An Inspector Calls. Then Another Inspector Calls.



(Word count: 440)

Inspection team members playing the role of “scribe” are charged with keeping the minutes of the events taking place in the (possibly virtual) audit room. Not too long ago, they may also have been charged with requesting information and documents from the back room, although Ready Room assumes the presence of a separate “assigner” who creates these requests. Still, scribes remain important members of the team, and the notes they take can be invaluable.

In Ready Room, scribe notes have historically behaved like a special form of chat, resulting in a continuous stream of timestamped notes that are kept separate from the team conversation. But even though you could have multiple scribes, until now all of their notes fed into this single stream. This made it awkward to support multiple inspectors working from different audit rooms or locations. In that scenario, team members had to know out of band which scribe was with which inspector and filter the messages appropriately in their head.

Multiple Scribe Feeds

No more. In this week’s release of Ready Room we introduce support for multiple scribe feeds! This feature allows scribes to keep their notes distinct from each other, and for the other team members to focus only on the events they are interested in.

By default, there is a single unnamed feed, and all scribe notes will be visible there — just as they have always been. However, by clicking the new “manage feeds” link in the scribe notes header, a team member can create one or more named feeds. When one of these feeds is selected by a scribe, their notes will be routed to that feed. Other team members can select the same feed to focus solely on the events taking place with that scribe. Team members can switch among the default and named feeds at will. If a feed is deleted, the accompanying notes are moved to the general feed, they are not themselves deleted.

Printing Scribe Notes

While printing information on paper is becoming less and less common, it’s still a desirable feature. Furthermore, many customers are interested in capturing the scribe notes in PDF format for filing purposes. In today’s release we also add support for printing scribe notes. On the right side of the scribe notes header there’s a new “export” control. Clicking that control opens a new tab and renders all of the scribe notes as simple, easy to read tables. For convenience, at the top of the page is a print button (or you can use the browser’s print feature) that can be used to print the notes to a printer or to a PDF file.

Be Ready!