It’s funny how some features hang around for years and years, but then at the other end of the spectrum there’s always something new happening in the world of IT. This release we cover both of those – looking forward to where your industry is going, and looking back at something we designed years ago.
In June we were at the Housing 24 show in Manchester. There was a lot of interest in “damp”, and there were many InternetOfThings suppliers exhibiting their different devices to help housing associations solve all their damp and mould issues. Since the show we have to worked with a couple of the other exhibitors who kindly lent us some sensors, and have added support for reading in IOT Device data directly into MARKUS. At the moment we don’t really know what to do with the data – Zahir wrote some reports to go with the APIs – but we think this is something that is only going to get bigger over the coming years. If you are currently tendering for damp and mould contracts then this is a capability of MARKUS that might help you. We also think this would be useful for non-social housing clients too. For example, the stand next to ours had a company that fitted self-adjusting pressure sensors to boilers, and another that did temperature senors in fridges – both these could be applied to either FM or HVAC worlds. If you have come across customers asking for this sort of thing then please get in touch. There’s nothing to “see” in MARKUS for this work, but we thought it would be a useful capability to add to the features.
At the other end of the spectrum is something that Pat has worked on for this release that changes a concept that has existed since our very first hosted/browser system in 2001, and that survived every major rewrite. Back in the early days everyone thought database access was too slow for users, and bandwidth was limited so “paged” result sets were a common feature of browser based software (some systems still use the concept). However, very early on we realised that if we could streamline the reports, then it didn’t matter if you asked for 10 or 10,000 results, we should give you them all in a single page, and not force you to step through the results 10 at a time. However, we thought it was a really useful optimisation to also generate the CSV and PDF versions of the data just in case you wanted to download them. Since then, we’ve been generating all 3 sets of data for every report. Until today! If you now want a CSV or PDF download then these are still available – you can either click on the old icon on the report to get these generated for you, or pre-tick the CSV and PDF options in the report filters to have the downloads delivered with the results. However, we only generate these if you ask for them so all reports should be just a little bit quicker for every user of the system. You probably won’t notice this yourself in any specific report, but the server should just be a tiny bit more responsive to every single request. Thanks to Pat some code that is older than he is has now been consigned to our history books. If you need any help with this change then please give us a call.
New Features
- Added experimental support for IOT moisture sensors – new API to receive the data, data structure to hold sensor data, and reporting on the data (including exceptions and a heatmap)
- Added support for fetching photos to the ServiceChannel API
- Changes to the login screen to make it easier to pull in announcements to display to users
- Added a new electrical installation condition report certificate PDF
- Added supplier notes to the find supplier report
- Major overhaul of the PDF and CSV generation from all reports to move the extra file generation from happening every request, to only happening when a user needs the exported file
- Changes to supplier setup to make it easier to pick from a descriptive set of supplier notes to give consistency and help communicating the CIS deductions to the invoice entry team
- New multi-section report for WIP driven from invc lines rather than jobs
- Added a new column to the items requiring action detail reports to calculate the number of days stuck in status alongside the internal KPI so users don’t have to calculate this themselves from the last status change date
- New report of gas movements in a period sliced by asset (all reports->scan for new reports->Gas Stock Movement by Asset)
- New filters on survey question report
- Changed the audit trail report to differentiate between viewing attachments and adding attachments to PDFs
- Added a new filter to status setup report to allow filtering by group or status label
- Changed the important survey answers report to allow easy linking to jobs, and to better display the completion date
- Added the list of operative secondary trades to the setup report
- Built a version of the mobile app with captions suitable to be used by people managing large stately home gardens using standard source code
- Extended Bulk Status Change to support unlimited sized lists of jobs
- Added live job messages to the job/site report
- Added support for surfacing asset details on the standard Building Maintenance mobile app to match how the ACR app displays them
- CSS changes to allow different page formats when merging survey PDFs together from a jobsheet
- Added triggers to automatically create depot specific start of day checks when new depots and contractors are created
- Added a more detailed version of the job history when editing job header that only shows the changes
- Added support for attaching photos to mobile application expenses claims that are not associated with any job
- Added audit comment into authentication syslog for suspended users
- Added purchase order information relating to jobs to the job/site report
- Added “export” to project jobs report
- Added conditional cell formating to all reports
- Suppressed split jobs from the timesheet portal where the primary job has been fully charged
Changes For A Single Contractor
- Fixed Sunday overtime rules on timesheet PDF
- Fixed lunch deduction on timesheet PDF
- Added site contact to the Construction purchase order PDF
- Changed timesheet PDF to display edited end of visit details rather than using the underlying raw operative status dates
- Removed “quote validity” from quotesheet PDF
- Fixed AndroidManifest bug which defined the wrong photo upload screen for specific API levels
- Changes to timesheet PDF to highlight clock off and clock on as separate activities
Platform Improvements
- Fixed PHP8 migration bugs: editing sales lines, Verisae job importer, emailing purchase orders to suppliers, queuing requests for RESTFUL interfaces, closing down job messages, printing visits, operative diary
- Removed the authentication bypass that allowed PDF generation process to directly access images without logging
Bug Fixes
- Fixed string overflow when prepending the mobile application captions to engineer notes
- Fixed “other” filter from items requiring action that conflicted between monitor clients and monitor contracts
- Fixed column heading alignment on the timesheet summary report
- Fixed mobile application sync process to prioritise newly created contacts in quick dials that also update assets. This prevents a renumbering bug updating the asset with the incorrect contact foreign id
- Removed the ability for users to override the operative message sent/received status when creating new messages
- Fixed button hint on the inspection batch report
- Fixed typo “Dowloaded”
- Prevent edge-case with record visit that adjusted the visit times when only the sales or materials lines changed
- Fixed auto-emailing absence change requests
- Fixed overlapping operative diary day view / fixed +1 button
- Fixed supplier invoice detail report to pull the correct nominal codes into the sub-report
- Fixed bug that cleared ordered quantity from edited lines on interfaced jobs where the system option was set to prevent any manual change to the value
- Removed the code that added an “-” to every job edited via the annotation screen
- Changed how “completed” jobs display in the operative diary to remove them from the cancelled section
