Here are highlights of what we improved in the TopLeft app in September.

Improvements

• On boards using member swimlanes to show how work is assigned to technicians, when the user filters the board to show only their own work, the board now appears without swimlanes. This permits better use of the available space on the page.
• When entering time or setting due dates, a new date picker widget is used. Some users had experienced problems with the previous date picker widget.
• On Gantt charts for individual projects, we've added a way to hide tickets in certain statuses. It's possible to hide tickets in certain statuses on a Kanban board by simply not mapping the statuses to any column, but this isn't possible on single-project Gantt charts. To hide tickets in certain statuses, an administrator can go to Settings > Customization > Gantt and select the statuses to hide.
• When TopLeft sends an email to a contact, an internal note is added to the ticket to record that the message has been sent. This makes it much clearer to technicians and managers that an email has been sent.

ConnectWise

• We've brought back the CC field on time entries.

Bugfixes

• When TopLeft sends an email to a contact or member using rich text formatting, the rich text formatting is now applied properly in the email. (This applies to ConnectWise only, since the Autotask API doesn't support rich text formatting.)

We've improved swimlanes when technicians filter a board to show only their own work.

On a member swimlane board, which shows work grouped by the technician assigned to a ticket, you may have wanted to see only your own work by clicking the "My Tickets" button. Then you would have seen your own work, but it would have still been in a swimlane:

This is useful but the number of cards in the view was limited by the height of the swimlane. It didn't use the whole window to show cards. For this reason, we have previously recommended the use of a separate Kanban board without swimlanes so that technicians could see their tickets in the full board view.

To make it easier to get the full board view for a single technician's tickets, a board with member swimlanes will now appear without swimlanes when the user filters the board to show only his or her own tickets.

This is the same view the technician would get on a board without swimlanes, eliminating redundant information on the screen and allowing more cards to appear in the window.

If you created Kanban boards without swimlanes just so technicians could see their own work using the whole window, you can consider removing those redundant boards.

This change applies only in the following cases:

1. The board has swimlanes that group cards by the assigned member. (For example this doesn't apply on a Company swimlane board.)
2. The user filters the cards to show his or her own work. (It doesn't apply when filtering for someone else's work.)

A few months ago we introduced a function for emailing ticket notes to any team member or company contact.

For ConnectWise users, at that time we removed the ability to use the general CC field from the PSA. But we heard from some customers that the Notify feature couldn't completely replace the CC feature. So we have returned the CC function to TopLeft's time and note entry screen for ConnectWise.

Here are highlights of what we improved in the TopLeft app in August.

Improvements

• You can upload attachments to tickets.
  
  
  
  
• Gantt charts can show project tasks grouped by who they are assigned to, so you can more easily see all the scheduled work assigned to a member.
• Added filters to client portal views for projects and ticket due dates. Now your clients can view a Kanban board showing work for a single project, even if the board normally shows work for multiple projects.

Bugfixes

• We fixed a few issues with Gantt charts:
  • Now taskbars show the name of the assigned member only once, even if a member has multiple service calls on a task.
  • The timeframe of a Gantt chart no longer moves when tasks are dragged and dropped to change scheduling.
  • Predecessors appear on tasks properly.

We've introduced a new variation of our Gantt charts to help you visualize how team members and managers are scheduled.

When you're viewing the Projects Timeline, showing how your top-level projects are scheduled, now you can group the projects by their Manager/Lead. This makes it clear how the projects are scheduled for each person when you have multiple managers.

Just click "Group by: Manager" on the Gantt page to view it this way.

Similarly, when you're viewing the Gantt chart for tasks of multiple projects you can now group them by member. Just choose "Group by: Resources".

With this view, you can see all the project work scheduled for each team member, making it easy to spot periods where too much or too little work is scheduled for a member.

As a reminder, Gantt charts are now available to all licensed users, not just those with Manager licenses. We'd love to hear what you think about the improvements we've made to Gantt charts over the last few months.

You can now attach files to tickets and tasks in TopLeft. This is available from the Files tab of the ticket editor.

The maximum file size is 10 MB for ConnectWise and about 6 MB for Autotask.

It's been a long time since we wrote a summary of what's changed in the TopLeft app. There's a lot in this update! In this period we also hired two software developers so we can keep improving things for you even faster.

Here's a summary of what we've been up to:

Improvements

• Added support for Single Sign On (SSO) using Microsoft Entra ID.
  
  
• Big improvements to Gantt charts: Gantt charts are available to all users (not just Managers), are available in client portal, can show work arranged by who's assigned to the task, charts can be exported to PDF, the tickets/tasks on the Gantt chart match those from the Kanban board from which it was launched, and we made a whole lot of usability improvements.
• CloudRadial client portal improvements: clients can now edit tickets/tasks by dragging between columns, adding a note to a ticket, or creating a new ticket.
• Added the ability to send ticket time entries and notes to any company contact or technician.
• Added swimlanes for tickets and tasks based on dates.
• When adding a ticket, you can set the ticket contact.
• Added a tool to test the permissions granted to the TopLeft API member, so you can proactively check the permissions are still correct instead of seeing errors in the app or sync log.
• When you assign someone to a ticket, the assignment is recorded as an internal note.
• Pods in the ticket/task editor now reload whenever any pod is saved, to ensure all form information is complete and up-to-date.
• The Users page in the settings section now lists the license assigned to the user.

ConnectWise

• Added display of images in tickets and ticket notes and rich text editing of those records.
• Added the ability to dispatch tickets to ConnectWise teams.
• Added display of company and contact alerts, so engineers are always aware of those special considerations for special clients.
• Added support for Company Sites- with a board filter, swimlane, label on cards, and ability to change the Site from the ticket editor.
• Added a board filter for the Company Type field of a ticket - especially useful if you use this field to identify the pod responsible for a ticket.
• Added a way to hide merged tickets.
• When dispatching a member to a ticket, you can set the Where and Status fields of the assignment.

Autotask

• Service tickets and project tasks can be shown together on one board!
• Added an option for project cards to show the project's department and use the department for swimlanes.
• Added a filter for Kanban boards to filter tickets by queue.

Bugfixes

• Times on Kanban boards now appear in the user's timezone, not the server timezone.

For those of you who use teams to manage work in ConnectWise, now you can assign a ticket to a team in TopLeft.

Also, notice we moved the Owner field to the Assignments section, so that all the assignment and dispatch-related fields are together on one tab.

Some clients have many sites and you need to track which tickets are for which sites. Now you can view and manage this in TopLeft for ConnectWise.

We've added three ways to make use of the company site for tickets:

1. Show the site on cards, like this:
   
2. Swimlanes for company site, so each company site has a swimlane that shows the tickets for that site
3. Change a ticket's site from the editing dialog:
   
   
   
   

Datto Autotask doesn't have an equivalent of this field, so this is not supported in TopLeft for Autotask.

Sometimes when you add a note to a ticket, you need to notify a variety of people. It could be an engineer or salesperson on your team who isn't assigned to the ticket, or someone at the client who isn't the main contact on the ticket.

When you enter a note or time entry on a ticket, now you can send the note to any contact at the client company or any engineer in your MSP.

Your choice is saved for the next time someone enters a note. Now you have complete flexibility in notifying clients and staff as you work on tickets.