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.)

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.

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.

We have great news about Gantt charts in TopLeft. They're way better than before! Here are the highlights:

• Gantt charts are now available to users with Engineer and Viewer licenses, not just to those with a Manager license!
• Gantt charts are in the client portal.
• Tasks can be shown by assigned resources so you can plan work and avoid scheduling problems more easily.
• You can export charts to PDF.
• A whole bunch of usability improvements to make your day better.

Keep reading for the details...

Gantt Available to All Users

Gantt charts can help engineers visualize their upcoming work, so we've made them available to those with Engineer and Viewer licenses. Previously Gantt charts were only available to Managers. Engineers can drag taskbars to change dates, while Viewers get a read-only view.

As with the Kanban boards, Engineers and Viewers can see tasks on the Gantt chart that are either unassigned or assigned to a user licensed in TopLeft. As always, those with a Manager license can see tasks assigned to anyone.

Gantt Available in Client Portal

Your clients also benefit from seeing project plans visually, so we've made Gantt charts available in the client portal- both the built-in client portal and the CloudRadial version.

Your clients can view Gantt charts from a Kanban board with project or project phase swimlanes.

To see a Gantt chart for a single project, your client can click the link in the swimlane header of the project.

To see a timeline of all their projects on the Kanban board, the client can click the link in the page header:

Show Tasks by Assigned Resource

To make it easier to see how work is scheduled among the engineers on your team, now you can organize tasks by their assigned resources.

Also, the names of the assigned members are shown beside each task:

PDF Export

Click the button. Get a PDF file of your Gantt chart.

Usability Improvements

We made it easier to use the Gantt charts. Some improvements include:

• Gantt charts use the same ticket filters as the Kanban board from which they are launched, so you see on the Gantt chart exactly what you saw on the Kanban board.
• It's much easier to scroll horizontally.
• Your display choices are persisted between page loads.
• It's easier to collapse or expand groups of tasks by using the new buttons in the task bar.
• Colours are clearer and we removed some strange artifacts that would sometimes appear on taskbars.

TopLeft integrates with CloudRadial to make it fast and easy to communicate with your clients about projects.

We've just made the integration much better.

Your clients can now edit project tickets/tasks in CloudRadial, in the same way they can do so in our built-in client portal.

Clients can make these changes:

• Change ticket status by dragging a card to a different column
• Add a note to a ticket. This emails the engineer(s) assigned to the ticket.
• Create a new ticket. Clients can choose the ticket description, content and project phase, but can't choose the status, priority, type, or other options- these are set by the TopLeft administrator.

These changes are only permitted if you choose to allow them in the board configuration.

To let your clients update projects in CloudRadial, follow the steps in the knowledgebase article.

We also have a knowledgebase article about setting up CloudRadial access.

We have a few improvements to announce.

Refresh Ticket Button

Sometimes a ticket is updated in the PSA while you already have the ticket open in TopLeft. Previously, to refresh the ticket in TopLeft you had to close and re-open the editor. Now you can just click the Refresh button, and all panes in the editor will reload.

Set Contact When Creating Tickets

When you create a ticket or task in TopLeft, now you can specify the contact. This is useful so that a company's default contact is not sent the "new ticket" emails from your PSA for every ticket you create in TopLeft.

Gantt Chart Filtering

Previously, when you viewed a Gantt chart for multiple projects, you would see all the projects from the Kanban board, even if you had applied temporary page filters. Now the temporary page filters are used on the Gantt chart, so you see the same projects on the Gantt chart that you saw on the Kanban board.

This is a big help when you're using a Kanban board that shows many projects, but for your Gantt view you only want to see a limited set of projects.

We also made big performance improvements to the Gantt chart for multiple projects.

ConnectWise Company Type Filter for Tickets

For ConnectWise users, you can now filter Kanban boards based on the Company Type field of a ticket's company.

This is really useful if you used the Company Type field to indicate the pod responsible for the company. You could use this new filter to set up a Kanban board for all the work a pod is responsible for.

Autotask users can now see service tickets and project tasks together in TopLeft!

Here's an example of a board with a top swimlane for service tickets, followed by swimlanes for each project. This is a great view for engineers to see all their work in one place, whether the work is for helpdesk or projects.

The boards can even be configured to show the service and project work mixed together within the same columns- making it easy to rank tickets and tasks together to plan which work will be done first.

To the best of our knowledge, TopLeft is the only platform that can show Autotask tickets and tasks together.

To show tickets and tasks together, administrators can click Boards in the main menu, then Add Board, then Ticket + Tasks.

This feature has been used by a number of customers already and now we're offering it to all Autotask users. We still have a few improvements in the backlog, such as for automatic ranking and additional filter choices, but the most widely used functions are available today. Try it out and let us know what you think!