5 New Features • 5 Improvements • 5 Bug Fixes

✨ New Features

(1) Favorites Menu in the Main Navigation

In addition to projects, now various saved views from projects as well as frequently edited tasks can be added to Favorites for quick and easy access directly through the main menu, without having to click through the project first 🙌

Of course, you can favorite as many projects, views, or tasks as you like. 

Mark Views or Tasks as favorite to add them to your favorites and easily arrange their order by drag & drop! Just click on an element and drag it to the desired position.

How to add views to favorites:

How to add tasks to favorites:

As part of this, we have modernized the entire navigation menu to make it more clear and user-friendly. More adjustments will follow!

(2) Workload View (Beta)

The new Workload View (also: Resource Planning) is now available to everyone. It offers a detailed way to plan planned efforts of project tasks and assigned individuals depending on their available capacity over defined periods. 

It takes into account all active members/guests of the workspace and all projects - permissions assumed. Absences including their approval status are also considered, as well as holidays or company vacations.

You can find the Workload View in a new tab Workload (Beta) at the portfolio level.

The Workload View offers many functions for resource planning and for looking at different perspectives.

The Workload View will undergo further iterations. Stay tuned!

More information can be found on the help pages ↗️

(3) Expanded Workspace Settings

Manage Absences

Effective immediately, there is the option to maintain absences of any kind. Absences affect the available capacity of individuals in the workspace.

Types of absence can be diverse and treated differently by each organization. Our goal was maximum flexibility, which is why we do not specify types of absence. People with special permission (HR rights) can create and manage as many types of absence as they like. 

Recorded (and approved) absences have an impact on the capacity of individuals and are accordingly taken into account in the Workload View.

Manage Holidays (and Events)

There can be multiple Holiday Calendars, e.g. for different locations of members. Holidays can be assigned to individuals and affect their availability.

An Event, unlike a holiday, can last several days. It can be used for things like company vacations.

Manage People

The Members section in the settings is for maintaining individual properties in this workspace. This area should not be confused with the administration of members in the Admin Center (invitations, role assignments, etc.), which applies organization-wide.

Here, for example, holiday calendars that have been created can be assigned to people. Also, the Working Hours can be defined in hours on a daily basis to determine the available capacity for workload planning. 

In addition, individual absence quotas (tab Quotas) can be maintained per person, if they should differ from standard budgets of the type of absence. 

(4) Creating Absence Requests

Once absence types have been established, absences can be managed by all members in the new menu item Absences. A new absence can be recorded via the New Absence button. The available absence types, which have been stored in the workspace, are selectable.

Absence types can optionally be provided with an approval. The approving individuals are notified accordingly and can approve or reject the absence request.

By default, absences can only be managed for oneself. Exceptions are individuals authorized to approve certain types of absences, as well as individuals with HR rights: They can also record absences for other individuals.

(5) Displaying & Editing Project Master Data Flavors in Tasks

In addition to the ability to insert project master data flavors in editor fields, these can now be structured in a tabular form in the flavors area of a task. In this way, project master data flavors can be adjusted directly from tasks in certain process steps, without having to jump to the project master data.

The New Group button has received another option for this purpose. Click on New Group (Project Master Data) to display a group for project master data flavors in the task.

You can create and position as many groups as you like.

Project master data groups inserted in this way have the following properties:

• Flavors can be added, edited, and removed within them.
• The selection in the group is individual for each task.
• Both the settings and the values can be edited, as if they were being edited in the project master data (permissions required).
• Settings and value assignments are always kept in sync with the project master data.
• Project master data groups can be used in task templates.
• Flavors of the "Formula" type cannot currently be used.

🌟 Improvements

• New "HR Right" (Beta): As part of the introduction of features such as absences, personal details, and resource planning, a new role privilege is being introduced. This is not a traditional role like Admin or member, but an additional privilege that can be given to any role. 
  
  
  • Individuals with HR rights can view and edit potentially sensitive personal information, e.g., working hours (available capacity) or absence contingencies of individuals.
  • Only individuals with HR rights can currently view the entirety of all members & guests in the resource view (both across projects and within a project). A further level (team leadership) that will be able to see a subset is planned for the next stage.
  • Only owners can assign HR rights in the member management in the Admin Center.
  • HR rights can only be assigned to members who are already active (invitation process completed).

•  
• New filter by folder name: 
  In the task filter, there are now two options to filter by folders.
  The first option Folder filters by a specific folder within a specific project. 
  The second option Folder Name refers to the name of a folder, which is not specific to any particular project.
  
  
  
  The main difference is that when filtering by a specific folder (option Folder), the filter always specifically searches for that folder, more precisely, for the ID of that folder. If this filter is saved in a view and applied in another project, the filter will show no results because the folder only exists in the original project (even if it has the same name in the other project). 
  
  The Folder Name filter thus provides the possibility to filter by a folder name that may be the same in multiple projects.
  
  
• Character limit removed in Project-ID field: The Project-ID can now be filled with an unlimited number of characters. 
  
  
• Board View Updates:
  • When moving a task by drag & drop in the board view of a project beyond the visible area to the right/left, the visible area now scrolls automatically.
  • Tasks created via the + button in a column are now placed at the top of the column. 
    
    
• Active absences visible throughout the system: 
  • In profile details (hovering the mouse over an avatar)
    
    
    
    
  • Avatars of currently absent individuals are displayed slightly transparent throughout the system
  • Additional notes are displayed in personal selection dialogs
    
    

🐞 Fixes

• Fixed: In board views of project templates, inactive projects, and archived projects, the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom was not visible.
• Fixed: Changing the email address of one's own smenso account in the Admin Center was temporarily non-functional. 
• Fixed: In the portfolio list view, if the column Gantt (Preview) was displayed, some columns did not show values that were placed to the left of the Gantt column. It only occurred with some columns - e.g., cost or effort fields.
• Fixed: There was a display error when dropping files into a task detail, which is now corrected.
• Fixed: In task details accessed from the board view, various calculated fields (flavors of the "Formula" type) were not displayed correctly. Now all calculations/formulas are displayed correctly.