Xero Scheduled Outage Notice

We received the following notice from the team at Xero today. Looks like they are doing some growth maintenance (a great thing), so we’re just letting Xero users in ProWorkflow know so they can plan around the outage if required.

 

Xero scheduled outage
30 August 2009

Hi there,

We’re upgrading the Xero production hosting servers so we have more capacity to accommodate our rapidly growing number of customers around the world.

Unfortunately this upgrade will mean our operations team has to take Xero offline for 6 hours this Sunday, 30 August from 10pm to 4 am NZT (click here to see what time that is for you).
This outage will affect our live API so network.xero.com will be unavailable during this time. However, our networktest.xero.com and networktest-ui.xero.com sites will be unaffected.
We’re sorry for any inconvenience this scheduled outage may cause.

Best regards,
Xero Network & Developer API team

We’ve just completed a minor update rollout and as well as a few little tweaks we’ve added some new features that we wanted to tell you about.
.

Tasks Page & Upcoming Items – Display Settings

This is a great new feature for customers who have a lot of tasks and want to see just those that are coming up in the near future. From the “Personal Settings” page you can change whether the Tasks Page displays all tasks or just those happening soon. You can also change how far in advance you want ProWorkflow to show tasks both on the Tasks Page and the Upcoming Items list that appears on your Homepage and in the Calendar Page.

.

Quotes/Invoices – Partial quantities for Fixed Cost Items

This has been something we’ve had quite a few requests for recently so we’re pleased to be able to add this. Previously you were limited to whole values, now you can add partial quantities of fixed cost items.

.

Quotes/Invoices – Display Settings

We’ve added an extra option to the Quote and Invoice Settings pages which lets you customise the number of records to show. If you have a lot of quotes and invoices this can help speed up the loading time for the Quote and Invoice pages.

.

Quotes/Invoices – PDF option for Clients

We have updated the quote and invoice pages so that your clients can now download PDF copies of their quotes and invoices (if they have permissions to see these pages). This option was always available for staff users but we thought it made sense to add it for your customers as well.

.

The number of customers who are using ProWorkflow’s integration with Xero is increasing rapidly so we thought it would be useful to let you know that a single Xero account can link with multiple ProWorkflow accounts. Many of our customers use different ProWorkflow accounts for teams within your company so now you can do that but centralise all of your invoices and accounting in one place!

In the last few months we have rolled out several task updates in response to customer requests and we wanted to share them with you. These features can be a great time saver as well as helping you to organise tasks more efficiently.
.

In-line Editing

It is now possible to edit tasks directly from the Project Details page, simply double click on any field, make any changes and click “Update!” and you’re done.

 
.

Task Templates

Task templates have been in ProWorkflow for a long time but we’ve improved them even further. In the past you needed to assign staff to a Project in advance or they would not be included when you added a Task Template. We’ve changed that so ProWorkflow now asks if you would like to add staff to the Project if they are not already assigned to it.

This should be a great help to those of you who use Task Templates regularly.
.

Task Ordering

ProWorkflow supports dependent tasks but for these to work correctly you had to remember to assign each task a unique order number. We’ve added an option that enforces Task Ordering throughout ProWorkflow so you can ensure your dependent tasks work correctly. This is found in the ‘Usability Settings’ area of the ADMINISTRATION section.

This will also be useful for customers who want to ensure each task has a unique order number to help you keep track of each task.
.

Task Description – Rich Text/HTML Support

We have updated the task description field to support rich text and HTML, previously it was only possible to use plain text. This update means you now have the same flexibility for task descriptions as you do for projects. .
.

This is an important update for any of our customers using the Firefox 3.5.x web browser. A bug was recently identified in Firefox that caused Firefox to drastically slow down when a page contained a large amount of JavaScript.

This applies to many pages throughout ProWorkflow and in some cases can give the impression that the browser has crashed.

This bug has been fixed in Firefox version 3.5.2 (and v3.0.13) so we ask that any affected customers use the “Check for Updates” feature found in the “Help” menu of Firefox to download the latest version. Any customers who have downloaded Firefox since the new release will not need to take any action.
.

.

We are always looking for ways to improve the speed of ProWorkflow. We add enhancements in this area on a regular basis but improving performance on the server-side is only one part of the story.

For a typical web page, only around 20% of the time taken to “load” the page is spent downloading the actual content. The rest of the time is spent by the browser processing the content so it can display it correctly. With complex pages like those used within ProWorkflow, this processing time can be quite significant so we have the following advice:

1) If you are using Internet Explorer then consider trying Firefox or Google Chrome which both typically process web pages much faster.

2) Always use the latest version of your browser as this will often improve speed as well as fixing bugs such as the Firefox JavaScript bug above.

We often get asked which internet browser is the fastest or which is the best for using the ProWorkflow solution. We asked one of the team to do a simple test. They took an account with a decent amount of information and clicked to load a number of pages in each browser. We timed the page load and this was the result.

Keep in mind that ProWorkflow is a very data intensive professional web based project management software application so isn’t comparable to ordinary website speeds.

These are the browsers we tested:

……Internet Explorer (7.0.6000.16890)
……Firefox (3.5.2)
……Chrome (2.0.172.39)

And here’s the results: (in seconds)

Looks like Chrome or Firefox are the winners! Time to get rid of the old Internet Explorer and download a faster browser!

……Firefox (3.5.2) – Download here!
……Chrome (2.0.172.39) – Download here!

The ProActive Software team are all very committed and loyal to the company and the products we build and love showing our support in any way possible.

It’s no wonder then that Chief Technology Officer, Alan Barlow, was recently seen departing the local surf shop with this beauty tucked under his arm.

According to Alan it was a “spur of the moment” purchase and he just couldn’t resist it for some orange reason!

I’m sure it was all part of Alan’s Brand Awareness campaign.

And for all you true surfer’s out there the dimensions are 6’5’’ x 23’’ x 2 ¾… And for all you geeks, it’s #FF6600.

As it’s part of the iPhone project we’re working on, the team needed to quickly finish off the ProWorkflow API. We’ve now added most of the common functions to the API, so developing for the ProWorkflow solution should be a breeze!

Contact us if you require further functionality in the API. Our top API geek, Vishal will be only too happy to please! Here’s the current list of calls and functions.

ProWorkflow API Functions List

Note: Contact us today if you are interested in developing third party tools to work with ProWorkflow via the API.