Good news for all companies who are using portatour® Anywhere and want to import and export their data regularly. Read on if you have 2 users or more and your data’s origin is not in an already supported system (Outlook, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, Connector).

Using the new portatour API (“Application Programming Interface”), you can make automated data exchange with other systems quick and easy.

At this time, the API supports four methods:

• Customer import (creating new customers and updating existing records)
• Customer export
• Appointment export
• Call report export

By providing these methods, the API mirrors the import/export functionality that is available in the user interface of portatour® Anywhere.

The API (and the documentation) is available for companies with 2 or more user accounts and only visible to users with administration rights. You can find the documentation in the portatour® Anywhere menu-item Options, below Organization when you click API. The documentation is in English and written for IT-administrators and programmers.

Data-import and -export is file-based. You can upload and download Excel, CSV or ODS files using HTTPS GET and POST requests, which you can run using the free open-source tool cURL (http://curl.haxx.se/) on any operating system on the command line. Automating these operations is easy using a batch file or shell script.

We wish you a great time automating and are looking forward to your feedback which you can send to feedback@portatour.com.

Starting today, managing your calendar in portatour® Anywhere is more convenient: you can now create recurring appointments.

When creating or editing an appointment, you will find a combo box “Recurring“. It makes the appointment recurring and sets the rules for repetition.

Here are three typical use cases for the new recurring appointments:

• Each month every 1^st Friday from 08:00 to 12:00 there is a sales meeting at the company office for all sales reps.
• A customer needs to be visited every 2 weeks, always on Wednesday. The time is not important (set Schedule to “Flexible on the day”).
• Each year, a public holiday is on the exact same date.

More details on how recurring appointments work:

• Entering a date into the “Until” field is optional. If you don’t set it, the recurring appointment will be repeated until you delete it.
• The calendar will only show recurring appointments for the next 12 months due to technical reasons. Don’t worry – the appointments will be repeated as configured.
• As you may have experienced with other calendar software (Outlook, Smartphone, …), with portatour® you can also delete or change single appointments from a series of recurring appointments. When editing an appointment out of a series, you will be asked whether you want to edit a single appointment or the whole series.

We wish you a productive time using this new feature and are looking forward to your feedback, which you can send us to feedback@portatour.com .

p.s. Users of portatour® in combination with a source-system – such as Outlook, Salesforce, Dynamics-CRM, or Connector – do not see the recurring-option for appointments in portatour® Anywhere. These users can – as before – use the recurring-option of their source system.

Good news for all sales reps who have to report their work-day in detail to their employer: this is now a lot easier thanks to the new extended time reporting tools which were released today for portatour® Anywhere.

Check out these new features:

• Open the new menu item Reports, where you will find a chronological listing of all reports that you have entered in portatour®. Easily check if everything is documented as required and complete unfinished reports. Below the list you find a button to Export your reports to Excel and to get the detailed portatour® Report for the day.
• Do you need to track your work-time? Use the buttons Clock in and Clock out. Days where you are not calling customers can be entered using Report day off. All these reports will show up in the  portatour® Report.
• Finally, you can now also report appointments you had where you entered the address manually but did not refer to an existing customer or “My Place”. Click on took place at the appointment to enter your call report.

Hint: Are you using portatour® Anywhere in combination with Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Connector? Update to the newest version of our integration software to ensure that the new reports for “Clock in”, “Clock out”, and “Day off” are handled correctly.

“Power-users” of portatour® already adopted them into their daily work: custom fields at Customers, Appointments, and Call Reports. portatour® can be personalized this way to fit your individual business workflows.

New since the release on 11/4/2013 are option sets (drop-down lists) as possible values for custom fields.

Do this to get started: open Options > Custom Fields. Create a new field and choose Data type: Option set

Write the desired options in the text-box below, one per line. In a line you can enter a key, followed by a semikolon, and a display text. See an example in the screenshot above.

What’s the key for? In other software systems there is often a number value required for a field. Setting the key to a number or a different thing than the displayed text makes date import&export easier. Using a key also allows you to change the displayed text later. You don’t have to modify or update the stored data, as long as you keep the key the same. You can choose any value for a key, a number or text or a kombination. If you do not set a key, portatour® will automatically set an alphabetical key for you.

Note: The menu item “Custom Fields” is only visible in the options window, when you are using portatour® Anywhere without a connection to a CRM system. You also have to be a single user or an administrator in a multi-user setup. In case you are using portatour® Anywhere in combination with Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce, you can define custom fields directly in the CRM system and synchronize them with portatour®. In case you are using portatour® Connector, edit the configuration file (XML). portatour® in combination with Outlook does not support custom fields due to limits implied by Outlook.

New is also the possibility to show custom fields in the customer name. Use it to show the field inside brackets everywhere in portatour® where the customer name is shown.

Example: You want to show the customer number and A-B-C classification next to the name of the customer. Enable show in customer name for both fields and your customers will show up as “Customer-name (Customernumber, Classification)”. For example: “Max Headroom Inc. (95014, A)“. See this in the customer list and search results, schedule, and portatour® Report.

Many users have been asking for a calendar view. Good news: today we released a brand new calendar view and you can start using it right away.

View your fixed appointments and your automatically optimized schedule in a weekly overview or a monthly view. It works on your smartphone, tablet, and notebook. Click Calendar below the schedule or go to Appointments in the main menu and then click Calendar.

Click on an entry and the appointment or the related customer will open. Create a new appointment by clicking into an empty slot.

You will also like a new feature we recently released: sharing your calendar.

Enable sharing by going to Options, and clicking Calendar Sharing. There are three distinct calendars to be shared: one with appointments, one with your current schedule, and one with reports. The sharing option gives you a link for each calendar which you can use to import the calendar into other applications – like Google Calendar or Outlook. You can also share the link with other people – like your sales-manager or inside sales staff. The link points to an iCal Feed, which is also known as “internet calendar” in many applications. Only people who know the link will be able to see your calendar. If you don’t share the links, the calendars remain private. You can always stop sharing.

Use these features to improve your daily work. We are looking forward to your feedback, which you can send us to feedback@portatour.com .

For everyone who did not read the portatour®-Manual yet, we offer the new portatour® Anywhere online-help as reference.

Clicking the question-mark-symbol in the main menu and in popup-windows will open the online help.

Online help will open in a new browser tab. Switching between help and the app is easy.

For each page in portatour®, a dedicated help-page will give you details about exactly the information you need – help is context-sensitive. On occasion, the help page will contain links to sub-sections with more details. Press Home for the table of contents.

Hints:
If the online help does not open on click, check if the popup-blocker of your browser is the reason.

Online help and user manual contain the same information.