This release is part of a quiet run in to Christmas – nothing too groundbreaking, and certainly nothing risky for the holiday season.
At the start of December we went live with a new pair of primary servers from Faelix, and retired a corresponding pair of 3 year old servers. There were a few teething issues for some sftp based interfacing projects relating to new IP addresses and permissions, but everything has been ironed out now. In a normal working day we are now processing around 1.2M page requests for the back office screens, reports, and dashboards. We deliver the vast majority of pages in under 1 second (98.8% of all requests), and 99.9% of all pages in under 2 seconds.
The new hardware has definitely helped, but mostly this is achieved by continuously monitoring and reviewing of the requests to make sure all the pages are being as responsive as possible. This release includes a couple of changes to the cloned attachment reports that had a big impact on some very slow queries, and a collection of changes to Items Requiring Action (and related reports) to improve performance for a contract that is triggering around 10,000 extra PPM visits each month. These changes are ongoing, and hopefully nobody has noticed anything except faster and more responsive pages in the last couple of weeks. If you have a favourite page or report that is taking longer (there are about 500 of them a day still) then let us know and we’ll see if we can improve the time it takes you to get an answer.
New Features
- Added a new status label so reopened jobs can go to an alternative status.
- Changed the Sage purchase invoice importer to use the invoice taxpointdate for the newly created order date.
- Added an urgency filter on find jobs to filter the jobs by the urgency based on the priority set against the job and the urgency_hours value set against the client.
- Latest Jobs Raised dashboard widget can now be filtered for split jobs.
- Improved the suspend/unsuspend button to use the same button for bother operations and to automatically save when the button is clicked rather than requiring a full page save.
- Added a system option to turn off the preview invoice button on the job sheet and interim invoice screen. The preview invoice is often misleading as some final calculations to do with deductions, retentions, layout options, and ultimate billing address are only possible within the full or interim invoice processes.
- Profit calculation on Estimated Value on the jobsheet is now controlled by a system option.
- Added the ability to remove personalised filters from the user setup screen.
- Improved the performance of items requiring action widget to support projects with many many jobs and tasks relating to them.
- Adding the “How to update the app” youtube video to the update screen in the mobile app to help engineers through the process. (https://youtu.be/lC1Z3_Db8tg?si=iAqw96kva43fjlMX)
- Stopped cloned attachments from split jobs showing back on the main jobs, and prevented future splits from cloning the previous clones.
- Type 1 operative required has been added to the job list operatives report.
- Added logging and audit trail to the user licence module.
Changes For a Single Contractor
New column on the UWE (Archibus) application report to show the maintenance codes
- Changes to sales invoice layout
Platform Improvements
- Minor PHP8 changes
- Updated the PHPUnit code
Bug Fixes
- Fixed the related invoices report to prevent SQL errors appearing in the reports that extend this.
- Fixed a problem that occasionally caused the import to fail when bulk importing SOR lines.
- Fixed how MARKUS handles attachments with a description of 2000+ characters when copied to a split job.
- Fixed a bug when correcting a job that the site field wasn’t being automatically selected.
