New in OfficeStatus 6

Scheduled Status Recurrence

Let's start off with the feature most often requested by our OfficeStatus customer base - support for recurrence in scheduled status changes. With this feature, your end users can schedule status changes to occur on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. And not just user statuses, either - scheduled resource status changes also now support recurrence.

Recurrence support touches many other features throughout OfficeStatus. The status change user interfaces, user and resource status calendars, status watches, and much more. Each of these areas has been enhanced to support new status recurrence capabilities.

And for those of you who don't want this capability made available to employees, it can easily be disabled. Or, you can disable recurrence support for specific user and/or resource statuses. For example, you can disable recurrence for the "In" status, specifically.

Enhanced Status Board Displays

The ability to display employee and resource status information lies at the heart of what OfficeStatus does. So, it seems fitting that we would make our status board displays more powerful than ever. Here are just some of the enhancements:

• Alternate phone number types (mobile, fax, etc.) can now be shown directly in all user status board views.
• Custom status fields now fully support sorting in all status board views.
• Windows Client status board views (user and resource) have enhanced user contact and status change navigation.
• A new "time in status" field has been added to web and desktop status board views.
• OfficeStatus Windows Client status board now supports optional (on by default) multi-line cells.
• Web interface has enhanced support for searching user and resource status board displays.
• Mobile web interface now shows user status images by default (with option to toggle column off).
• Maximum length of user and resource status comments has been increased to 2048 characters.
• User status grid views (web and Windows interfaces) now offer a right-click menu option for toggling status locks on or off.
• Rounding of assisted date/time values during status changes is now managed by the Client Settings system.
• Scheduled status changes can now be deleted via the user/resource status change interface.
• The mobile web interface now honors current assisted date/time rounding Client Settings.
• The mobile web interface can now be configured to show a wider variety of status columns (including custom status fields).
• The mobile web interface now honors the "highlight me in the user status board" client option.
• The mobile web interface status board now updates itself automatically (without needing to be refreshed manually).
• Improved handling of long status comments in the user and resource status board views.

Public (Large-Screen) View

The OfficeStatus public view, designed for large-screen displays in public areas, has received numerous design enhancements.

• A new table view mode offers a more spatially efficient mode of displaying user status data.
• The existing public view display is now called "tile mode" and offers enhanced layout.
• Both table and tile display modes now support automatic scrolling. When a large number of user status rows are present, the view will scroll through them automatically and re-start when the end is reached.
• New field display and sorting options have been added.
• Full-screen toggle support has been added.

Reporting Improvements

Reporting is a key capability of OfficeStatus, and we've made several enhancements for version 6.0.

• Report rendering performance has been improved considerably.
• Reports can now be exported directly to MS Excel file format.
• User Time Card report can now target specific statuses, making it far more flexible.
• New "User Time in Status" report shows time spent in each status, per user.
• Layout, alignment, and spacing has been improved for all existing reports.

Web Interface Improvements

The primary OfficeStatus web interface has been streamlined and enhanced with many new features.

• Web interface presentation has been modernized with larger fonts, new colors, and improved layout.
• Web interface user status change window now supports "One-Click Return" feature.
• Web interface user status change window now supports "Out & Returning" feature.
• New, streamlined page headers with message and company announcement counts.
• Web-based (user and admin) help systems have been completely overhauled and modernized.
• Status watch display (on user home page) now shows status icons and can be used to initiate user status changes.
• User and resource status board displays now support printing (requires browser pop-ups be enabled).
• A stand-alone company announcements page has been added to the OfficeStatus web interface.
• Web interface user message search function improved to avoid page refresh and respond to enter button clicks.
• Improved input validation, error reporting, and performance throughout.
• New user home page design and layout.

Windows Client Improvements

OfficeStatus Windows Client is better than ever. We've retained the overall look and feel while adding new information, new layout options, and much more.

• Greatly improved appearance and usability of OfficeStatus Windows Client on high resolution displays.
• Department tabs now show department member counts (in addition to department name).
• A "statuses" chart has been added to OfficeStatus Windows Client that shows distribution of users across all statuses.
• Status watch panel has been enhanced to show status images and can now initiate status changes (via double-click).
• Improved date/time selection controls in OfficeStatus Windows Client status change dialogs.
• More intuitive and reliable main window show/hide behavior.
• Application themes have been simplified and improved across all supported operating systems.
• Improved date/time selection controls during status change operations.

Server Side User Inactivity Monitoring

OfficeStatus now offers the ability to supplement the user idle detection capabilities of OfficeStatus Windows Client with new server-side user inactivity monitoring.

This feature can change the status of an end user when his or her client interface (web, desktop, or mobile) stops communicating with the server for a specified period of time. It works best in environments where end users have one of the OfficeStatus client interfaces actively running throughout their workday.

Enhanced Resource Status Tracking

• Resources can now be assigned a "status manager", thereby restricting who can update the status of said resource.
• Management of resource notes and scheduled status changes is now limited to their creators, resource owners, and status managers (if assigned).
• Resource status change views (web and Windows interfaces) now provide one-click return and form reset capabilities.
• Resource status change views now defaults the assigned user (when not already set) based upon resource availability.
• Resource ownership is now explicit and editable.

New Administrative Features

OfficeStatus 6 offers new support for enabling or disabling features, enhances many built-in administrative tools, provides new status configuration options, and more.

• Active Directory user import tool now supports importing of user photos directly into OfficeStatus.
• Status watch features can now be enabled for everyone, for role members only, or disabled entirely.
• Text messaging features can now be enabled for everyone, for role members only, or disabled entirely.
• Admins can now require that users provide "due back" information on a per-status basis.
• Admins can now selectively enable or disable scheduling at the status level.
• Quick (right click within user status board) status changes can now be disabled.
• Admins can now control which user interfaces (Windows, web, or mobile web) employees can use to log into OfficeStatus.
• Added support for user account lockout after a specified number of authentication failures occur.
• Admin client layout page can now manage the default visibility of alternate phone type status board columns.
• Admins can now overwrite existing user work schedules with the company site schedule.
• Admins can now push client settings to one or more specific users (from the client settings tool).
• Admin user listing batch editing mechanism has been expanded to support new OfficeStatus 6 user attributes.

Additional Improvements

• Improved performance of report-related database queries.
• Users are now provided with more granular error messaging upon entering incorrect authentication credentials during login.
• OfficeStatus web and Windows desktop interfaces better adapt their user interfaces to disabled system features.
• Sent messages now behave more intuitively and can now be deleted by the originating user.
• Maintenance service now offers stronger resilience to transient failures in individual service workers.
• During installation of OfficeStatus Server, maintenance system service is now configured to auto-recover upon failure.
• When a user's account is disabled, they will now be logged out of web or desktop interfaces sooner (during navigation).
• A system notification is now generated when the OfficeStatus Maintenance system service is being shut down.
• Many more web and Windows Client detail views have a default sort associated with them.
• Many other minor enhancements and bug fixes