Alpha Tracker - Tips & Tricks - Webinar #8

Dan 

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dan and I'm a team lead here at Start Software. And alongside me today, I've got Jack who is our Alpha Tracker product lead. And in today's webinar, we're gonna be talking about hotspots. 

Dan 

So we'll give you a run through of what they are, how you can use them in Alpha Tracker and hopefully teach you something new. And once we've covered that, we're gonna give you a sneak peek into release 40, which is gonna be our next major Alpha Tracker release. 

Dan 

So we're gonna try and keep this to 20 minutes so we don't take all of your lunch time. But if you do have any questions while Jack and I are going through this, please just drop them in the chat or in the Q&A section and we'll try and answer those as we go along. 

Dan 

If we don't get your message, we'll answer it after the webinar and we make sure that all of the questions are answered. So I think, let's get started Jack. So I'm currently logged into Alpha Tracker just on one of our demo systems and hotspotting starts from the project typically. 

Dan 

And first of all, what is hotspotting, what is it? Essentially, it's a way of being able to add in your suspect items from a survey. So whether it's samples or no access areas or presumed items onto a drawing plan. 

Dan 

So you may have been provided the drawing plan by your client or you might have drawn up when you are on site. And it's basically dropping in the suspect items onto the plan and making it interactive so you can see where those particular items were and where you took those samples. 

Dan 

So to get started, we'll go to the hotspots button at the bottom of the project screen here. And what this will do is give you an option to choose what drawing that you want to put the hotspots onto. 

Dan 

So this is reading from typically the Drawings folder on the project folder over here. Or I think it puts in anything with drawing a name. Is that right?  

Jack 

Yeah, if you've uploaded it with the name it's got the word drawing in it in its file name or show here or if you've got a dedicated drawing sub folder that you've got set up in your system then any file in that folder will come through here as well if it's compatible with the hotspotting. 

Dan 

So we've done a typical Blue Peter thing and something we prepared earlier. So this is our sample drawing plan that we've got. And we're going to have some hotspots to it. So we'll open up our editor. 

Dan 

And what we've got is the plan on the left-hand side. And then on the right-hand side, we've got a list of all of the suspect items. Now, these are just a couple of sample ones that I have set up prior to this. 

Dan 

So we've got a sample, which is actually non-asbestos. We've got a positive sample, which is chrysital. And then we've also got a presumed item as well. So let's get adding these to the plan. So it's really, really simple to do. 

Dan 

All you do is hold your shift key, pick where you took that sample. So I'm on sample one at the moment. So I'm going to say it was over here and I can click. And what that'll do is, as you can see, drop in the sample tag straight onto the drawing. 

Dan 

And it's that simple. You can see over here, we do record a couple of things. So we record the X and Y coordinates. So this is if you've got a really detailed plan and you want to get very specific with where that sample was taken, you can actually adjust the X and Y coordinates to move that around on the plan. 

Dan 

Typically, we find just clicking works just fine. But if you do want to get that detailed, you have got the option there. And you can also change the colour of the tags. So we support a handful of colours by default, as you can see here. 

Dan 

And then this will change the colour of the tag. Now, I'm going to leave that as it is for the moment, because I'll show you something shortly, which you'll find quite useful, hopefully. So we'll move on and we'll then drop this particular sample onto the plan as well. 

Dan 

So again, just hold the shift key and drop where you want that to go. And that will drop it on. And then finally, we'll do the last one and we'll pop this one over here as well. So you can see we're starting to build up interactive hotspots on the plan. 

Dan 

Now, once we've done all of that, I did mention earlier about the colours. So we've built in an auto-colour code option. And as you probably guessed, it's going to colour code those based on the key that we've got down at the bottom. 

Dan 

So if it's a positive item, it'll be like a red, orange kind of colour, strongly presumed with the yellow. We've got, as you can see down here, all the different colours for different situations. So we'll auto-colour code these now. 

Dan 

And that will actually update all of those tags. And you can see now we've got the green for the NAB sample that we took. We've got the purple over here for this particular presumed item. And then we've also got the red, orange for the positive sample. 

Dan 

And you can see they've also updated in the list over here. So it's that easy, really, really quick to do. And it looks great. You can see exactly where your samples or presumed items were or where they were taken. 

Dan 

And once we've done that, this is now available on the client portal, which I think is really nice actually, because then your clients can see the interactive plan you've just set up and then they can see where samples were actually taken and then delve a bit deeper into that. 

Dan 

So I'll switch over now to the client portal view. So I'm going to be logging in as a client now and I'll show you how that looks from their side of things. So if I just move over to here and I've already logged in and I'm on the report list at the moment. 

Dan 

So this is where you can see all of the projects or reports that you've done for a particular client or they can see what you've done for them. And I can see a plans button and we've got two plans here. 

Dan 

So we've got the normal floor plan and we've also got the hot spotted floor plan as well. So you can see in our preview, we've got these hot spots here. So I'm going to go ahead and open that up and view the live plan. 

Dan 

And it's a very similar screen to what we've just shown. Obviously the client can't edit it, but they can see all of the details there. Now you can see we've got the suspect items on the right-hand side. 

Dan 

And based on what item is selected, it's actually highlighting and flashing on the plan. So it's just to make it easier to find that particular item and see where that sample was. And if I go ahead and move over to this, this chrysital sample here, you can see that that's now flashing over here and you can view the details for these as well. 

Dan 

So as a client, you can see exactly. what that particular item is, whether it was sampled, what the identification was, where it was. So it just helps give them a visual picture of what was done on site, basically. 

Jack 

So interactive the other way around as well. So while Dan was clicking on the right-hand side You can actually click on the sample tags as well and it will select the correct row on the on the right for you and then the users can view the details from there.

Dan 

Exactly that Jack thanks for that. So yeah you can go ahead and view those details and they'll then load up and if there are photos taken in this example, I didn't take any, but it'll then show the photos so you can you can start to really visualize where things are done and what was done on on site. 

Dan 

And obviously it's important to say this is a floor plan one so this would be say the first floor may have a building with five six seven floors. So you could have lots of different hot spotted plans available in the plan section over here, but we've just kept it nice and simple for the demo and just done a single floor plan. 

Dan 

So that's a really quick overview of the hot spots. 

Dan 

Now just before we move on to the release 40 stuff there is actually another way you can do hot spots as well. So some of you may be familiar with Alpha Draw. 

Dan 

For those of you that aren't Alpha Draw is something that we've got built into Alpha Tracker to essentially enable you to create your own floor plans, and you can do it on a mobile app as well, but as well as being able to do that you can also do the hotspot in there as well can't you Jack. 

Dan 

So I'll go over to alpha draw now you can open that from the button down here at the bottom, so in your in your project toolbar and over in Alpha Draw, there's a drawing I've done earlier please excuse it, I am I'm not saying yeah design I'm not good at doing the floor plans but you get the idea it's a very basic floor plan that we've got over here.

Dan 

So you can draw your own, but even cooler what you can do is actually import your own drawings so you can see we've got our drawing that we did in the project over here and I've pulled that straight into Alpha Draw and from here you can then do the hotspot and just like you were doing in Alpha Tracker but you can actually do it in Alpha Draw.

Dan 

So we support the sample points and you can drag and drop those in over here and we can also load up the survey data as well so like before we have our suspect items on the right hand side we can do the same over here.

Dan 

So we can do view survey data and then that's gonna load up the survey data for that particular project and you can see we've got this over here and you can then do your auto colour coding.

Dan 

But before we do that what you need to do is just actually update your sample tag so you can pick the approach so whether it was sampled or presumed or whatever it may be.

Dan 

So we'll say this was sampled you can pop in your sample number so in this case I'll just do 001 and then you can change your colours and tag colours as you wish and then this is where you can then go ahead view your survey data and then you can auto colour code.

Dan 

And then what that'll do as you can see that's colour coded our plan here with the green and for our NAD sample.

Dan 

So you can use either Alpha Draw or a hotspot editor to do to do the hotspots. It's completely up to you and it works both ways.

Dan 

We have some people that prefer to do it in Alpha Draw, we have some people that prefer to do it in the hotspot editor as well it really doesn't matter it's a complete personal preference.

Dan 

But I think that's probably everything on the hotspots, yeah. So hopefully you've learned something that new there and you'll go ahead and have a play around with that.

Dan 

So now we'll move over to our sneak peek features in release 40. 

Dan 

So the first one that we want to talk you through is our project quick edit screen. So at the moment as I'm sure you all know to open up a project you go to the project list like we've got now and then you can click on the project link and that's going to go ahead and load up the project and show all of the details about that project, just as normal, as you do and there we go.

Dan 

What we've actually integrated now is a quick edit screen of this so we found that most people going to the project screen they're only doing a handful of things aren't they? 

Jack 

They're only going to go and get one or two items like a client reference number or just to open another sub screen or something like that. So like Dan was saying, we've just added this lightning bolt feature on the right-hand side of the project number and that will go ahead and open up the project information but it's more of a quick view. 

Jack 

So it's not all of the information, it's a subset of it but it should have all the key info that you need and you'll see how quickly that opens in comparison to opening the full object detail and you can switch between the projects quite quickly. 

Jack 

The cool thing about this as well is that you can move the project window wherever you like on screen and anything on the list is still clickable. So you can open the document folder at the same time, you can open the jotter, the survey data, anything that's available on the project list, you can open at the same time. 

Jack 

So you can almost have two things on the go at once whereas you couldn't before. 

Dan 

Like Jack said, because it's so quick to open, I've found myself personally using this more than actually going into the project screen. You can quickly open it and if you've got a client order number to key in, you can just drop that in and yeah, I find it really useful. 

Dan 

So hopefully you will too. And like I said, that's coming in release 40. So that's our next major release. Another one we want to show you in a release 40 is to do with the on-stop feature. So some of you may have used this, some of you may not have used it. 

Dan 

And on-stop feature essentially allows you to flag a client to say that they're on-stop, whether it's they haven't paid their bills or you're trying to work contractually and you're just not going to do any work for them at the moment, you can mark that client on-stop rather than deleting them or removing them. 

Dan 

You can just simply say, look, we're not doing any work for them. And then that gets flagged up. Now we did have this feature available. But to be honest, it wasn't particularly widely used. And we've done quite a few improvements to it. 

Dan 

So hopefully, if you are in that situation, this is something that would be really useful to you. So as you can see, we've got a client over here. And this is just all of our testing clients that we've got set up on our demo system. 

Dan 

But you can see testing client 01, we've marked that as on-stop. So you can see from the list, right, we can't do any work for this particular client. And then if you were to go into that client, as you can see, the big red banner at the top is also indicating to us, hang on, this client's on-stop and we can't do any work for it, no work should be carried out. 

Dan 

So we've made it nice and easy for you to see that at a glance from the client list. But I appreciate not all the time you'll be working from the client list. Most people will be adding in projects from the project screen, for example. 

Dan 

So what we can do is now when you go and add a new project, if we go and try and add in a client that is on-stop, when we go to save it, it's going to actually prompt us and say, well, hang on a minute, this is on-stop. 

Dan 

So I'll just key in that particular client there. So this is the one that was on-stop. If I just go to save it, you'll see that we now get the prompt straight away and says, client's on-stop, no work should be carried out for this client. 

Dan 

So that's another new thing we've built in and done. 

Jack 

We've also made it more obvious if you go to select the client so if you didn't know the client code and you select it from the list, Dan just brings it up quickly. The on-stop indicator is now on any of these client pickers in the system so it should be more obvious when you go to book in the work that you shouldn't be booking in another job for this particular client until they're taken off stop essentially. 

Dan 

Oh, it looks like we've just got a question here. So, someone said, I've used on-stop in the past. Will the new features work with the previous clients of Marcus' on-estop? 

Jack 

Yeah, it will. So you'll just get the new visual styling for it, which is a bit smarter than it was before, but easier to see and you'll get all the new validation that we put in throughout the system and the new banner indicators as well. 

Dan 

That's our on-stop feature. And then the final thing you just wanted to quickly talk about before we wrap it up today is the document requests screen. So this is actually only available to super users. 

Dan 

And some of you may, again, may be familiar with it, may not be. But essentially, this allows you to see all of the documents that you've requested, basically that you've requested. But typically, people use it to see what's been requested on a particular day or in a particular afternoon. 

Dan 

So you can see how busy you've been. And this is our new document request screen. So now you'll be able to see what documents have been requested, who's requested it, when they requested it, things such as what's in the queue, what's not in the queue. 

Dan 

And then you can also change the queue that they're in. So if there's a queue that's busy, for example, you can switch the document into a different queue so that I'll then start producing. But the main change is actually our Cloud document option here. 

Dan 

So Jack, do you want to just quickly move on? Yeah. 

Jack 

So a lot of you probably won't see this option straight away. But we're working on a new document production engine at the moment. Some of you might have it in use on your quotes possibly. We do have it in beta for quotes at the moment. 

Jack 

And we've just added in this new cloud option on the document request screen so you can monitor which ones are going through our new cloud production engine. So this document engine essentially gets around the queue issues that you may have experienced in the past with the previous document production. 

Jack 

And there is no queue anymore. And documents produce much faster than before. Quotes especially, they produce directly on screen and produce in a couple of seconds in comparison. So maybe a couple of minutes before where you've got larger quotes. 

Jack 

And we're working on survey documents at the moment. And those should be ready to be integrated in the next month or so. And then we can get people moved over to the new engine. And hopefully, your documents will produce a lot quicker. 

Dan 

Yeah, that's it. That's always going to be a bonus. So like Jack said, yeah, we were using it a couple of places just on smaller documents at the moment. So your quotes and some things like that. But yeah, we are looking to beef these up and get them out on you on your survey reports. 

Dan 

So yeah, keep an eye on that, keep an eye on the blog posts. And yeah, we're really excited about this. That's going to be really good. I think that's our 20 minutes up today. So thanks very much for everyone for joining. 

Dan 

Much appreciated, as always. We'll be back again at the last Tuesday next month to go through another webinar. We don't actually have a topic at the moment, do we Jack? 

Jack 

Open for suggestions.

Dan 

Yeah, open for suggestions. If you've got any ideas or you want us to cover anything or go through anything in a bit more detail, please just drop us a message and we can take a look at that. So thanks again and have a good day. 

Dan 

Thanks very much.