Today we have installed a new update of portatour® on our servers or released it for download respectively. Read the following 3 news to learn more about it:

• Get more out of portatour® with the new application check
• In-house feedback button
• Longer notes field for call reports

We wish you continued success with portatour® and hope you enjoy using its new features. We look forward to receiving your feedback to feedback@portatour.com.

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.

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.

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:

• New maps 2015 with improved driving time estimation
• Improved selection of starting location for route planning

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:

• Real time traffic information (for example: traffic jams caused by accidents) are not considered in route planning.
• The historic driving times are always the average value of the whole working day. For road segments that have diverting driving times during rush hours the daily average is used as a basis for calculation.
• Should you suffer by slow traffic based on “rush hour” traffic in cities, we recommend adapting the driving speed option on city roads, for example to “30% slower”.
• Should you have adapted the driving speed settings already before this update, your settings have been automatically converted to the new setting.

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”.

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:

• Call Blocks for customers
• Update for quicker and easier use

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 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.