Binocs: The latest and greatest

We added a few great new capabilities in the latest version of Binocs.

New things to try which are already live in your environment

Demand

• NEW: combine multiple tag types in demand search. E.g. stage = XXX and material = YYY
• NEW: If Unconstrained analysis is your default setting (set in system parameters) then planned dates in demand tree come from unconstrained plan. Late information on the folder is also calculated based on the unconstrained dates.
• FIXED: When deleting a demand folder the loader is shown (otherwise you can get confused if anything is happening)
• FIXED: When you assign one task to 6 , 7, 9, 11, … people, there was a warning message that’s referring to a rounding mistake + it’s was not saved
• NEW: Prevent linking demand to non-active services. You can’t select a service which is obsolete in demand AND you can’t create demand via API anymore for services that are obsolete.

Capacity planning

• FIXED: Clients using equipment scheduling saw equipment workload appearing in Analyze workload reports. This will no longer be the case if you set up this workaround (explanation here)

Scheduling

• NEW: Search for demand tags in schedule (e.g. when you’re scheduling sessions you can now search for sample ID which will return all activities of a session containing this sample)

Services

• FIXED: Duplicate services does not copy all settings (e.g. waiting for exact constraint)

General

• NEW: When an analysis is running –> new user logs in and sees that an analysis is running and can’t push the button
• IMPROVED: go to users –> loads much faster
• FIXED: Go to Organization –> add Team with a long name (+ X  characters) –> something went wrong message

NEXT UP (Tuesday December 11th 7pm CET) –> preview is already available on UAT

User rights & security

• NEW: When searching in demand no demand items should be returned from demand channels the user doesn’t have rights for
• NEW: When copy pasting an URL of a demand line in a channel the user doesn’t have rights for the demand channel list will be shown instead of the demand line.

Demand

• IMPROVED: copy-pasting demand folders will be much faster

Scheduling

• NEW: You can add notes to multiple activities at once. (multi-select activities using ctrl or shift select and add a note for all of them at once)
• NEW: 2 extra filter options in the schedule –> only show locked activities and only show unlocked activities
• FIXED: If 2 activities need to be planned waiting exactly one day for one another –> if first one is done –> run scheduler again –> second activity isn’t scheduled (scheduler doesn’t take into account the done activity anymore)
• IMPROVED: When using the sample queue manager, manually changing or removing sessions is much faster.
• IMPROVED: Equipment activities are automatically checked of every night (they don’t appear in to be checked anymore). More details explained here.

Single Sign On

• NEW: We have been testing single sign on for a while and are now ready to start connecting clients.

We hope these features will help you get even more out of Binocs. We’ve got more planned! Stay tuned.

Thanks for following along, and thanks for all the feedback along the way.

All the best,
— The team at Binocs