RoomTracker 3.0 is a milestone release. It is part of our ongoing quality and usability initiatives and continues to deliver additional value to our clients and their user communities. Our RoomTracker high utilization firms have crossed 140,000 reservations this month and their feedback provides the raw materials for this release. RoomTracker 3.1 primarily focuses on performance tuning, addressing both speed issues and complex bugs found among our growing installed base. It is part of our ongoing quality and usability initiatives and continues to deliver additional value to our clients and their user communities.
Updates in RoomTracker 3.1 focus on a few primary areas:
In addition to the primary areas above, there are also a wide set of internal refinements and bug fixes making RoomTracker faster, easier and more reliable across all our firms, large and small. The 3.1 release candidates where battle-tested among a few of our largest firms in both testing and production environments.
Feature Summary
Enhancement Summary
NEW in 3.1 Faster Reservations: End users make reservations in less time and get back to other firm business quickly. The Room Request Wizard (RRW) moves between tabs faster because the conflict checkers and validation code have been streamlined and fine-tuned.
NEW in 3.1 Database Load tuning: Along with the RRW improvements, the database tuning returns queries much faster under heavy load. The Daily page, reports and Confirmation pages require much less server resources. All areas of RoomTracker perform much faster because the SQL server has more resources available to manage concurrent requests. RoomTracker scales much better as load increases across the firm.
NEW in 3.1 Rebuilt Confirmation e-mail: The outgoing confirmation e-mail is reformatted based on firm feedback. It is much easier to read and separates the rooms, food and equipment into a much more logical format.
NEW in 3.1 Migration Constraints: RoomTracker has always expected unique users, offices and other data in the Migration source tables. RT 3.1 enforces those rules with new constraints on the RoomTrackerMigration database. This prevents subtle, intermittent downstream issues caused by duplicate user, office or other records where RT is expecting unique records. No rule changes have been introduced, but the system is better protected from bogus duplicate data entering the system.
New in 3.0 Room Request Wizard (RRW) Request Tab: Completely re-implemented to improve usability while maintaining 100% backward compatibility. Users may type client and matter numbers directly or continue to use the full matter look up capability. Typed in matter numbers are fully validated. RoomTracker now defaults to your last saved Client/Matter combination, further cutting the time/effort required to make a new reservation.
NEW in 3.0 RRW Food and Equipment Tab: Food and Equipment now supports firm-defined categories making ordering much easier for users. Instead of one long list of items, food and/or equipment are organized into sub groups, expanding with a single mouse click. For example, you may organize food into Breakfast, Lunch, Snacks and/or Beverages. Each firm defines their own categories and the implementation is 100% backward compatible. After installing this release, your users will see no change until the firm/office decides to take advantage of the new category features.
NEW in 3.0 RW Attendee Tab: Instead of selecting 15 individuals to attend the meeting, users may now select a distribution group (AKA aliases) IF that group is already established in the firm mail system. This sends Outlook requests to the group with one selection. Administrators add existing distribution lists from the mail system and users select from the existing lists.
NEW in 3.0 Custom Filters on Delivery Reports: Food and Equipment management and deliveries just became easier. Each office may assign a delivery group to their food and/or equipment items. “Video Deposition Service” can be in the “Outside Vendors” group and laptops can be in the “IT Group”. Service providers filter the delivery reports by these groups, cutting the time and effort required to service the attorneys. All filter groups are custom defined at the office level, providing maximum flexibility for the firm.
NEW in 3.0 New Printing Options on Reports: Many reports now support printing a single meeting/room. If a meeting is updated in the middle of the day, simply print that meeting rather than the complete day. Print a single room, a set of rooms or all rooms in one quick pass.
NEW on the RRW Food Tab: Custom menu link. On the RRW Food tab, allows an optional custom HTML page (e.g. custom menu) to display below the existing tab. Exposed when the Office Administrator defines the URL. Set per office.
NEW also on the RRW Food Tab: Food Charge Authorization report for food items with prices set in an admin function for each office. The price is shown when selecting food items and presented on the food delivery report to be used as a sign-off sheet.
NEW “My Reservations” report: Added filters and sorting for meetings to be attended
NEW Additional “Front Desk” Role added: As User plus view/print on-line “Visitors” report.
NEW “Meetings by Room” report: Prints a summary of all meetings in one room for a day. For firms which post the meeting list on the door of each room on a daily basis
NEW Daily view big image pop up: Click on room or floor plan to display a larger image
NEW Video icon: Icon added to projectors in the Room Request Wizard equipment lists. Users quickly find video monitors when creating a video conference
ENHANCED in 3.1 Report – My Reservations: Added Food and Equipment to report.
ENHANCED in 3.1 Help – Live Documentation Link: Now only seen by users with admin roles.
UPDATED in 3.0 After Hours Flags: Reservations outside of staff hours are flagged with red text and a tool tip in the Confirmation, Meeting Status and the delivery reports. Busy schedulers and service providers will quickly notice requests for rooms and services outside of normal staff hours.
UPDATED in 3.0 Default Room Image in the RRW: For users who start from the Daily View, the RRW displays the image from the selected room, rather than a generic “no image”. It also provides the text description for that room.
UPDATED in 3.0 Admin- Non Admin Edit: Additional times have been added for ½ hour prior to and ½ hour after meeting start time
UPDATED in 3.0 Documentation: Current documentation can be accessed from a link on the Help About menu option. This will take the user to a Baarns site with a full set of current documentation in Word and Excel workbook format.
UPDATED in 3.0 Reports - System Set up: The section for "Less than 2 Office lists" has been removed since having less than 2 room lists is no longer an issue
UPDATED in 3.0 RRW - Room Details: When replacing or changing a room the explanatory text has been made clearer and informs the user of the steps to remove a room from the reservation.
UPDATED in 3.0 Daily View: Tool tip added to handle long meeting titles
UPDATED in 3.0 Performance Tuning: This version includes a wide set of interface tweaks and many stored procedures have been re-written to improve their performance and reliability. For example, the conflict checking procedures are from 15 to 75% faster, depending on the nature of the reservation. Users see faster page displays and a more responsive system.
Room Request Wizard (RRW) – Room Details tab is dramatically faster; availability check is over 4 times faster
Room Details list (RRW) - tooltip now includes office name, seating and video capabilities
Room Details list (RRW) – Room names now displayed in blue with underline
Multi-day View – tooltip now includes meeting title
Food and equipment delivery reports print with larger fonts and are fine-tuned based on specific client feedback. The printed copies are easier to read, cutting mistakes and delivery times. Critical delivery information is reordered to provide higher readability at a glance
Room Request Wizard conflict messages refined and simplified for video conferences Potential conflicts include unavailable equipment, rooms already in use and/or rooms without the appropriate video connections needed for the conference
Video Status reports now include all offices/rooms in the conference. Any scheduler/admin in any of the participating offices now instantly view all offices involved in the conference
Formatting updated in “Meeting Status” report so unconfirmed reservations are more obvious. All unconfirmed reservations also sort to the bottom of the list
Added release number to email diagnostics allowing faster bug fixes from Baarns.
Countless interface tweaks and fine tunings based on feedback from existing firms. Existing code enhanced as new features are integrated and/or bugs are fixed. Includes both performance and reliability improvements in the front and backend code
Confirmation page now includes all reservations, even those in the past. In previous versions if a reservation was not confirmed before the starting time of the reservation, it no longer appeared on the Confirmation page. In 2.6 all unconfirmed reservations show and Schedulers can delete or confirm reservations in the past.
Multi-Day reservations are converted to “Recurring” reservations behind the scenes for enhanced functionality. For example, if the user creates a 3-day meeting, RoomTracker automatically converts that into a recurring meeting, for 3 consecutive days. This provides the ability to edit/delete individual days of the meeting. In the past you could NOT edit individual meetings within a multi-day meeting.
