Friday, June 11, 2010
We have been hard at work on an update for Invoicing within GrandView. As part of this effort, we needed to find an effective and versatile grid control capable of meeting all of our specific needs. We choose the grid control made by DHTMLX.
The DHTMLX grid control is an Ajax-enabled javascript grid control that allows us to provide an updated look and feel to grid data while still having full client side control of the grid. Some of the most notable features we have used on this new control include:
- Double-clicking on any row will automatically open the item for editing
- Row selection (used to add a child for parent items)
- Row based image buttons for reordering, editing and deletion
- Client-side data binding to eliminated page reloads
- Customizable skins through CSS
All these improvements in addition to the client side architecture allows us to provide richer and faster experience with grid data through GrandView!
Peter Forney
Grandview Business Solutions Developer
Monday, April 19, 2010
New GrandView Features for Release 7.1
GrandView 7.1 is out and it's packed with enhancements and updates. We've converted the last of our old ASP technology and improved project execution. The GrandView application also now supports an employee bio/resume module. This is coupled with a global categories system that can be applied to projects, proposals and employees to make staffing and resource management even easier. More details about two of our newest features follow.
New Global Categories
Sales people want more ways to categorize their proposals to improve accuracy and consistency of sales information. Project managers often need to categorize their projects for better execution as well as feedback information to sales. And managers are always looking for more ways to categorize employees' skills and experience to staff projects efficiently and effectively. The new global categories functionality allows administrators to define categories for Industries/Applications, Services, Manufacturers/Products, and other Keywords. These categories can then be associated with proposals, projects, and employees (through the new employee profile functionality). Project categories are automatically inherited when tied to proposals and employees can update their profile to include relevant experience in the various categories. New proposal, project, and employee data views and SideBar searches have also been added to allow users to filter information by category.
Proposal Categories
Category Assignments
New Employee Profile
The new employee profile functionality allows employees to document and categorize their experience and also allows managers and other users to search and view employee summary information. Some of the features of the new employee profile functionality are:
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Search and view employee summary information
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Updates bio information
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Update resume information: employment history, education, work experience, professional experience, patents and publications, professional affiliations, certifications, and other relevant experience
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Add/maintain resume files
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View employee resume information including training and project history
Employee Bio
Be sure to explore these new features and others in the latest release of GrandView.
Jeff Eganhouse
GrandView Business Solutions Developer
Friday, April 09, 2010
GrandView has long been established as a web-based business application that is accessible from anywhere there is an internet connection. Initially, it was an extremely useful tool for working away from the office - whether it was on a customer site, on the road, or just to get extra work done from home. As RoviSys has grown, GrandView has also evolved to handle multi-office environments. In the last five years, RoviSys has opened a regional office in Apex, North Carolina and most recently we've opened an office in Singapore. One of the highest priorities in establishing these satellite offices was (and still is) maintaining a lifeline of communication and business culture for our employees. Of course, the simple solution is to use email for this communication. However, email is impersonal and is very disjointed when you are trying to centralize information for a growing business. Although email still has its place, GrandView helps handle multi-office challenges by offering numerous features such as project collaboration, file management, electronic approvals, and training to name a few.
The GrandView project collaboration features help project teams stay connected remotely with quick and easy access to project data as well as notification via email or a dashboard. Employees have remote access to company procedures, standards, and templates as well as project files with GrandView file management features. Electronic approvals for areas such as TimeSheet and Sales Proposals help expedite these otherwise time-consuming processes especially when dealing with remote offices. Finally, our RoviSys Continuing Education program (RCE) takes advantage of GrandView to deliver training content whether it is for new hires or veteran employees needing a refresher. We've also been able to take advantage of phone and web conferencing to capture presentations for remote on-demand access.
GrandView has played a significant role in handling the multi-office challenges for RoviSys especially when it comes to promoting employee communication and maintaining business culture. Features are continuously added that will allow RoviSys to adapt to whatever challenges that may lie ahead in a multi-office environment.
In the next part in this series, we'll discuss how we use GrandView project management and collaboration tools to handle the challenges of manging project teams from multiple offices.
Friday, March 19, 2010
TimeSheet Quick Entry Dashboard Module
Need an alternative way to charge your time, or just a constant reminder to keep your TimeSheet updated? You can now enter your time from your dashboard with the TimeSheet Quick Entry module. This module provides:
- Convenient date navigation and "type to filter" selection of your Project and Task
- Task information, like scheduled dates, hours remaining, and overdue/completed
- Links to email your project manager and view your full TimeSheet
- An at-a-glance summary of your daily, weekly, and monthly hours
- Links to daily, weekly, and monthly timesheet reports
Here at RoviSys, giving our employees an alternative way to log time has helped to streamline our business process - the earlier your employees' TimeSheets are submitted, the quicker you can send invoices to your customers!
Mark Carpenter
GrandView Business Solutions Developer
Monday, February 08, 2010
Transmittals Made Easier
Project transmittals containing several items have previously required the manual addition of each document or software item individually. Now, all the items required for a transmittal can be added at once through a single dialog. This will save time and simplify the process of getting the transmittal to the customer.
Filtering & Selections
The Multi-Add dialog lists all the document and software revisions available for the project, minus any that have already been added to the transmittal. This list can be filtered according to item type, transmitted status, and by keyword. Selections made at any point within the dialog are remembered, even if the selection is no longer displayed due to the filters chosen. This allows you to search for an item, select it and then continue searching without having to scroll through a large list or open another window. The transmittal reason and comments due date are based off of the default values and are applied when the item is selected. Before saving, all the selections can be reviewed by clearing the filters and then choosing the selections only option.
The Multi-Add option simplifies and speeds up the already valuable functionality of electronic transmittals within GrandView.
Peter Forney
GrandView Business Solutions Developer
Friday, January 22, 2010
Keeping data consistent across multiple offices is absolutely vital to any business, but it is made much more difficult when your offices are on opposite sides of the world. Having a single, centralized database is obviously ideal from a maintenance standpoint, but is impractical if it takes tens of seconds to perform even the simplest tasks from across the pond; sometimes, you can only be as productive as network latency allows. Having a separate database for each regional office solves the latency issue, but brings on the nightmare of worrying about synchronizing the data you have scattered about.
Enter SQL Server Replication.
SQL Server Replication offers a way to solve both of these problems. Set up a master "Publication" database at your main site, and a "Subscription" database at each of your satellite offices, and SQL Server takes care of the rest. No matter where your users are, changes made at one office will automatically be replicated to the rest. Now, you have the benefit of fast, local access, as well as managed data synchronization. We use this technology at RoviSys to further streamline our business process and tackle some of our multi-office challenges.
Stay tuned for a follow-up post covering some of the technical challenges we encountered setting up SQL Server Replication.
Also coming soon is an upcoming series on some of the other Multi-Office Challenges we've faced, and how GrandView has helped us overcome them!
Mark Carpenter
GrandView Business Solutions Developer
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 (released Nov. 7, 2005), Master Pages provides an object-oriented approach to web page design. Master Pages is the next generation to templates. In the blog post, Master Pages, Part 1, the master page concept was introduced. This article talks about image reference paths.
Image Paths
The .master page image references are always resolved from the location of the page which inherits the .master page (the content page). As long as the .master page is at the same folder level as the content page, the reference to the image resolves correctly:
In this example, Index.aspx uses the .master page and images referenced by the .master page resolve correctly.
If the .master and content pages are at different folder levels, as shown...
... then the .master page contains a different path to the image than the content page and the image can't be resolved.
Solution one:
ASP.NET runtime provides a feature called “URL rebasing”. The runtime will try to “rebase” relative URLs it finds on server-side controls inside a master page. This means the following relative path will work, no matter where the master page and web form live. Putting a runat=Server" statement in the <img> attributes resolves the image location:
<img src="~/Images/GVLighthouse.gif" runat="server" />
Solution two:
ASP.NET contains a handy function in the Page object called ResolveClientURL, which will resolve URL's that are defined client-side. This is particularly useful if an object CAN"T be converted to a server-side object, such as the <Body> tag:
<Body background = '<%ResolveClientUrl("~/Images/GVLighthouse.gif") %>' style="margin-left: 10px" />
Or on the simple image tag:
<img src="<%=ResolveClientUrl("~/Images/GVLighthouse.gif") %>" style="margin-left: 10px" />
Quite often, images will also be referred to from within the included .css style sheet in the .master page. This is not a problem, though, since the image URL path is always with respect to the .css style sheet location:
body
{
background-image:url('images\mylogo.gif');
}
Image and other element references can be tricky when using .master pages, but the payoff is the flexibility of a more object-oriented approach by putting all the common parts of your pages in .master pages.
David Heater, P.E.
GrandView Business Solutions Developer
Friday, October 30, 2009
Email is great. Shared files are fast and convenient. At the end of the day though, who is keeping track of all of the files that get passed between team members, managers, and customers on a project? GrandView can keep tabs on the documents and software that get passed back and forth with Electronic Transmittals. By tracking the who, what and when of file transfers Electronic Transmittals inject accountability, ease of use, and customer peace of mind into your project.
Accountability
One of the best reasons to use Electronic Transmittals is accountability. When a document is sent to a customer, GrandView keeps a record of the transaction, and once it has been acknowledged, it cannot be erased from history. This allows project managers to keep a close eye on what has or has not been sent to and seen by customers. You'll never have to hear "I think I sent that last week." or "We never got that file." It's all right there in GrandView.
Ease of Use
With Electronic Transmittals, you'll never find yourself searching your email for that design document your engineer sent out. It's right there in your project in GrandView. Plus, with GrandView's search functionality, you can easily track down files from older projects as well. Once a file has been sent using Electronic Transmittals, that file is easily accessible from one location for you, your project team, and your customers.
Peace of Mind
When a file has been sent using GrandView Electronic Transmittals and acknowledged by a customer or team member, the contents of that file are locked. This allows both project managers and customers to rest easy knowing that the document they read will not change. Revisions and new files are transmitted separately, so all changes are captured in GrandView. This instills confidence in customers and becomes a great selling point when proposing projects.
GrandView Electronic Transmittals provide value to you and your customers that makes your services more desirable and more easily managed by your team.
Jeff Eganhouse
GrandView Business Solutions Developer
Monday, October 26, 2009
Profiling employee experience is easy with the new Employee Profile feature and the new Global Categories functionality in GrandView. The Employee Profile functionality allows employees to document and categorize their experience and also allows managers and other users to search and view employee summary information. Some of the features of the new employee profile functionality are:
- Search and view employee summary information
- Update bio information
- Update resume information: employment history, education, work experience, professional experience, patents and publications, professional affiliations, certifications, and other relevant experience
- Add/maintain resume files
- View employee resume information including training and project history
Chris Engelmann, GrandView Product Manager
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
After a summer hiatus, the GrandView Blog is returning at full strength this fall. Our GrandView Business Solutions team has been busy putting the finishing touches on the latest customer version 7.1 (look for a new post coming soon), helping to develop other products and tools at RoviSys, and addressing multi-office challenges (more about that in a series of future posts). We will bring you more new and exciting technical and product information. We'll also keep you abreast of support issues and continue to throw some project management tips in for good measure. Another area that we'd like to touch on is our business solutions experience. We'd like to provide tips and examples of how we've kept RoviSys a step above our competition by running our organization efficiently and effectively.
Chris Engelmann, GrandView Product Manager