Lots of updates…
One of our ambitions for the all-new HosPortal V2 rostering and scheduling software launched in February was to give us more flexibility to make material enhancements, and make them more quickly. We planned for this in part by using the best-available software architecture and approaches. We also made conscious design decisions along the way that not only considered our immediate aspirations, but also by constantly asking ‘what might our customers want in the future?’
We are now six months since launch and we are delighted that our aspirations have been realised in spades. We have managed to make small and more material enhancements really quickly, release completely new features more efficiently, and have been able to respond to the inevitable bugs without too much disruption to our customers. We are now also releasing planned enhancements about once per week. As of this article we are up to Release 14. We will aim to put a more structured set of release notes in this blogpost over time.
Features
Our first major new feature is term templates that allow creation of repeating patterns of work, such as training terms, and quickly applying them and reassigning them over periods of time. More details can be seen here.
Enhancements
A summary of some more noteworthy enhancements since February that customers can see are included below. There are even more enhancements behind the scenes.
HosPortal now subscribes to a public holiday database service, that significantly simplifies the work involved - and improves the accuracy of - public holidays for all users in any jurisdiction.
Ability to manage rosters, availability and templates in '‘staff view’. Most customers user a ‘roster’ view or ‘location’ view to manage rosters. You can now also list the staff down the side of the page and manage their activity by date.
Improved self-roster management, including more flexible preference-based rosters and more power to roster administrators to create and manage selections on behalf of other users.
A more complete audit log to track and report all changes made to a shift, including deletions and not just assignment changes
Ability to export customer-specific staff profile information in addition to standard contact details
Improved tracking of SMS messages and reporting of send status
Many and varied cosmetic and flexibility improvements to PDF and Excel exports and reports
Ability to export and print templates, for instance for clinical allocations
Ability to count draft shifts in statistical reports
Ability to ‘force terminate’ users without first managing all their outstanding activity after their termination date: all shifts can be marked vacant.
Ability to ‘force end’ repeating shifts, that will now automatically remove all user templates associated with that shift
Restructure of file folders, to make them easier to use (thank you to Prince of Wales Hospital for being patient with this)
Ability to duplicate even the most complex self-roster, to more easily run the next cycle
Ability to add tags to templates
Ability to see tags using icons on the roster pages, and ability to add and see tags on individuals on a shift
Inclusion of functions to find and more easily manage template conflicts
Ability to hide leave types from non-administrative staff
More options for setting and saving views
Lots and lots of speed and performance improvements in almost every aspect of HosPortal
Lots of small bug fixes
Charles, Chris and the team reviewing ideas for future HosPortal enhancements
