Blog

Over the weekend we released a big update to CxAlloy TQ. There’s a lot in this one and you can read about all the improvements in our release notes, but I want to dive into three new features in particular:

• Checklist and test line changes
• New embedding options for files and folders in reports
• Project duplication

Checklist and Test Line Changes

For years we’ve been tracking the full history of checklist and test lines, including who answered each line. We’ve known this information could be useful but we just hadn’t figured out how to show it without it being overwhelming.

After a few false starts and back-to-the-drawing-board course shifts, we’ve finally got something that we like. What you’ll find is that any line can now be expanded to show who answered the line, who wrote the note, and who recorded the linked attribute. We’ll also show you the date and time for each of those.

This data has been extended to the PDF reports as well with the addition of a new print option, “Answered By”. Check it to see the same detailed information in your PDF.

This update gave us an opportunity to make some other changes as well. You’ll now find that instead of an “Actions” button for each line, the Edit, Delete, and Add Line actions are now shown as icons when the line is expanded. We’ve also added new “Expand Lines” and “Collapse Lines” options under “Section Actions” to hide or show these actions for all lines.

Another new feature: you’ll find a fourth icon below the three actions: History. Clicking this will bring up a list of all changes of any kind that have happened to that line including who made the change and when. This can be useful when a line has had its answer changed or other important edits.

Another goal of this update was to make it easier and faster to see and confirm attribute values. To accomplish this we have pulled the linked attribute information out of the “Note” area and now show it to the right of each line. This change takes a process that used to be four clicks:

• click “Yes” or the checkmark icon
• click “Note”
• click “Use value X”
• click “Save”

and brings it down to one click:

• click “Confirm X”

When confirming an attribute value the line will be marked “Yes” if it has not already been answered. Of course you can still correct a value instead of confirming it, or enter totally new values when there is nothing to confirm, just like before.

That’s a lot so far but we did more. We’ve heard your complaints and we no longer number header lines! Be aware, this change isn’t in the iOS app just yet but will be there very soon.

There’s even more than that, such as improvements to the bar showing the percentage of lines answered and autosizing text boxes. You can find all the details in our release notes.

New Embedding Options for Files and Folders

We are committed to continuously improving our report generator. In this release we’ve added some oft-requested new options for “File” and “Folder” sections. You can now choose what quality the embedded file(s) should have as well as whether they are shrunk to fit in the margins (the default) or take up the whole page.

These options allow you to create a more professional look when integrating in external documents (such as an executive summary) into the report.

Project Duplication

We’ve had project duplication in beta for quite a while and have slowly been updating it based on feedback. We now feel that it is ready to be rolled out to everyone. You’ll now find a “Duplicate” button next to each project in your account-level project list. When duplicating a project, you’ll be able to choose what to duplicate. Some of the additions we made to this based on the feedback we received are the options to duplicate people, folders, and report generator settings.

Duplicating a project is a great option for situations where you are commissioning many similar projects, such as a chain of fast food restaurants or grocery stores.

Because duplicating a project also duplicates the project’s settings, including custom statuses, it could also be used as a type of project template system. You could identify a past project as the template for your retro-commissioning projects, for example, and a different project as the template for your new construction projects.

Bonus: Speed Improvements

Special bonus! We received some concerns from a customer that was experiencing long load times on one of their project’s review and issue lists. When we looked into it we discovered that certain projects with a lot of reviews or issues and frequent sharing through the “Permissions” function could see these long load times. So we fixed it! For the particular project that our customer brought to us we have been able to improve load times by between 80 and 90 percent when using the 500 per-page setting.

Just like this speed increase, many of the updates in this release come from customers reaching out to tell us what we can do better. So thank you to anyone that sent us an email, gave us a call, or talked to us in person about how we could improve. And keep it coming! We are always listening at support@cxalloy.com.

CxAlloy has always featured amazing reports. In particular, our report generator, perhaps our most powerful reporting capability, could save you enormous amounts of time by combining all your project content and outputting it as a single, organized, bookmarked PDF.

Because the report generator is so impressive, we almost always demonstrate it in our webinars and other presentations. However, until a few days ago, the report generator itself was part of our premium features. Premium features were optional and added an additional charge, which was frustrating to many of our customers.

So we changed it! Today the report generator is included in every project at no additional charge. To celebrate this change and to help those who may not be familiar with the power of the report generator, we will be hosting a special webinar on Thursday, May 28 at 2:00 PM Eastern focused solely on the report generator. You can register to attend here.

You will find the report generator under the “Reports” tab in your projects. You can also read an overview of our reporting features, including the report generator, on our website.

White Labeling

What does this mean for premium features? We have replaced our premium features with one of its former members, “White Labeling.” White labeling allows you to substitute the logo on the site and in the footer of the PDFs with your own company logo.

Recent Updates

In addition to opening up the report generator for everyone, our latest release added a new look for issue and field observation comments, improvements to the display of custom logos, and multiple recipients for receipts.

We also made some behind-the-scenes changes to how we handle image and file uploads. These upgrades will increase the quality of embedded PDFs in the reports you create, and have made it possible to embed non-PDF files (such as Word and Excel files) into your reports. The ability to embed non-PDF files is currently in beta.

These are just the changes in our most recent release. We’ve had multiple releases since the beginning of the year, including:

• View the percentage of lines answered for checklists and tests and include this information in your PDF reports.
• Improved performance, better searching, and additional sorts for checklist and test pages.
• Improvements to including external files in the report generator, including title pages, bookmarks, and the ability to embed all files in a folder.
• Added “Set Status of All Sections” and “Assign All Sections” buttons to checklists.
• Added paging to issues in field observations and reviews to improve performance for very large reports.
• Added dedicated import for systems and equipment types (making it possible to import attribute information for them).
• Color, contrast, and style improvements.

You can see these updates and more in our release notes.Reports for Everyone!

Several months back, we invited CxAlloy TQ users to complete a survey in order to identify the features you would most like to see.

Because you all were so generous with your time and insight, I’d like to return the favor and outline our findings. Your participation in the survey has really helped us understand where we should focus our efforts.

We want to be open with the results because we truly see ourselves as your partner with a shared goal of project success, and in any good partnership, open and honest communication is key.

Barcodes vs. Meeting Minutes

As we were putting the survey together, our team was working on some initial designs for integrating barcode support into the software and app. Although we were excited about the potential for barcodes, in our research efforts we were having some troubling conversations — our customers didn’t seem to have any experience with using barcodes on a project. When we investigated further, we found indifference about barcode functionality (i.e. “That sounds cool but I don’t know if I would use it”). Meanwhile, we received several emails over a short period of time asking us to build meeting minutes. We started to wonder: were we spending our time on the wrong thing? We decided to pause our efforts on barcoding until we got the survey results.

It’s a good thing too because the survey showed that barcodes were the least desired feature¹ compared to the four other features we pitted against it. The clear winner was meeting minutes.

Meetings are Coming

Because of your feedback, we have shifted our focus to meeting minutes. In fact, after months of research, discussions with customers, and reviews of real-world minutes, we realized we need to incorporate more than just minutes — so we are building a new “Meetings” section.

I don’t want to share too much, but currently we are planning to incorporate:

• Tasks
• Agendas
• Distribution Lists
• Attendance Lists
• Minutes
• Issues

Other Features

Another question in our survey asked participants to select five features out of ten that they would like to see. These are all features that we believe in, but we wanted to know which ones we should prioritize. The top choice, a more flexible template builder, is now in the planning stages.

A separate question asked survey takers to rank features based on their usefulness. The features in this question were more speculative — ones we thought might be a good idea weren’t as sure about. In keeping with that, there weren’t strong winners or losers here, but we are looking to these results in prioritizing features. For example, we recently rolled out due date filtering in the issues list, and we will be debuting tasks as part of our Meetings feature.

The Difference Between Contractors, Project Managers, and Commissioning Agents

Over 100 CxAlloy TQ users responded to the survey. Respondents varied in their roles within CxAlloy TQ projects; while the majority were commissioning professionals that use the software to document their projects, we also got responses from administrative professionals, project managers, project executives, and contractors. We knew that these different groups had different reasons for using the software and different experiences with it; the survey showed us that those differences affected how the software was perceived and what we needed to do to make it better.

In particular we found that our favorability ratings (as measured by respondents’ willingness to recommend the software) were meaningfully different across the different user groups. On one end of the spectrum, we had administrative professionals, followed closely be commissioning authorities, who really love the software. On the other end, we had contractors who were closer to neutral on it. Project managers landed in the middle of these two groups.

These results are not that surprising as CxAlloy TQ was designed specifically to target the needs of the commissioning professional; so it makes sense that we would be favored by them. However, one of the core philosophies behind CxAlloy TQ is facilitating collaboration. We want to help you involve all project stakeholders in the commissioning process in a way that truly works. If the software is frustrating or of little use for some of those stakeholders, then we need to do better.

Ultimately, you, the commissioning professional, are more likely to hear the complaints from these stakeholders than we are. And that makes your job harder. These things are all interconnected. Providing every stakeholder a better experience with CxAlloy TQ should, in turn, make it easier for you to successfully leverage CxAlloy TQ on your projects and get even more value from it.

Our Direction

How is this insight going to manifest in the software? We now see our need to improve the software for each of these distinct user groups simultaneously.

For project managers, we are working to incorporate more features that can answer the question, “What is the status of my projects?” We want to make it easy to answer questions like:

• How is the mechanical contractor doing on filling out the checklists?
• What checklists remain to be completed?
• Who is delaying the closing of issues?
• Is the equipment ready to be tested? Have all related issues and checklists been closed or completed?

In the case of contractors, the focus will be in two areas: first, improving the reliability and speed of our mobile apps. Second, looking for ways we can make common tasks simpler and easier to complete. This could include things like:

• Minimizing the number of clicks (or taps) necessary to answer a checklist line.
• Making it easier to find the remaining work a contractor needs to complete.
• Combining or automating certain steps, such as setting the status of a checklist or commenting and changing the status of an issue.
• Making common actions more obvious, such as commenting on an issue or adding a photo.

For commissioning professionals, we will focus on making them more efficient. This group is where we’ll add “power user” features to make data creation and management easier and faster.

Footnotes

1. This doesn’t mean that barcodes are out the window. It’s important to remember that this survey was just a sample of our current customers, and there may be a contingent that desperately wants barcodes (which maybe now we’ll hear from). There may also be a chicken and egg situation, in which potential customers never sign on with CxAlloy TQ in the first place because we don’t have integrated barcode functionality. However, it does mean that if we add barcoding, our approach to rolling it out needs to contemplate these findings. Rather than rolling out the feature and saying “have at it,” we would want to combine it with an education campaign about how barcodes can benefit a project. We would need to educate our customers on why they would want to start barcoding when they haven’t before. That’s a very different task than simply adding a highly-requested feature.

We’ve just rolled out an update that makes several improvements to our report generator, along with other additions.

First, we’ve added a new Folder section. This new section will allow you to easily add a folder of PDF files to your report. You might have a “Meeting Minutes” folder containing PDFs of your meeting minutes. Or, perhaps you have a “TAB” folder containing all the TAB reports. The new Folder section will allow you to easily include these documents in your report without having to select each file individually.

We also updated the report generator so that Custom Title Page and File sections will be bookmarked. We have also added a title page (with the ability to specify a custom title and subtitle) for the File section.

Another time-saving addition is the ability to restrict a status as part of your project defaults. Previously a status could only be restricted once a project was created, meaning that you had to remember to go in and restrict any statuses every time you created a new project. Now you can specify the status permissions in your project defaults. Currently this is limited to restricting to “Owner, Co-Owner, and Manager”.

This release features two more crowd-pleasing changes: field observation comments now sort in ascending order instead of descending order, and when adding someone to a project you can choose whether to subscribe them to daily digest emails for that project.

Of course, this release includes the usual small improvements and other bug fixes. You can read more in our release notes.

Today’s release is headlined by a highly-requested feature: the ability to see, at a glance, the progress of your checklists or tests.

A small progress bar now appears next to checklists and tests. Green is the percentage of lines marked “Yes”. Red is the percentage of lines marked “No”. And black is the percentage marked “N/A”.

Previously the only way to to get this information was to look at each checklist or test and scan the answers yourself. We think this new approach is a huge improvement. We thank all of our customers that requested it!

Today’s release includes a number of other improvements as well. Many of these improvements we are initially rolling out to checklists and tests but will come to other sections later on.

Additional Sorts. You can now sort checklists and tests by any asset type (Equipment, Equipment Type, System, Space, Floor, Zone, and Building).

Custom Status Sort. Sorting by status will now sort in the order defined in your project settings, not alphabetically.

Improved Performance. We’ve done a lot of work to increase the speed of checklist and test page loads, especially on larger projects.

Improved Search. The search functionality for checklists and tests has been improved and expanded. Searching for multiple words will now treat each word as a separate search term, and you can exclude a term by putting a “-” in front of it. To search for an exact phrase (the default behavior of the previous search), put your search in quotes.

Layout Changes. A new layout for the checklist and test lists gives us room for the new progress bars, but it also addresses complaints about names being truncated. We’ve also moved the “Note” button for checklist and test lines to the left, next to the “Add Issue” button.

Increased Contrast. We’ve darkened up the text in some spots and made our colors a little brighter.

Bug Fixes

• We’ve fixed a bug where the undo function would sometimes fail.
• We have replaced the 1000 per page option with 500. We also have switched those that still had the legacy “All” setting over to 500.
• When clicking “Note” for a line that has a linked attribute, focus will now be placed in the attribute field.
• We’ve improved the issue export function to include more data.

 

You may have read media reports about the discovery of a computer bug that could put the security of web sites at risk, dubbed “Shellshock” by some in the media.

I want to assure you that we have kept abreast of the issue and have updated all of the CxAlloy servers with the recent patches that fix the bug.

In addition, based on the information currently known about this bug, it is unlikely that CxAlloy servers were vulnerable prior to the patch as our particular server configuration has not been shown to be vulnerable.

We are committed to ensuring the security of your data. You can read more about our security and data protection policies on our security page.

We know that many of you have not been receiving email notifications for some time. For anyone that has experienced that, I apologize. As we’ve grown our previous approach to sending emails became overwhelmed. We have been working to revamp our email notifications to address the issues, and I’m happy to say that starting today you will receive all the email notifications you are subscribed to.

Email notifications allow you to be emailed when something important happens with an issue, checklist, test, or other item you created, are assigned to, or are watching.

You can choose to receive these emails immediately (within five minutes) after the action happens, or combine them into a once- or twice-daily email. You can also choose what you want to be notified about. For example, if you are creating a lot of items, notifications about items you’ve created may be too much. In that case you might want to turn off notifications for those items. To manage your email notifications, visit your profile page.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@cxalloy.com