Alpha Tracker - Tips & Tricks - Webinar #12

Dan 

Good afternoon, everyone. We can see some people just joining now, so we'll wait a couple of moments and then we'll get started. Hi, John. Hi, Francesca. Thanks for joining us today. Hi, Romanda. Yeah, we've got a chunk of people coming in now, which is good. 

Dan 

So let's get started. First of all, thanks very much for joining us today for our Alpha Tracker Tips and Tricks webinar. Today, we're going to be running through Alpha Tracker calendars and linking to external calendars. 

Dan 

It's really exciting, and hopefully you'll learn something new or go away going, we want to start using that in our business. So just a quick introduction. My name's Dan. I'm a team leader here at Start, and today I'm joined with Jack, who is the Alpha Tracker product lead. 

Dan 

I'm sure you're all familiar with Jack through emails and that sort of stuff. So let's get started. First of all, can someone just drop a message in the Q&A just to let us know you can hear us and see us all OK? 

Dan 

I presume you can, but I guess I want to double check. We haven't had anyone drop anything in yet. If anyone would just mind saying they can hear us, that would be great. Brilliant. Thanks, John. Great stuff. 

Dan 

So we'll try and keep it to 20 minutes today, so we don't eat all of your lunchtime. But that should be enough to get you stuck into what we've got to show you. So linking Alpha Tracker calendars to external calendars. 

Dan 

I'm sure most of you are aware of the Alpha Tracker calendar, and you probably all use it quite a bit. I know we certainly do, don't we, Jack? And while it's really good, sometimes you want to link it to existing calendars that you've already got. 

Dan 

So we can link to a wide variety of external calendars, such as Google Calendars and Microsoft Exchange Calendars, so things like your Outlook and your Microsoft Teams. Now, I'll go through the Google Calendar Sync first. 

Dan 

So essentially what happens is, when you add in an appointment in Alpha Tracker, if your Alpha Tracker is set up, what it will do is sync those appointments over into your Google Calendar, and then you'll be able to see those appointments on your phone or in Google Calendar on the web. 

Dan 

Now, I've used Google Calendar for ages. As you know, we always use Alpha Tracker for our business, and I've always used Google Calendar, and it's because my wife and I have got a number of personal calendars, and it's good to see what we've got going on in work, what we've got going on outside of work, and that sort of thing. 

Dan 

So I'll just flick over and show you an example. So this is my Google Calendar here. So everything in green are the appointments from our Alpha Tracker calendar, and then all of the other ones, so we've got the purples and the blues, are from my other Google Calendars. 

Dan 

And very importantly, don't wanna miss the wine tasting next Wednesday. So we've got that put in there, and then you can obviously show and hide all of your calendars. And I found that really useful from a personal perspective, because I could see my work stuff, as well as all of my personal things. 

Dan 

And you don't have to do anything other than the initial setup to get Google Calendar working. It's really straightforward to do. And essentially, as soon as an appointment is added into Alpha Tracker, it will then pull through into your calendars here, and you can see those straight away. 

Dan 

It's pretty much instant. It probably takes, I don't know, up to a minute to show any calendar. You've got a thought, Jack, or something like that. 

Jack 

Yeah, it runs on a timer and every time it runs, it will just pick up all the new or edited appointments and it'll just sync them into your Google calendar straight away for you. So they should appear within a minute or so, put them into Alpha Tracker. 

Dan 

Exactly, exactly. And the other good thing about Google calendars is if you're using Android devices, they work really well with that, they fit in quite nicely. So that's a brief overview of the Google calendars. 

Dan 

Jack, do you want to run through the Microsoft Exchange? 

Jack 

Yeah, for sure. So, Microsoft Exchange is essentially your Outlook calendar and your Microsoft Teams calendar. So, we'll just drag that onto the screen for you. Here, we've got one that we can just take across. 

Dan 

Please bring that over. Great, thanks Dan. 

Jack 

there we go. So, as you can see, these are the same appointments that Dan was just showing, but this is more of a business related calendar. So as Dan explained, Google, while you can use it for business, obviously, a lot of people have their own Google account, so they mix it in with their work appointments, which is really useful. 

Jack 

But with Microsoft Teams or Outlook, it's usually strictly a business calendar. So if you want people to use it in more of a business fashion than they can do. And this is really useful because you can see all of your Alpha Tracker appointments mixed in with anything else that you might have, which is unrelated to Alpha Tracker. 

Jack 

So you might have lots of online meetings that you do with Microsoft Teams or anything else that you might add to your Teams calendar, such as Zoom meetings, those can be added to Teams calendar, that type of thing, where you might be attending meetings with customers online, et cetera, et cetera. 

Jack 

And then you can ensure you're not double booking yourself because you can check your Teams calendar, make sure you've not got a meeting overlapping with another meeting or whatever onsite meeting where you might be getting on site to actually do a meeting with a customer or perhaps doing an actual asbestos survey and make sure you've not got an online Teams meeting with somebody else. 

Jack 

So that's really useful. And as I say, that works with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook. 

Dan 

Yeah, exactly. Thanks for that Jack. And another great thing about the Exchange Sync is the fact that you can hook it in or actually you can hook in any of the Teams and Microsoft Teams meetings with Tracker Filer as well. 

Dan 

So that's really cool. So Jack was saying, it's good to use Microsoft Teams calendar so you can see any external meetings, any web meetings you've got set up. But what you can actually do is send those through to your Alpha Tracker calendar as well. 

Dan 

So if, for example, someone has sent you a Teams meeting, it goes into your Microsoft Teams calendar. And then that won't show in your Alpha Tracker, but we've got a way around that, which is really nice. 

Dan 

So what I'll do is I'll just book in a meeting into Microsoft Teams, and I'll just call this a test webinar or something like that. And I'll invite Jack to it. And all you need to do is also invite Tracker Filer. 

Dan 

So you'll all have your own Tracker Filer email addresses if you've got it set up. Again, if you don't have it set up, just let us know. And it's something we can set up for you. So we're doing this at 10 till 10:30, and then I'll send the meeting out. 

Dan 

So that's my Microsoft Teams meeting sent out all okay. Now what that will have done, because Tracker Filer is copied in, it will actually add that meeting into my Alpha Tracker calendar automatically, which is really nice. 

Dan 

So if we just flick over to Alpha Tracker here, if I go to the work week, you can see third of July, and we've got test webinar straight away in my Alpha Tracker calendar. And I can open that up. I'll see all of the information about that particular meeting. 

Dan 

Obviously, I didn't put much in, I've popped in test webinar, but you can then also see that this was added by Tracker Filer. And you can see there as well, it's in Jack's diary too. So it's added it in both of our diaries. 

Dan 

Now, obviously, because I set up the meeting, I copied in Tracker Filer. If you received a meeting invite, you can just forward the appointment to Tracker Filer, and that will just lodge it for you in there as well. 

Dan 

So that's a really, really nice feature. And again, it just helps integrate your external calendars with the Alpha Tracker calendars. Now, unfortunately, at the moment, the calendar syncs only one way. 

Dan 

So you can add stuff into Alpha Tracker, and it'll go through to your, to your Google or your Microsoft calendars, but it doesn't work the other way at the moment. We are in the middle of doing some development for it. And we're hoping by the end of the year, we'll have it. So we've got a two way sync. 

Dan 

So you could add something into your Google calendar, for example, and that will come through straight into your Alpha Tracker one. So that's something that we've got in the development pipeline, isn't it Jack? 

Jack 

So you'd also be able to move the appointment, so if you're in your team's calendar you might want to quickly move something to the next day and you'll be able to do that and they would update inside of Alpha Tracker as well, so that'd be really handy once that's available. 

Dan 

Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. Thanks for that, Jack. Let's just see if we've got any questions. I think we've got one come through. Let's see what that says. Is there a way to check that there is not a class from Alpha Tracker rather than having to open up Outlook to check that? 

Jack 

I think it means clash rather than class, it might just be a typo. So I think we've probably just covered that off with the two-way sync. Once the two-way sync is working and you know that the Outlook calendar or your Microsoft Teams calendar or your Google calendar is basically the same as your Alpha Tracker calendar and you can move them to and from, then I think that probably answers the question and you know that there won't be any sort of clashes there. 

Dan 

Exactly. You might have to be checking both things. Great stuff. Yeah, thanks for that, Jack. So that is a very, very quick run through of the two sync programs. They're really useful. And it's also important to note that you can actually use both of them at the same time. 

Dan 

And that's currently what we're doing. So like I said, I was very much a Google Calendar fan, and I was using that a lot. But we've recently started using the Microsoft Exchange sync as well as, and to be fair, I'm starting to sway more towards that one now. 

Dan 

I'm starting to use that because of the reasons that Jack mentioned with your external meetings and your web meetings coming through, it just helps keep everything in one place. So that's a really nice thing that you can actually have both of them running at the same time. 

Dan 

It doesn't cause any clashes or anything like that. Great. So hopefully, that's giving you insight into those two sync programs. There's a couple more bits we do want to talk about there. Jack, over to you for the next one, I think. 

Jack 

That's fine, thank you. So the next thing that we want to just show is another integration that we've got at the moment using a separate piece of software that we're integrating with and we're working with them to continue to evolve this integration at the moment and it's called FLS. 

Jack 

Its full name is Fastly and Smart but everyone just calls it FLS for short. And what FLS does is essentially optimises appointments for you. So you can give FLS a bunch of say domestic house locations that you'd like to book for a group of staff. 

Jack 

Say it was just for one surveyor or two or three surveyors and you'd like the booking to be as optimised as possible so that you can fit in as much work as possible. For example, say you had 10 properties all on one street, you perhaps want all of the appointments for that day to be all of the addresses on that street. 

Jack 

You wouldn't want to be going off to different streets, you can see different house coming back etc etc. And what FLS aims to do is optimise all of those appointments for you and then we can read them back into Alpha Tracker. 

Jack 

So that's a really useful tool that I recommend you take a look at if you do a lot of domestic planning for domestic properties and FLS will really help get all of your appointments in the best possible order which we can then read into Alpha Tracker so it's all in the Alpha Tracker calendar and then your surveyors can go off on their way and get as much work done as possible. 

Dan 

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Thanks, Jack. Yeah, it's like Jack said, it's a really, really useful tool for optimizing, yeah, diary appointments. So you can do the least amount of traveling and do the most amount of work essentially. 

Dan 

Yeah, domestic surveys are just one example of that. If you've got 10 on a street, you can go and do all of those in a day or two, depending on how fast you're working or how big the properties are. That's a really cool one. 

Dan 

I mean, just wanted to quickly touch on that. So if you are doing lots of domestic surveys, things like that, and this is interesting to you, do get in touch. And yeah, we can, we can talk you through that and how that actually fits together. 

Dan 

And of course, when those appointments come back, it then ties into our calendar sync stuff. And that'll go out to the appropriate web calendars like your Google and your Microsoft calendars as well. 

Dan 

So everything's all interlinked and keeping your scheduling nice and tight. So the next and final piece that I want to show you today is to do with the new feature that we've been working on in Alpha Tracker. 

Dan 

So I won't go into too much detail around the wall board itself, but I'll just quickly summarize it. So I'm sure quite a lot of you know the wallboard is a really useful tool in Alpha Tracker to give you an overview of appointments that are either in the week, month, quarter

Dan 

whatever it may be, so you can see what work you've got, what gaps you've got. And again, I personally use it here at Start to see if I can find a gap in people's diaries or work out if they're doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. 

Dan 

And you can have a really good overview of the whole team using the wallboard. And it was one of the features. We actually, we came across it because we were trying to book in a number of appointments back to back in the calendar, and we were flicking back and doing stuff. 

Dan 

And it was working fine. And then we thought, hang on, we're already in the wallboard. Let's see if we can do something in here to make it a bit easier to work with. So this is just on our demo system at the moment. 

Dan 

I've just picked myself in the calendar. If you had 10 people, you'd see the 10 down the left-hand side and all of their appointments. But as you can see, I've got a lot of gaps in my diary. And what you can now do is drag and drop. 

Dan 

So you can literally drag and say from the 11th to the 15th, I want to book in an appointment. And just to mention, this is a pre-release feature. We're literally doing some testing on at the moment. 

Dan 

So it is an ultra early sneak peek, but we just wanted to show you because it is a really nice thing. But essentially all you need to do is pop in your project number, so your job number, pop in your start and end times that you want to do. 

Dan 

So if you are only doing this particular piece of work, I don't know, 9 till 10 on a day, you can put 9 till 10 and it will do it 9 till 10 on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, for example. 

Dan 

So it's quite good for booking in write-up times. So if you do your report writing up or checking in the afternoon, you do it say three till five, you can do that and block out a week, two weeks, a month in advance, all from one screen. 

Dan 

So you basically pick your job, pick your times, pop any notes in, and then you can pick any other staff that are doing that job with you. So you'll get added into their calendars as well. It's also really good for doing things such as holidays, for example. 

Dan 

If someone's got some leave, you can just drag and drop that in and you can block those out. And it's a really useful feature. So we're hoping that when that's available, you'll be making good use of that. 

Dan 

And I'm sure when we come to release it we'll touch on it again and remind you of it. But as we were talking about calendars today, we thought it'd be rude not to go through this particular feature to show you what there is to offer. 

Dan 

And I think that probably wraps it up for us today. So just a quick recap on what we've gone through. So we've gone through the Alpha Tracker Calendar very briefly. We've shown how you can link up your external calendars to Alpha Tracker, such as Google and Microsoft Exchange. 

Dan 

We've gone through how you can use Tracker Filer to also help book in meetings into the Alpha Tracker diary by forwarding those appointments through and of course you can do it for external meetings that come through as well. 

Dan 

We've gone through the FLS integration that we've got in Alpha Tracker to help you with your diary optimisation which again is really useful for your domestic surveys and then the quick sneak peek into the new wallboard feature. 

Dan 

So I think that probably covers everything from us. If there's anything you've seen here today and you're not currently using and you do want to use then please just get in touch with us, get in touch with the support desk and we'll be able to help you out there and then or schedule in time to get these installed for you. 

Dan 

They're pretty straightforward to do so we should be able to get you up and running quite quickly with either Google Calendar, Exchange Calendar Sync or even Tracker Filer if you're not using those. So like I said just get in touch. 

Dan 

It doesn't look like we've got any other questions but if you do have any questions that pop up after the meeting obviously feel free to ping those through and then we'll get back to you as soon as we can. 

Dan 

So thank you very much from me and thanks from Jack and we will catch you on the next webinar. Take care everyone and speak to you soon. Thanks.