Happy 2025, Ready Roomers! 🥳 We're kicking off the new year with some important and long anticipated updates. Let's jump right in.

Multiple Assignees

Ready Room now allows multiple fulfillers and reviewers on a request!

With release 8.4.0, a team member can add one primary fulfiller and any number of collaborators to a request. Same with reviewers. We opted for a “primary and collaborators” approach instead of just having multiple collaborators because we strongly believe that if everyone’s responsible, then no one is. Having a primary assignee clearly shows who’s accountable for answering the request.

We’ve also changed the assignee selector to a simple-to-use popup with filtering. This is useful for large inspections, making it easy to find and select assignees even if there’s a hundred members in the inspection.

All fulfillers and reviewers, not just the primaries, will be notified (in Ready Room and via email) when a request needs their attention, either because it’s ready to be worked on or because it was returned for additional attention.

When viewing the workflow dashboard, we will show as many assignees as will fit. If there’s a primary, that user’s name/address will be bolded.

View Scribe Notes in Place

Before this release, clicking on a scribe note to view it replaced the inspection screen—as one might expect. If a user wanted to retain the inspection screen and view scribe notes, they would use standard browser features (e.g. Ctrl-click) to open the scribe note in a new tab or window.

All well and good, but with this release we made opening scribe notes in a new tab more obvious by adding a dedicated control for just that. More importantly, however, it is now possible to view scribe notes without opening a new tab or window at all.

By clicking on the new “view in place” icon (an arrow pointing down and left), the scribe note will render in place—replacing the list of current scribe notes. This is a dynamic view; the content is updated as the scribe note changes. Auto-scrolling is also available, too.

Keep in mind that this feature is mostly useful for users with large monitors. On a laptop screen there may not be enough screen real estate to show much information.

Delayed and Late Requests

This release changes the time resolution from hours to minutes for determining when a request is considered delayed or late. That is, it’s now possible to configure an inspection to flag a request as delayed if it hasn’t been released after 15 minutes and late if still not released after 30 minutes.

Furthermore, there’s a new filter to show requests that are delayed, late, or both. You can even do the opposite and show which tasks are on time. This filter is especially useful if delayed requests have scrolled off the bottom of the screen. Now you can show late requests without manually scrolling through each column.

Allow Restricted SMEs to view Scribe Notes

There’s a new inspection option settable by administrators that allows restricted SMEs to view (but not edit) scribe notes. It’s off by default.

Minor Tweaks

• Grammarly support has been removed from the rich-text editors since Grammarly has discontinued this product.
• Inspection filters now default to open.

Maintenance

• With this release we have migrated Postgres, the Ready Room transactional database, from version 11 to version 17, the most recent version.
• With an eye towards security, we’ve removed outdated JavaScript dependencies and updated all remaining JavaScript and Elixir dependencies.
• We continue to expand our automated tests. There are now almost 750 tests helping us to avoid regressions and allowing seamless upgrades.