Now that the Christmas rush is over, Santa Claus has been able to turn his attention to some of the letters he’s received from Ready Room customers.
Dear Santa, We have lots of inspections every year and we invite upwards of 50 team members to each. It’s very tedious adding team members to Ready Room one by one. Is it possible for you to have one of your elves enable support for adding multiple users at once? Thank You, Mark
Well, Mark, it says here that you’ve been very good this year and got your audit plan approved on time. So I spoke with Sugarplum, and she coded up something I think you’ll like. With the latest release of Ready Room you can enter as many email addresses as you like, both when adding users to the system and when adding members to an inspection. Make sure to separate the email addresses by spaces, commas, or new lines. 
Email addresses are validated to make sure they are well formatted before any attempt is made to add them. If any addresses are invalid, you will be notified which ones are in error. Once everything checks out, all users will be added to the system. Users added to an account will default to the “team member” role and team members added to an inspection will default to the “subject matter expert” persona.
Dearest Santa Claus, You know how there’s always that one person who never seems to be able to access important emails? I’m sure you do. Well, I deal with a lot of inspections and I’m tired of having people fail to register for Ready Room because they “didn’t notice” (air quotes) the signup email, and they don't know how to search their email or even what a spam folder is. It would be so much easier if I can just send them the magic registration link myself instead of or as well as sending them a new invitation. Can you do that, Santa? I’ve been ever so good. Jen
Jen, you have indeed been ever so good, especially if we overlook that weekend in Provincetown, so I tasked Pepper with your request. With the latest release of Ready Room, if a new user is having difficulties registering because they can’t find the signup email, you can send them a new invitation from the user administration screen as normal. When you do, the unique registration URL will be displayed at the top of the page for you to copy and do with what you will. 
Dear Mr. Claus, I am writing to you today to inform you that the file previewer in Ready Room is not adequate for my needs. In particular, it does not faithfully render complex documents and it sometimes fails to render some documents at all. If you examine my file, you’ll see that my Goodness Rating for the period ending 2022-12-24 was 4.9 out of 5. I believe this level of goodness is sufficient for you to honor my request for better file preview functionality in the new year. Thank you in advance, Nancy
Uhm, yes, quite. Well, to be exact, Nancy, goodness ratings are rounded up. Your actual rating for 2022 is 4.8601. Fortunately, that is still sufficient to get your request prioritized, so I assigned this enhancement to Wunorse Openslae. The following are his comments after closing out the ticket. Jingles and I paired on this one. For PDFs and Office documents we switched out the existing Google document viewer in favor of two new solutions from Adobe and Microsoft, respectively. The Adobe viewer can faithfully render PDF documents of arbitrary complexity. It also supports these additional features:
- Find text
- Go to page
- Zoom in/out
- Thumbnail pagination
- Printing and downloading
- Single/Dual page viewing
The Microsoft Office viewer will render Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with full fidelity, including fonts, images, and Excel “sheets.”. Moreover, a single click will open the document in read-only mode in Microsoft 365, giving the viewer full Office functionality. Note, the Office viewer does not treat CSV files as spreadsheets, so those will continue to be rendered with the Google viewer, as will plain text files. Fortunately, both CSV and plain text files are uncommon.
Santa, I hope you had a good holiday and a chance to rest. Now that your latest trip around the world is over, I was hoping you and your elves would have time for one simple Ready Room feature. You see, while we are happy to have FDA inspectors use Ready Room, a number of them get hung up on the system generated IDs visible in the Inspector Portal. In particular, they don’t like gaps. We tried to explain to them that these IDs are really just Ready Room internals, but they still don’t like that the IDs may go 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7. “Where’s number 4?” they’ll ask. “How come there’s no number 4?” The “missing” IDs, of course, are for staged tasks or requests that we haven’t released yet or requests that we’ve deleted. Regardless, for Christmas, it would be extremely useful if we could simply not show system IDs to inspectors at all. Say hi to Mrs. C. for me, Amy
Amy, I feel your pain. I get similar pushback from Donner if I even think about hitching him up next to Prancer instead of Blitzen. Anyway, I asked Shinny to take care of this. He told me that in the current release of Ready Room, there is a new inspection-level configuration item allowing you to hide system generated IDs in the inspector portal.
Toggling the “Display system generated request IDs to inspectors” to off will keep the IDs from rendering in the inspector portal. There are implications to this that you should be aware of. Mostly that without a system generated ID, you will most likely want to make the “Custom ID” field on a request mandatory (otherwise there will be no good way to refer to a task when talking to an inspector). The system will not do this for you, the Custom ID field remains optional. Also, when not showing system IDs, the ability to sort and filter by ID is removed. Finally, what’s known as a “Custom ID” for team members is now shown as “Request ID” for inspectors.
