Calendar searching
The highlight feature of this May 2020 release of agileBase is calendar/timeline searching.
Typing into the new search box at the top of the calendar will reduce the entries on screen down to those that match. This has a couple of specific uses –
1 – you can now view data by two different facets. For example, imagine you have a number of calendar views set up for each type of event – one view for board meetings, another for general meetings (zoom calls), one for customer calls, another for pre-arranged demos etc. These will be displayed in different colours on screen.
You may want to see just events which you (or another specific person) are attending – typing a name into the search box will narrow down the results.
2 – when showing a grid (timeline view) with swim lanes for event classes (perhaps a set of milestones with a lane for each task, like a GANTT view). In this case the search can be used to reduce results down to which task/milestone you’re interested in.
Thanks goes to Beacon Foods for initially requesting this.
As the first ‘minimal’ release of a new feature, we’re keen for everyone to try it out and give us feedback. Later releases may introduce new capabilities.
Other user interface improvements
Another calendar update is that you can now toggle the display of Saturday and Sunday in the calendar, to allow more space for the rest of the week. To hide weekends, click on the active calendar button at the top of the screen (e.g. ‘year’, ‘month’, ‘week’) and to toggle them back on, just click again.
Searching standard views has also been tweaked – previously, double clicking in a filter box to select the current text was difficult due to scrolling issues. These have now been resolved. Thanks to the West of England Combined Authority for reporting this.
Calculations
Calculations are now no longer converted into lowercase – that means you can enter text in any case into a calculation definition and it will be retained as typed. So there’s no need to sprinkle so many ‘initicap(text)’ and ‘upper(text)’ functions throughout them.
Data security corner – extra login information
Finally, continuing the focus on improving security for users and companies, there’s a tweak to the way login information is logged this month that administrators should be aware of.
In addition to logging the IP address, internet provider and country of each login, the nearest city will also be included. This extra information may be useful to administrators e.g. when investigating any suspicious logins.
Please bear in mind that for many reasons, ‘the accuracy of IP geolocation information can vary wildly across service providers’. Particularly when organisations are increasingly using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to improve their employees’ data security, the results may not represent their real locations. However, even then the functionality can be useful to look at how many people are using recommended VPNs and proxy services.
As the format of location data is changing, the system’s new location detection may be triggered the first time someone logs in after this release, resulting in them getting a Two Factor Authentication prompt. People who don’t have 2FA enabled will get an email notifying them of a login from a new location.
Source: Agilebase