We took advantage of the long weekend in the US to release a number of small updates to Ready Room.
File Names
It appears that there are some Ready Room users who did not start using computers in 1980. I know this based on the wide variety of characters people seem to think are perfectly fine to use in file names. Pound signs? Colons? Really?
I kid, of course, but the use of unusual characters in file names has been the source of some consternation for our customers. So with this release we shore up a number of things:
When uploading files to Ready Room, illegal characters in file names will be replaced with underscores.
We do the same thing when uploading files from Ready Room to an inspector’s shared storage service (e.g. Box or Teams—especially Teams). This is primarily to deal with files already uploaded that may contain illegal characters.
When using Ready Room to rename a file, we will not allow the use of illegal characters. Furthermore, we will warn the user if they (accidentally) remove the file’s extension.
Which characters are considered illegal varies from operating system to operating system and from cloud service to cloud service. We have normalized that list as follows:
< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
" (double quote)
# (hash or pound sign)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)
Local Time
For the most part, Ready Room renders timestamps in the user’s local time zone (as set in their profile). However, there were a few places where we used Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, which is mostly the same as GMT) instead. These have been changed, and now all times are displayed in local time, often with a tool tip available to show UTC time if needed. This change is especially evident when viewing audit logs.
Sundry
If an inspector sends a request back for clarification, Ready Room will now send an email notification to all administrators who are also inspection team members.
Single sign-on configuration instructions are now public. Previously, you had to be logged in to read them.
The label filter for inspections and storyboards is now a “select” widget instead of a text input field.
We no longer end an ongoing briefing (video conference) if the list of attendees is altered.
