Author: CxAlloy_Admin

Hello! It’s been a while and we have a lot to share. First there are some recent updates to tell you about and then I want to give you a preview of our plans for our 2nd annual customer summer!

Recent Updates

Multiple Report Generator Configurations

You can now create multiple report generator configurations in your projects. This one is pretty self-explanatory. 😀 You no longer need to mess up an existing configuration in order to run some other report! Just click “Add New” at the top right of the page to get started creating a new report configuration.

Account Overview

Our new Account Overview, which has been in beta with our user conference attendees since late last year, is now available in all accounts.

Like the project list, the account overview shows you a list of all projects in the account. It then improves on the project list by showing each project’s dashboard directly in the list and adding filters, sorting, exporting, and PDF reporting.

For those in the beta it’s worth noting that this release included improvements, such as a nicer-looking PDF and group headers when sorting.

In the future we will replace the project list with the account overview.

Test Template Folders in Upgraded Projects

In accounts and projects that have Upgraded Checklists tests and test templates now work like checklists. This means that many of the checklist benefits you get from upgrading your project are also in tests, like organizing your test templates into folders and the improved batch creation and template copying functions.

If you haven’t upgraded your account or project yet we encourage you to do so. Read our Upgrade Guide to get started.

Integration with CxAlloy FM for Seamless Maintenance

We have also made available our integration with CxAlloy FM (Facility Maintenance), our preventative maintenance software.

With this integration you can move a project’s asset data – equipment, equipment types, systems, and locations – to CxAlloy FM with a click. Beyond just copying asset data, CxAlloy FM will look for common equipment (such as air handling units, chillers, boilers, etc.) and automatically create maintenance procedures and schedules for them.

To learn more about the integration and CxAlloy FM, please read our support article or watch our integration webinar.

The Second Annual Customer Appreciation Summer

The feedback we got on last year’s Customer Appreciation Summer was so positive we decided to do it again! Like last year we’ll be releasing a series of new features all summer long, with a particular focus on features that are highly requested by our customers.

Here are just some of the features we’ll be releasing:

• Attach multiple photos to a field observation comment
• Manage a user’s projects at the account level
• Import asset and assignment fields with issues

Our 2nd Customer Appreciation Summer will start the weekend of June 22-23. We hope you enjoy it!

When you’re walking into work against a cold wind with your jacket drawn tightly around you, your hands in your pockets to stay warm, it may seem like summer is in the distant past, so I understand if you’ve forgotten about our Customer Appreciation Summer. If you haven’t, though, you may have noticed that a couple of planned updates didn’t get announced.

Well, our final features proved a bit more challenging so they had to get moved to “Customer Appreciation Fall” 🍁 We snuck two updates out over the past month that I’m sure you’ll be interested in. Luckily our customer appreciation doesn’t change with the seasons!

Field Observation Comment Photos

The first feature addresses what may be one of our oldest outstanding feature requests – the ability to update photos on field observation comments. You can now add a photo to an existing field observation comment, change the photo on an existing comment, or remove the photo from a comment. Thank goodness!

We also have made it possible to reorder your field observation comments simply by dragging and dropping them.

The same comment photo features are already in the iOS app and comment reordering will be in the next update.

Export Updates

We’ve also gone through and updated all of our exports. Many exports now include more information than they did previously, and they all now have the following improvements:

• Header rows have a background color
• When it makes sense, multiple worksheets are used. For example, exporting a test will put each attempt into its own worksheet.
• Columns will be auto-sized to match the maximum width of the column’s content
• Clickable links to the original item are provided when possible
• Dates will be formatted as dates (and values that are not dates but look like dates won’t be incorrectly formatted as dates)

We’ve learned from your feedback that exporting and then importing checklists, tests, and templates is a common task and we wanted to improve that experience. Now when importing you can select the specific worksheet that contains just the lines, which in turn provides an improved flow with how our import operates.

Area Served Filtering and Sorting

Finally, just today we added filtering and sorting by Area Served for checklists, tests, and issues. Area Served has proven to be pretty important for some customers’ workflows and we anticipate this will make it even more useful for those folks.

We hope you enjoy these updates. Summer may be over but we’re still working to make CxAlloy TQ the best it can be. Until next time, stay warm out there!

This week in our Customer Appreciation Summer we are adding the ability to sort issues, equipment, field observations, and reviews by when they were last updated. This new sort is called “Date Updated”.

An item will be considered “updated” not only when it is edited, but also when files, issues, or comments are added to it. The exact rules controlling the updated date for an item can be found in a new help article.

A forthcoming update to the iOS app will also include this new sorting option.

We know you want to see this same sort for checklists and tests and we are working on it. To get that one right – which we believe means accounting for answers to individual lines – we need a little more time.

See you next week!

This week’s feature in our Customer Appreciation Summer is another top request. You can now apply status restrictions to not only the setting of a status, but also to the un-setting of that status. In other words, once you set an issue to “Closed” (for example), the only people that can change it away from “Closed” are the people that are allowed to set “Closed” in the first place.

This feature is opt-in. If you’d like to turn it on, navigate to your status configuration in project settings and click “Permissions” next to the status you want to restrict. Then check the new “Also restrict unsetting this status” checkbox.

This new option is available as part of your account-level project defaults as well.

This additional restriction will be enforced in the iOS app starting with version 3.4, which we just made available.

While we were making changes to the status permission dialog we also added tooltips that better explain what each option does.

See you next week!

This week’s feature in our Customer Appreciation Summer is for data geeks. You can now export key data – issues, checklists, and tests – from across all projects.

Unlike our project-based exports, which present the exported data similarly to how you see it in the software, these account exports are tailored more towards those looking for “raw data”.

For example, these exports include the numerical IDs that the software uses to uniquely identify each record. You’ll also notice that we split up the exports into their underlying pieces. Rather than a single test export, for example, there are instead three exports: Tests, Test Attempts, and Test Attempt Lines.

In keeping with the “raw data” approach of these exports, you can choose between CSV and SQLite formats. CSV (Comma Separated Values) is a simple spreadsheet format that will open in Excel and other spreadsheet programs, while SQLite is a common database format. You may need to download additional software to open the SQLite file.

When exporting to a SQLite file you will always receive a single file. When exporting to CSV you may receive multiple files if the export is large, as we have limited a single CSV file to 50,000 rows.

The exports are only available to account administrators and can be accessed under the new “Export” tab within your accounts.

See you next week!

This week’s feature in our Customer Appreciation Summer is one that we’re really happy to make available – custom permission presets.

Since we first introduced our more granular permission model in 2012 and its somewhat intimidating array of checkboxes, we’ve also provided some presets to save you the hassle of clicking all those little checkboxes. Presets are intended to save you time; they check the boxes for you.

Previously the available presets included some basic setups, such as “View Only”, as well as some recommended configurations, such as “Recommended for Subcontractor”. These were helpful, but they couldn’t be renamed or changed, and you couldn’t create your own. That changes with this week’s release!

You’ll now find a new “Permissions” section in your Account Settings. As a part of this release, every account starts with the default presets we’ve used for years (”Recommended for Subcontractor”, etc.). The difference is that you can now create new presets and edit or delete existing presets.

Presets are configured exclusively at the account level; you can’t have project-specific presets.

The presets appear in the same place they always have when adding a person to a project, except that now you’ll be choosing from your list of custom account presets.

Of course, you can always tailor the permissions to each individual user and nothing about that changes with this release.

See you next week!

This week in our Customer Appreciation Summer we are adding the ability to export the list of people on the project. The export will include three worksheets: People, Companies, and Roles.

With this release, we are at the halfway point in our customer appreciation summer. To recap, in the last five weeks we have added these features:

• Batch manage attributes
• PDF table of contents
• Batch change test status
• Dashboard overview PDF
• Copy meeting minutes between projects

For the second half of the summer, we are aiming to finish strong with more highly requested features, including:

• Custom permission presets
• Field observation comment improvements
• Account overview
• Template folders

We hope you are enjoying your summer. See you next week!

In week 5 of our Customer Appreciation Summer, we are adding the ability to copy meeting minutes and agendas between projects.

To copy from a meeting in another project, use the new project dropdown in the Copy dialog, then select a meeting and the agenda or minutes as usual.

When copying between projects, any embedded references to issues, tasks, files, or comments will automatically be removed.

We hope you like it. See you next week!

If you’ve ever taken a screenshot of the project dashboard, this week’s feature is for you. For the fourth week of our Customer Appreciation Summer, we are adding PDF and export options to the project dashboard overview.

It’s pretty simple – just click one of the new “Export” or “PDF” buttons at the top right of the dashboard overview. We’ve also added “Dashboard” as a section you can include in the report generator.

We’d like to have exports and PDFs for more of the dashboard in the future, so let us know what other dashboard information you’d like to see included.

A small but useful feature for the third week of our Customer Appreciation Summer: batch changing test statuses.

To use the feature, simply select one or more tests in the list, then click “Set Status of Most Recent Attempt” in the action bar that appears above the list.

As you may have noticed, technically you’ll be setting the status of each test’s most recent attempt. A test can have many attempts and this feature will only change the status of the latest attempt. Because the overall status of the test is pulled from the latest attempt, changing the status of the most recent attempt will also change the status of the test overall.

It’s a small feature but one that can save you a lot of time when you need it. We hope you enjoy it. See you next week!

It’s week two of our Customer Appreciation Summer, and we’ve got a great one – you can now include a Table of Contents when generating reports!

Our report generator has always included automatic bookmarks so that you can easily navigate around the document. These bookmarks are only available when viewing the PDF digitally, though. With the new Table of Contents section, you can now include a table of contents in the report itself. This can be really handy with printed copies, and it’s also useful for PDF users that are less experienced and may not know how to use PDF bookmarks.

To add a Table of Contents simply select it from the available sections in the report generator. You can give the Table of Contents a custom title, choose how many columns to use, and what level of detail to provide. This allows you to go from a simple chapter-style listing to an almost index-like approach. It’s probably easiest just to see what these different options look like:

As our customer appreciation summer rolls on we’ll keep bringing you great new features you’ve been asking for. We hope you like it!