Administrators have more control over who can see and edit what
We changed the user rights and introduced view filters and edit rights:
- View filters: You want to help users to focus and avoid that they get lost in the clutter of the full user community. Instead of showing all services and teams in the organization in dropdowns/lists or hundreds of demand channels on one screen, we only show what they need.
- Edit restrictions: an organization wants to make sure that only authorized users can edit data in Binocs. That’s why administrators can set restrictions on who can change what.
You can now set specific filters and rights on analysis, capacity, services, demand and the worklist. The exact actions users can perform can be found here.
Remark: The current user rights are migrated in such a way that users keep the same authorizations and rights as before.
Binocs moved to the .com world
The url to the Binocs app used to be cloud01.binocs.eu, but we decided to use a .com address. From now on you can go to cloud01.mybinocs.com/tenant (where tenant = your organizations tenant name). The Binocs website moved as well to discover-binocs.com.
Less confusion on the demand planned dates
The planned start date of a demandline used to be the monday date of the planned week. In some cases this could result in planned dates before the requested start date. For example a requested start of 2016-02-24 (Wednesday) and a planned date of 2016-02-22 (Monday). It’s planned in the same week, but it’s confusing.
Now the planned start date is the latest of the planned Monday date and the requested date. This way the planned date will never be before the requested date. We did the inverse for the planned finished date. The planned finish date is the earliest of the planned Sunday date and the requested date in case they are in the same week.
Remark: Technically this doesn’t change anything. The demand lines are still planned in the same weeks, but visually it’s not confusing anymore.
Cleaning demand became easier
Deleting cancelled or done demand lines was not possible before, but now it is. This way the user is in full control to clean up his/her demand channel.
Get the important stuff done with the improved worklist
The worklist now shows by default the tracked demand lines for the current week ordered on priority and free slack. Want to know the worklist for next week? Just type in a date of next week and voila. You now have more search possibilities on demand dates as well.
A more exact service capacity profile
The service capacity profile shows the workload per 1 unit, but the average failure ratio wasn’t shown. As a result the results in the workload analyzer (where the failure ratio is taken into account) and the capacity profile were sometimes inconsistent for the user. We added the failure ratio part in the graph as well. Result = a consistent workload analyzer and service capacity profile.
More user friendly unit sets
Sometimes users were confused by the use of the plural of units even when the quantity was 1. For example the capacity profile shows the workload per 1 testS or a demandline requests 1 testS. Now admins can set the singular and plural of the units and Binocs will adapt depending on the quantity.
Improved demand analyzer
You can now analyze demand for a team accross all demand channels and the planned dates can be choosen as pivot chart field as well.
Sometimes users were locked out too soon
Users are locked out when they enter their password wrongly 5 times in a row. But some users were locked out after one attempt already. We solved this.
Forget password failed in some cases
When the username wasn’t the email adress the forget password wasn’t sending mails. We solved this.
User interface improvements
We fixed some minor interface problems, such as the demand search field that collapsed after search and wasn’t readable anymore when entering new search criteria and some misalignments in the competences screens.
Resend invitations
Sometimes users lose their invitation mail before registering to Binocs. Admins had to remove and recreate the user in the past, but now admins can just resend the invitation mail.
API improvements
We improved the API by enhancing the speed of some calls and added extra functionality (for example assign team members to demand lines via the API). Some small bugs were fixed as well.