New + Improved
Improved Aggregate Reporting ^^
Power BI dashboards require a full dataset, including data that is not currently included in any aggregated report, so we have made the following improvements to the aggregated reports.
- Where enabled, it’s now possible to filter aggregated reports based on the Project and/or Contract state (i.e. to choose whether or not to include Completed and/or Archived Projects or Contracts in the dataset)
- In the interests of standardisation, 21 out of 26 existing reports have been renamed
- In addition we have created 12 new reports listed below;
- Document
- Instruction - Client to Project Manager
- Instruction - Supervisor to Supplier
- Non-Conformance
- Non-Conformity
- Non-Conformity Proposal - Project Manager
- Notification - Client to Project Manager
- Notification - Project Manager to Client
- Notification - Project Manager to Supervisor
- Notification - Supervisor to Project Manager
- Test Inspection - Project Manager
- Test Inspection - Supervisor
- Report names are now listed alphabetically. As before, it is still possible to find a particular report by typing the name.
Improved Timings ^^
This problem was reported by a specific customer who are using custom fields and an Asset Register (including Asset Fields on every notice). They have a relatively small number of contracts but high volume of notices and, in particular, they create a lot of related notices.
The following improvements have been implemented in this release:
- only load the fields we need for all potential related items Previously we were loading all data for all notices when we only really needed a subset.
- increase the cache timeout on the Asset Register to 24 hours
The Asset Register includes several thousand records and is updated infrequently so the previous timeout setting was causing the Asset Register to be unnecessarily refreshed every 10 minutes. With the new setting the full register will load into server cache once per day (when first called) so will significantly improve retrieval times throughout the day.
Improved control of Secondary dates ^^
FastDraft has the capability to capture secondary dates for a contract (e.g. Key Dates and Sectional Completion Dates). In principle these should only be adjusted via a Compensation Event but in practice these are sometimes entered incorrectly. Depending on the User level (SuperUser and Above), there is now the ability to Update and Delete the rows on the list. Two new columns have also been added to record the Last Amend Date and Last Amend Reference. These columns show the date the secondary date was changed, and any notification associated with the secondary date. The secondary date cannot be amended or deleted if there is an associated notification.
When clicking on the plus sign on the right hand side, a new pop up window is displayed where details of the new date to be added can be entered.
Contract Template ^^
The Contract Template structure has changed to support some growing space for upcoming requirements. User Filters are grouped into objects within the template. As each Contract Template is saved a transformer will be moving old properties to new properties.
New option for Notifications ^^
Some of our users require the ability to send email notifications/reminders to individuals they select via their own default email application.
Where enabled, it’s now possible for a user to share a link to a Fast Draft notice via their own email application using the new ‘Share’ button.
The button will launch the user’s default email application with the subject pre-populated to include the Notification Type, Reference and Contract Name
By design, the list of recipients will not be pre-populated
The email will be sent via the user’s own external email so Fast Draft won’t log/track recipients but the sender will be able to see that information via their sent items
The email will include a link to Fast Draft so both the sender and recipient will require access to the relevant contract in Fast Draft and access/visibility will be constrained based on the contract template (i.e. if a link is shared with somebody who doesn’t have appropriate access rights that person won’t be able to access the link)
This is intended to supplement and not to replace the standard notifications features of FastDraft
Improvement Asset Register functionality ^^
Currently, only one of our customers uses the Asset Register. The feature requires a url to be included for each asset in the metadata and can be configured to append that with supplier name if required. This functionality is currently only available for this customer.
New Client Party Actions ^^
As the Client party can now be configured as the replying party the actions menu (RAG panel) has been expanded to accommodate Client/Employer actions (where applicable).
Where Client/Employer reply actions are not configured (or if the template configuration dictates that a user cannot see them) the Client/Employer won’t appear.
New Custom fields ^^
Two new class of custom fields have been added:
- Select Single Contract User
- Select Multiple Contract User
These new fields function in a very similar way to a Select box and a Multiple Select Box respectively except there is no need to define a list of dropdown options as the dropdown will automatically display a list of contract users. This feature was developed to meet the needs of a single customer [Aberdeenshire Council] to allow them to nominate a single user ‘For Action’ and multiple users ‘For Information’. This feature was not designed to work with the new ‘Share’ button [it would be much more complicated to attempt to populate an email based on a configurable custom field]
Longer term, it’s intended that information captured in this way could be included in email notifications and used to trigger email distribution rules in the customer’s email client (e.g. Outlook Manage email messages by using rules)
Improved Performance
For our FastDraft instances that have already been migrated to PaaS (Platform as a Service) for improved performance.
The PaaS servers by default, go into standby when not in use. This is as expected. However, it has been observed that this causes the system to appear unresponsive for the first login of the day. A task has been scheduled for 08:00 (local time) each morning to prompt the servers out of standby and thereby avoid any negative perception from users.
Notes
^^ Items marked with a double up arrow require specific permissions or subscription types before they are available.
** Items marked with a double asterix will provide improved scalability, performance and reliability for the platform and will be rolled out in the near future.