronized accounts. You can decide which example customer you use in the filter.
The view must return exactly one column with date values. Any additional columns with other data types are ignored by portatour®. I am using the “Start Time” column of the appointment, which contains both the time and the date of the visit. To ensure that the latest appointment is picked, I configure the sorting of the results to sort by “Start Time” in “Descending Order”. portatour® will read the date from the the first returned row.
Summing up, these are the four requirements to consider when writing this view:
Click on “Validate” to see the last call date portatour® would use for the example account. Verify that this conforms to your expectations.
The same principle applies for initializing contacts and leads.
Dynamics CRM offers multiple standard addresses for a record. Should “Address 1” not be the address visited by field reps, you can use this new setting to instruct portatour® to use “Address 2”.
After 6 weeks of intensive development we have released a big update of portatour® on our servers and released new downloads.
You will find detailed information about the improvements in these two articles:
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 .
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 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:
Notes about call blocks:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
