This week’s episode of Ready Room is brought to you by you, our customers, and all of your invaluable feedback. Stay tuned to learn more about the following enhancements:

• Assign a request to a reviewer
• Make editing a request safer and more intuitive
• Get alerts about remote changes to the request you have open
• Dramatic performance improvements
• Other minor UI enhancements

The Review(er)s are in!

By extremely popular demand, Ready Room now supports the ability to assign a request to a specific reviewer.

When a request is assigned to a reviewer, the reviewer will receive an email and an on-screen notification whenever the ticket is moved into the “Host Review” column. We have also added the ability to filter the board based on the reviewer. Similarly, the “Mine” tab will show requests for which the current user is either the assignee or reviewer. Finally, changing the reviewer is captured in the audit history.

The Cutting Room Floor

One piece of feedback that we’ve heard loud and clear is that editing a task is confusing. It’s not clear what the edit button edits, the resulting form—containing every field!—is big and clumsy, and it’s too easy to forget to save your changes.

With the current release we’ve significantly overhauled this behavior. First, under the assumption that unrelated fields won’t often be changed together, we have organized related fields into separately editable groups:

• Participants: assignee, reviewer, and inspector.
• Request: title, description, custom ID, and hard copy.
• Response: response
• Notes: notes

Each of these smaller groups are independently editable by clicking on the “edit” icon to the right of the current settings, which are now always visible. This means that the “Save” button is also always visible, thus mitigating the likelihood of forgetting to save.

Goodbye Fast Action

The Fast Action functionality is a valuable feature. To wit: make the task a person is most likely to perform the easiest to perform. But having a separate section for it was awkward. The current release, however, not only makes request fields separately editable, it also makes them separately addressable via URLs such as “inspections/a98e6de9-2783-4fd7-aab4-15f9be0fa85e/tasks/2/edit/request”. This allowed us to remove the redundant “Fast Action” fields that used to appear at the top of a request, and instead simply open the appropriate section of the request for editing.

Box Sub-folder

Speaking of awkward, our customers who use the Box Upload functionality, will be happy to hear that we’ve moved the “Box Sub-folder” setting out of the One Big Form to just above the list of attachments where it belongs. We’ve also made it simpler to use the default sub-folder setting (which is now stripped of illegal characters). Note, the Box sub-folder setting is only visible if the inspector associated with a request is properly configured to allow Box uploads.

Rewrite!

It’s long been the case that when more than one team member is viewing the same request, Ready Room will display the remote user’s avatars to the left of the ticket. Furthermore, when a remote user is editing the request, Ready Room will also display some animated dots below the avatar to alert the current user to the fact. Finally, should a remote user commit a change to the request, that change is reflected immediately on the local user’s view.

However, it was not always obvious that such a remote change was made! This is especially so if the change was made to fields that the local user is currently editing (made worse by the One Big Form), when Ready Room should not alter what the local user might be actively typing.

With the current release, an alert is generated with every change a remote user makes to an open ticket. The alert is unobtrusively displayed to the right of the request, with the most recent change on top. The alert shows who made the change and when, plus exactly what was changed. This allows the local user to know that the data she might be actively editing has just been changed by someone else.

Note, these alerts are entirely ephemeral. They are displayed only for the period that a user has a request open. When the request is closed, the alerts are lost.

Performance Improvements

Our engineers have also been hard at work improving the performance of an already high-performing application. In this release we…

• Removed a significant number of unnecessary database calls.
• Improved the response time of one critical query (retrieve a request) by 15,000%. That’s not a typo!
• Eliminated redundant calls to the very expensive “build all the boards” function.

We suspect that the performance improvements are such that they will be noticeable by end users, but even if not, they are still hugely important in keeping our servers healthy as more and more customers are on-boarded.

Other Minor UI Improvements

• The icon for the assignee has been changed to a “runner.”
• The icon for a staged request is now a thumbtack (it was a clipboard).
• The “Print Scribe Notes” icon has been changed from “open in another tab” to “printer.
• The reviewer, if any, is shown to the right of the assignee on the request card.
• The “staged” and “hard copy” icons that formerly occupied the reviewer area on a request card are now in the footer where they belong.
• When a request is open, the relative creation time is now in the upper right hand corner
• The “request complete” widget is now below the notes field and only shown when a request is released.
• The request ID has been added to all emails that mention a request.
• The “Inspection Members” icon has been changed to include a “cog.”

Previously Released

Not every release gets an announcement. We occasionally release minor features and bug fixes without any fanfare. Here’s what’s already been released since the last announcement.

• Purge Account. If you, our otherwise delighted customer, are acquired by a much, much larger firm, it may be necessary to completely expunge all of your data and documents from Ready Room. We can now do this, but it’s not exposed in the UI, you need to submit a request to support@readyroom.net.
• The (am)/(pm) substitutions available in scribe notes always generated the time the page was loaded and not the current time. This has been fixed.
• On the rare occasions when the global time zone database changed, there was a brief window of time when a user could not view or change their profile. This has been corrected.