With today’s update of portatour®, the calendar has been enhanced with new information and functions. Read on to learn how you can make the most of the resulting new opportunities.

Reminder: You can access the calendar by clicking “Appointments” in the main menu. If the appointment list appears instead of the calendar, click the Calendar button at the top.

Displaying of trips and breaks

In the calendar’s daily and weekly views, you can see at a glance which times are already scheduled for trips or breaks between customer visits.

Trips are represented by grey roads and lunch breaks with a fork-and-knife symbol. A white surface can be seen instead of the roads for times that have not been allocated – e.g. waiting times before fixed appointments.

Note: In the month view, roads and breaks are not displayed due to size constraints. If necessary, change the view using the cogwheel icon at the top right. You can find your personal lunch break settings in the portatour® Options under “Work Break”.

Displaying of overnight stays

Until now, only the overnight stays for which you explicitly created an appointment were visible in the portatour® Calendar. As of today’s update, you also see the overnight stays that portatour® suggests. These are recognizable by the grey entries at the beginning and end of the day.

In most cases, these will be overnight stays at your home location. However, if you have allowed overnight stays away from home, these entries can also be overnight stays at a “preferred accommodation” or at another location that portatour® suggests with regard to route optimization.

Note: Enable the automatic scheduling of overnight stays in the portatour® Options under “Overnight Stay on the Way”. You can manage your favorite places (e.g. favorite hotels) in the navigation menu under “My Places”.

Changing working times for a single day

The start and end times of the suggestions for overnight stays in the calendar correspond to your working hours, which are set in the portatour® Options.

If you wish to change your working hours on an exceptional basis for a single day, for example, because you want to start early and arrive back home earlier as well, you can achieve this in the calendar by simply moving the overnight stay at the beginning or end of the day to an earlier time. Use the drag and drop functionality, i.e. press, move and release the calendar entry to the desired time. You are then prompted to confirm.

The suggestion for an overnight stay is converted into a fixed appointment, which is colored dark blue in the calendar, as usual. Update the schedule by clicking the red update icon at the top left so the changed working time is scheduled accordingly.

Note: As an alternative to drag and drop, click the overnight stay suggestion, then select “Convert to Appt. & Edit”, and just enter the changed time in the appointment window.

Changing the location of an overnight stay

To change the location of the overnight stay for a given day, for example, because you booked a hotel, click the respective overnight stay in the calendar and then select “Change Overnight Stay Location”.

Another menu appears, where you select an address from “My Places”, or your home location, or a manually entered address.

After selecting the new overnight location, the appointment window opens, where you can optionally adjust the respective times. Upon saving the appointment, the previous overnight suggestion in the calendar is replaced. An update of the schedule is necessary so the changed accommodation is scheduled accordingly.

Note: If no schedule is available for a future day in the calendar, create an overnight stay by clicking the day and selecting “Overnight Stay”.

Fixing an overnight stay suggestion

If you want to fix a suggestion for an overnight stay so that it will not change during subsequent schedule updates, click the overnight stay in the calendar and select “Convert to Appointment”. It is not necessary to update the schedule.

Use this option if, for example, you book a hotel that portatour® has proposed on its own using one of your “Preferred Accommodations”.

Other scheduling options …

The three menu items “Convert to Appt. & Edit”, “Change Overnight Stay Location” and “Convert to Appointment” can also be found in the schedule by clicking the departure and arrival entries on days in the future.

We hope these new functions will make your daily work with poratour® even more pleasant and efficient. Our development team welcomes your feedback at feedback@portatour.com .

Note: The following article is intended primarily for portatour® administrators of company accounts (2 or more users).

We at portatour® are very pleased that many companies use the portatour® Anywhere API to automatically import and export their data on a regular basis.

However, in the course of logfile analyses, we have found that in some cases, that the root causes of faulty API calls are not resolved. This means that the same faulty calls are tried again and again day in and day out.

Due to these errors, which are often due to data inconsistencies in the import file, the API calls fail altogether. The field rep does not receive current data. Often the problem is only identified and remedied days or weeks later, after end users complain.

Today’s update of the portatour® API helps you to quickly detect and solve such errors before users are affected.

If an API call fails, portatour® now automatically sends an e-mail with an exact call and error description to the e-mail address of the administrator account whose credentials were used for the API call. As an administrator, you can promptly begin to remedy the cause. It is important to ensure that the administrator account you are using has the correct e-mail address and that mails sent to that account are also regularly read.

Note: To avoid generating a flood of e-mails for errors that involve many user accounts and therefore many API calls, automatic e-mail delivery is always delayed for at least one minute after a faulty API call. If further faulty API calls happen during this minute, all error messages are combined into a single e-mail and the delivery is delayed further. Therefore, there is no need to be surprised when e-mails always arrive at least one minute later in your mailbox in the event of an error.

At this point, we would like to offer you some reassurance: it is usually a matter of special cases in the data or in the process that were still unknown during the initial programming of the data synchronization via the API or in your program code. The API calls should subsequently go through without errors on an ongoing basis.

Automatic e-mail delivery for errors cannot be deactivated. Fixing the cause of any errors should always be a high priority, otherwise API calls will fail in any event.

Note however that while the e-mail notifications cover many of the possible automation errors, they are not all-encompassing. For example, in the following two problem scenarios, portatour® does not send an e-mail:

• If you use invalid administrator credentials (username + password) in the API call, portatour® cannot identify your e-mail address.
• If there is an error in a preprocessing step on your side and the program flow does not reach the actual API call.

If you need any assistance with API usage, we are happy to provide you an individualized workshop.

If you already have photos on your smartphone, you probably know what “geotagging” means: The photo is saved with the location where the photo was taken. You can search for photos more quickly and have them displayed on a map.

As of today’s portatour® update, geotagging of call reports is now possible on demand, i.e. portatour® can optionally store where the report was entered. You can use this functionality to show your employer, without any additional effort, that you were indeed at the customer’s premises. Geotagging helps with documentation for tax-free allowances (per diems) and is also used to avoid mistakes, since you would see if a report is about to be entered for the wrong customer.

The only prerequisite is that you always create the report immediately after the customer visit, i.e. while you are still geographically close.

Activating the geotagging functionality

By default, geotagging is deactivated. To use the function, it must be activated in the Options under Reporting. In the Geotags selection box, switch the setting from “Disabled” to “Add optionally” or “Add automatically”. As with most options in portatour®, a default value can be set for the company account and changed individually on a per-user basis.

Creating a geotagged call report

If you have configured the setting to  “Add automatically” in the options, when you create a new call report, for example by clicking “Called Now” while still at the customer, your location is automatically determined and added as a geotag to the report. Your device typically takes 1 to 10 seconds to find your location. You can already start filling in the report during this time. The geotag is shown in the report form below:

You can find the following information in the geotag:

• Distance from your location to the customer visited or appointment attended as a beeline calculation. This value shows how far away you are from the actual address visited when you create the report. The address visited appears in the report directly above the geotag.
  Values up to several hundred meters are perfectly normal, e.g. due to large company premises, a distant parking space, any inaccuracy in the geocoding of the customer address or in the determination of the location.
  If the distance is significantly greater, this can be a warning sign that you are not entering the report for the right customer!
• Accuracy of the found location. The location is determined by your device, and accuracy can vary due to technologies used and any signal hinderances. The actual distance should be considered in relative terms with regard to the precision of the geotag. If the accuracy is too imprecise, you can use the “Update” button to launch a new determination of the location.
• Address of your location. Keep in mind that the street and building number will rarely coincide exactly with the visited address. Small distances or inaccuracies can easily lead to a crossroad, parallel street or to another building number.

If you have set the option to “Add optionally”, the geotagging is not automatically launched when the report is created. It takes a click on the “Add” button for the geotag to be appended to the call report.

A call report can only be geotagged at the time of report creation. It is not possible to subsequently add, change or delete a geotag in a call report.

Tip: If you have little time immediately after the customer visit, we recommend immediately creating and saving the call report . This only takes a few seconds and also works in offline mode. Later, you can enter any missing information (e.g. notes), in the evening. This procedure ensures accurate times and geotags in the reports, allows you to update the schedule at any time, since portatour® has registered all the completed visits, and also prevents you from forgetting to enter reports.

The location function must be enabled for your device to find your location. Furthermore, you have to instruct the web browser to allow portatour® to actually use it. If there are problems finding your location, you will receive an error message after 30 seconds, at the latest, which will be stored in the geotag of the call report. For troubleshooting, contact your device support.

Displaying call reports with geotags

Geotags are displayed in three places in portatour®:

• In portatour® Anywhere: When you open a call report for editing, the geotag is displayed but cannot be edited.
• In the portatour® Report: If in the Options, under Reporting, in the section “portatour® Reports”, you set Geotags to “Show”, the geotags for the last 7 days are also displayed in the portatour® Report. A default value for this setting can be configured both company-wide and individually modified on a per-user basis.
• In an Excel/CSV-Export of the call reports: There are new columns that contain the geotag information detailed above.

Additional information regarding geotagging

• Geotags are only available for “Called Now” and “Missed” reports. No geotags can be assigned for other report types (Clock In, Clock Out, Day Off, Other).
• Users must validate and save each geotag on their own. For this reason, geotags are not available for automatically generated reports, i.e. if in the Options, under Reporting, Report Creation is set to “Create automatically”, then geotagging is disabled.
• For call reports entered in offline mode, only the distance and accuracy are displayed in the geotag. To determine the address, an online connection is required; the address will be completed once the report is subsequently uploaded to the server.
• If you are running portatour® Anywhere in combination with a host system (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM), geotagging is not yet possible.

Before today’s update of portatour®, it was not possible to plan long-haul flights in portatour®. The reason for this was that portatour® always checks whether it is possible to drive the route between two appointments by car, which is seldom possible when routes are actually being travelled by plane.

Now, there is a trick on how to skip this check. If an appointment starts at 12:00 a.m., there will be no availability check for it. Likewise, when appointments end at 11:59 p.m., no drive home is scheduled. You can now use this state of affairs to plan flights. The following example provides an explanation.

Let’s say you fly from Chicago to Miami on Monday at 5:00 p.m., to set off the next day at 7:30 a.m. from your hotel in Miami to visit customers there and in the surrounding areas. To do this, create an appointment on Monday from 5:00 p.m to 11:59 p.m. with the address of the Chicago airport. This tells portatour® that the Monday route ends at Chicago airport. You then create an appointment on Tuesday from 12:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. at the address of the hotel in Miami. This lets portatour® know that your route will start at the hotel on Tuesday at 7:30 a.m. No route feasibility check between these two appointments takes place, thanks to the set times of 11:59 p.m. and 12:00 a.m.

Important: To enter these special times (12:00 a.m. or 11:59 p.m.), change the “Schedule” setting in the appointment to “All-/Multiday” and then adjust the appointment’s start time and end time accordingly (see screenshot above).

Notes:

• To create such appointments, for example, click a blank area of the desired day in the calendar and then select “at custom address” from the “New Appointment” context menu.
• If you are staying several days in Miami, you either create several additional overnight appointments at the desired hotels or enable overnight stays in the portatour® Options. You can optionally enter your favorite hotels in the region under “My Places”, so that they are automatically scheduled.
• For the return flight, create an appointment at Miami airport from, for example, 6:00 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. In this way, your route for the following day will begin from your home location.
• Currently, it is not possible to book a flight in the middle of the day, whereby you would visit customers before and after the flight.

Note: The following article’s target audience is portatour® administrators and supervisors with company accounts (2 or more users).

With today’s update, the familiar portatour® Report can now be issued not just for individual users, but also consolidated for the entire organization, as well as for user groups.

To get such a Report, in the portatour® Options, in the lower pane, under Organization, click “Request Report”. To get Reports for a given user group, click “User Management”, log into the desired user group, scroll down to the bottom and click “Request portatour® Report”. (Note: user groups are available as of 10 licenses).

In the Report, you will find the key statistics you are already familiar with from the Report of an individual user, with the key difference that the values of the consolidated users are either summed up or calculated as averages.

Notes:

• With this update, the application check is integrated in the company report or user group report.
• Those sections that are user-specific, e.g. a specific schedule, call reports or overdue customers, are not available in the company or user group Report. For detailed analyses, continue to use the portatour® Report for the respective users, which you can also request directly under User Management.
• The (automatic) sending of the new consolidated Reports by e-mail is not yet supported.

Please note: this article’s target audience is administrators of portatour® company accounts (2 users or more).

With today’s portatour® update, the customer import gets a new feature: the automatic transfer of existing customer records between user accounts.

With the following example, we would like to explain in greater detail what this means and what benefits this new feature provides. Let’s say you manage your customer data in an ERP system and transfer this data regularly into portatour® by importing customers. As part of a new segmentation within your ERP system, some of Smith’s clients will be assigned to Jones. Without the transfer of customers in portatour®, these customers will be created as new customers for Jones. All the information and reports previously entered by Smith will not be visible to Jones. In order to avoid this, you can either transfer the customers in question manually in portatour® before importing from Smith to Jones, or you use the new automatic customer import transfer feature.

The use of the automatic transfer feature is simple: on the new “Select transfer mode” page of the import wizard, you configure whether you want to copy or move customer data to other user accounts. If you leave the transfer in “do not transfer” mode, no automatic transfer will occur. In addition, you determine whether the data regarding customers — that is to say appointments, reports, and call blocks — will also be copied or moved along with the customer.

If the import file now contains customers that cannot be found in the user account, portatour® first looks in other user accounts in your organization to see if those customers are there. For the search, the key fields “External ID” and “Portatour ID” are used. If portatour® finds them, the customers in question will first be transferred from the other user account to the current user account – that means either copied or moved according to the settings – and then updated by the data in the import file. If portatour® does not find a customer, it will simply be created as usual. On the Import preview page, you will see information about whether and how many customers will be transferred from another user account.

If you have automated the import of customers via the API, the transfer function is also available. When calling “ImportCustomers”, use the new parameter “transferMode=Copy” or “transferMode=Move”. You can find more information about this in the API’s technical documentation in the Options.

Further information regarding automatic transfer:

• In the import wizard, the transfer function is only available if the user has permission to transfer customers. See Options -> Permissions.
• The automatic transfer feature is only available in the “update customers” and “update customers incl. deletion” import mode – but not in the “create customers” mode.
• Only the “External ID”, “Portatour ID” key fields, or both, are allowed. The transfer is not available if you use other fields as the key.
  
• When searching for customers in other user accounts, portatour® will also look in their recycle bins. In this way, you can freely choose the order of imports when a customer has to be transferred from User A to User B. If the customer is first removed by User A via an import in the “Update incl. deletion” mode (to be more precise: moved to the recycle bin), it will be still found during the following import of clients to User B, and then transferred with all its data. The only thing to note is that the maximum period before the recycle bin is emptied is 14 days.

With today’s update, portatour® has been extended with a “recycle bin” for customers. As of now, when you delete customers, they will be moved into this recycle bin as a precaution and kept there for 14 days before they are permanently deleted. You can restore customers in the recycle bin at any time – i.e. retract the deletion. You have now an additional “safety net” at your disposal in case you deleted customers by mistake.

To access the recycle bin, click on “Customers” in the main menu, scroll down to the bottom of the customer list and click the new button “Recycle bin”. If there are already customers in the recycle bin, they are listed, sorted by deletion date:

In the recycle bin, we differentiate between customers who were manually deleted by the click of a button in portatour® and customers who were automatically deleted during an import – via import assistant or API import. To change the selection, switch on top of the list between “Deleted manually” and “Deleted by import“.

To restore a customer, click on them and select in the subsequent context menu the entry “Restore“. In the context menu, you also have the possibility to immediately permanently delete the customer. To restore or permanently delete multiple customers at once, use the buttons below the list.

If you ask yourself now what advantage the recycle bin adds compared to the already known general restore function in the options: Using the general restore points, the entire data base is reset to an older data status – thus, all records are affected (customers, appointments, call reports, …), which can result in data loss. The recycle bin on the other hand allows the selective restoration of certain customers without having other entries being discarded. In the future, look in the recycle bin if you do not find customers any more, before resetting the entire data base to an older restore point.

Further details about the recycle bin:

• Customers in the recycle bin are completely ignored by portatour®. They are neither scheduled nor can they be opened, edited or exported.
• The retention period in the recycle bin is usually 14 days. It can be shorter if the limit of 3,000 customers is exceeded. In that case, the customers with the oldest deletion date are removed from the recycle bin early.
• If your customer records have “External IDs“, a customer is possibly automatically restored from the recycle bin if there is a customer record with an analog “External ID”. This protects you from data loss if you use the import option “incl. deletion” and you have deleted customers from a user account in this way by mistake. A correct, subsequent import automatically restores the customers from the recycle bin – including all entries the users already made at the customers in portatour®.
• The recycle bin is only available for customers. Deletions of appointments and call reports are still immediately permanent.
• Only users having the authorization to delete customers according to the permission settings have the right to restore customers from the recycle bin.
• Users who are directly linked to a data source system (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM) do not have a recycle bin in portatour® Anywhere. If a customer is deleted in that case, they are moved to the recycle bin of the respective source system.

Since 2014, portatour® Anywhere has an offline mode which allows you to access your schedule and to enter call reports even without internet connection. The offline mode has to be enabled once in the options. More on this in the help.

With today’s update of portatour®, the offline mode’s main menu bar was matched to the one of the online mode in order to provide a more intuitive usage.

Once your device loses internet connection and you switch to the offline mode of portatour®, there will still be a yellow banner on top of the pages informing you about the offline mode.

Once your device gains internet connection again, you will automatically be informed of that by the blue link “go online” being displayed. In the upper right corner of the menu bar, you will also see the red button.

Also there, you have the possibility to switch back to online mode by clicking “go online“.