When using Kanban, you may have asked yourself: What's the total of the budget hours on all tickets in a column or swimlane?

Or you may have asked: How many tickets with errors are on a board? In a swimlane? In a certain column?

Now you can find the answer to these questions easily in TopLeft Kanban.

Kanban can summarize the number of warning and error cards in a column, swimlane, or board, as well as the hours logged and budgeted on a ticket and the time the cards have spent in the columns. This helps you identify where problem work is located on your board, allowing you to zoom in and fix it quickly. You can also compare columns and swimlanes for the amount of logged and budgeted work, allowing you to plan more precisely.

We're working on further enhancements for this feature, so watch this space over the next couple of weeks. Please let us know what you think!

When using the time entry form in Kanban to log time and change a ticket's status at the same time, you may have seen errors about time entries not being allowed in the ticket's status. This would happen if time entry was prohibited in the ticket's new status.

But that's now a thing of the past because Kanban is smarter about how it logs your time and changes the ticket status. As long as either the ticket's current status or the new status allows time entry, Kanban will enter the time in the right order. You don't have to worry about it any more.

This applies to both ConnectWise and Autotask mode.

For Autotask customers, there's a new swimlane for ticket and task boards for grouping by Primary Resource.

How is this different than the Resource swimlane? The Resource swimlane shows a ticket or task for a member if he or she is assigned as either the primary or a secondary, but the Primary Resource swimlane only shows work where the member is assigned as the primary. Tickets and tasks without a primary resource are shown in their own swimlane at the top of the page, even if they have secondary assignments.

Autotask customers- on your Kanban boards with queue swimlanes, you can now drag tickets between swimlanes to update the ticket in Autotask. Nice!

November was busy here at TopLeft. We delivered a number of things that had been on the roadmap for a long time. Here are the details:

Improvements

• Added support for custom fields/user-defined fields from your PSA.
• Completely overhauled the board edit page. You no longer have to scroll up and down an enormously tall page and it loads faster in certain scenarios.
• We migrated to a new cloud hosting provider with much better fault tolerance and flexibility. Did you notice the database host failure this week? No you didn't, because many types of failures are handled automatically. 😎
• Added an option to show the details about scheduled assignments/service calls on cards without having to hover over the member icon with your mouse.
• Added a swimlane option for project boards that shows projects by the week of their end date
• Updated some labels in the UI to make them more consistent with the terms used in your PSA
• Improved the login experience in a couple of uncommon cases where users might have multiple tabs of Kanban open. Previously you could see a confusing security error page. Now you will see the error in fewer scenarios, and when you do see it the error page includes information about the possible causes and how to fix it.

ConnectWise mode

• Added the ability for Kanban to make changes to tickets (changing status, adding time and notes, etc.) as if it was you, instead of using Kanban's own API member for that.
• Added the ability to keep closed tickets in our copy of your database for a configurable period of time, so you can have a chance to review them on a Kanban board.
• Fixed an issue that could cause time and notes to be synced for a ConnectWise ticket, even when syncing of time and notes is disabled.

Autotask mode

• Added the ability to drag between queue swimlanes.
• We fixed couple of bugs in the service call dialog.

Invisible stuff

• We improved our internal error reporting mechanisms to reduce the frequency of certain reports and include additional data in other reports so we can track down problems faster.

TopLeft Kanban has never shown closed ConnectWise tickets- until now.

If you want to show tickets in a closed status in Kanban, you can now keep them for a period of time you specify. This allows you to have a column showing tickets in a closed status so you can review them once a day or once a week, for example.

For instructions on configuring this, see the knowledgebase article.

If your on-premise ConnectWise server is behind an IP-filtering firewall, check your allowed IPs. There have been some changes.

• 2605:cf80:80:c00::1/64
• 192.243.214.224/29
• 64.225.4.64
• 64.225.4.77
• 64.225.4.65
• 64.225.4.102
• 104.248.8.3
• 64.225.20.123
• 68.183.57.100

We expect this list to be stable for a while since we've now settled into our new infrastructure. Thanks for your patience while we improved the service.

For TopLeft administrators who create and update Kanban boards, we've made a big change to the board edit page. Instead of a single long form, the page is split up into major sections, with each section in a tab.

The tab navigation is always at the top of the page, even if you scroll down.

Also, the Save button always appears at the bottom of the page, even if you scroll up, and we've added a button that allows you to save and return to editing the board rather than always saving and sending you to the board view.

We hope these improvements allow you to iterate your board designs much faster. Let us know what you think!

If you schedule a lot of work into technicians' calendars, it can be helpful to see the details of the schedules directly on the Kanban cards. Now you can do that in TopLeft Kanban:

As with the compact view of assignments, the border of the assignment indicates when it occurs:

• Grey outline: the member is assigned without a calendar appointment
• Blue outline: the assignment is for tomorrow or further in the future
• Green outline: the assignment is today
• Red outline: the assignment occurred in the past

Administrators can enable this view by enabling the "Assignment details" option on the Kanban board. If the option is not enabled, assignment details can still be seen by hovering over the member's icon.

TopLeft can now make changes to tickets, projects, and other records as if you made the change in the ConnectWise application. This allows:

• The audit trail for a ticket, project, or opportunity to show which member made the change, rather than showing the change was made by the general TopLeft API member.
• Show ticket and time entry notes as being entered by the member when sending notes to customers, rather than showing they were made by the general TopLeft API member.
• Changes to be subjected to the member's security role restrictions.

To enable this function, you need to make a set of member API keys and put the keys in the TopLeft app. Instructions and an explanatory video are in the knowledgebase.