Improved schedule and notifications soon to be released

It's october, and our biggest update of 2019 is soon to be released. It will include improved schedule abilities, user notifications and a several minor improvements.

Usually, we release small increments and updates (almost) every month. September and October however has been the exception. The different parts of updates we have been working on is depending on each other, and we have to finish each part in order to release them all.

Improved schedule abilities and recurring appointments

One of the abilities that has been demanded, is the ability to create recurring/repeating appointments or reservations. This applies especially in scheduling maintenance tasks. Along with a complete rebuild of the reservation (now called appointment) creator, we have added the ability to create recurring appointments based on the RFC 5545 (iCalendar) specification standard.

We have redesigned the item selector to make it easier and quicker to find and add items/assets to an appointment. We have also added the ability to add associated users to the appointment, along with the existing ability to add associated contacts to it. The browsers for adding users and contacts are similar to the item browser.

Notifications

We have finally added notifications to Itefy. When creating new appointments and adding users, you can set Itefy to automatically send reminders to selected users.

Each user will receive their notifications in the new notification center in Itefy.

In addition, users will (optionally) receive push notifications on their smartphone if using the Itefy mobile app whenever a new notification is generated.

Notification abilities will during the next months also be added to issues, inventory threshold alarms and more.

Schedule and activity

The activity overview, both on the frontpage dashboard and in the activity center has  included all kinds of activity including future activity such as reservations and appointments. This caused some disadvantages when trying to get a quick overview of both schedule and activities, and we decided to split them into two separate sections; One for past and present activities (what happened), and one for future schedule (what is going to happen). Past activities are sorted so that the latest activity is on the top, while the schedule is sorted with the next appointment on the top.

Questionnaires, mobile app and other updates

We have also been working on other improvements, like extending the original check-in questionnaires ability into check-outs and events as well.  We're also working on new batch features, more item search result columns to select among, user interface improvements and new features in the mobile app, to mention a few. However, we're first and foremost focusing on getting the new schedule and notification features done, working well and getting released.

A glimpse at the plans for Q4 2019 and Q1 2020

While product improvements are our main and most important focus, support, marketing and sales are crucial for the business behind the product. Our help center is very useful for our users, but needs more content and changes so that it is up-to-date with our latest product updates.

Our website is also due for an update, especially in the features section, which haven't had a real update in almost a year (there has bee a lot of product changed and improvements since then). We will also be working on marketing and getting Itefy listed on various software review sites.

We also have a few ideas on making some case studies, both as articles on the website, but we're considering creating a few YouTube videos as well.