FOB3 User Feedback
We’re capturing the feedback we get from users and publishing it here. Please let us have your thoughts so we can fix any issues and plan future developments.
December 2nd.
Documents and Correspondence Not Found
Steve says
List Links to Documents and Correspondence are hidden behind the Expand (Drop Down) Arrows. This is a change to help reduce the clutter on busy pages for the user, and speed up the database access – basically the fewer the links on the page the faster the server can populate it. We understand it’s different but overall think this is the best approach both in terms of complexity and performance.
Actions
1. The action box when assigning emails. A couple of times the action box has ‘collapsed’ so nothing can be seen in it….2. Ditto when adding actions to a company/plan
Tags
created a tag for a series of clients. Adding a new client and using the Tag created, I managed to miss a capital letter at the beginning of the word – e.g. banking instead of Banking. Subsequently gone back into the client to amend and although changed and saved, the tag still appears with lower case letter b instead of upper case B. Now have duplicated tags
Steve says
I just created an action and assigned a new tag User_Test then created another action and assigned a new tag user_test. Both actions now carry the tag User_Test.
We use a look up feature to bring up existing data from the database. When the app sees something it recognises in the look up it assigns that value, as opposed to what’s actually been written. It seems the look up isn’t recognising differences in capitalisation. I can see both advantages and disadvantages to this but the underlying technology is a standard approach to grouping like records and we wouldn’t want to fool around with that. So I guess we need to monitor usage to see if it becomes a problem.
Navigation
tried searching under Plan for a company, not being sure if I’d created a plan for the action I’d undertaken a few days ago. The search threw up the client which then puts the company back into Relationships. It turned out I hadn’t created an action so had to add under the Plan page in the normal fashion
Dashboard Completed Actions
“checked the boxes of the two tasks completed. The tasks greyed-out but did not clear. I refreshed the screen. The two tasks cleared but left the next two tasks with checked boxes which then actioned to grey-out…I had to reinstate by going into plans and unchecking the task for today.”
Steve says
I think the problem here is a change in the apps behaviour. FOB2 automatically refreshed the page on checking the completed box. It then went off and updated the database in the background. With FOB3 we’re using a different technology with the message log telling us the update is complete. If we refresh the page before the message log comes back it actually updates a different record.
I almost did the same thing completing actions in Dashboard.
There are excellent reasons for using the stuff we are now – not the least of which is the behaviour is very similar in Google Mail and that will become true of more on line software. We think any user difficulties with this will be short term, just a question of getting used to the app reacting differently to FOB2
December 1st – Incoming Email wasn’t working
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Steve says
this was a temporary blip only. The new mail set up was sending out thousands of error messages so the guys took it off line until they could figure out what was going wrong and fix it.
The situation continued for around 12 hours but no email was lost. Everything sent to drop boxes was queued and delivered when the fix had been implemented.
December 1st – Assign Emails in Dashboard has changed
. FOB2 displayed Opportunity (Plan) and Company to make life easier when assigning the email and adding/editing actions.
Steve says
Action on this item is in place. We’re working on a solution – technology isn’t the problem, decent workflow is.
December 1st -Task Assignments and Address Countries
had been reset to the default during the changeover.
Steve says
We’re looking into this but have no idea what happened. Obviously inconvenient I don’t think we can do anything but apologise for the inconvenience. We won’t leave it there. We need to find out what happened to understand any implications for other records.
November 30th Site Not Responding
– Andy Boddice
Steve says
Embarrassed grimaces all around – unfortunately the server crashed sometime yesterday morning and the server was un-available for several hours. We’re guilty as charged and suitably chastised.
What went wrong
To improve response times with the Add widgets we’d used some clever caching techniques for particular pieces of the code. When people started to use it this clever trick sent everything into a spin and brought down the whole app.
We didn’t catch this in testing before deploy because we couldn’t test it with sufficient volume. Unfortunately it’s one of those “sods law” things – if anything can go wrong it will, and at the worst possible time. In this case everybody with responsibility for keeping the app up was tied up on other things, and for several hours.
The “turbo” improvement was backed out as soon as we could get to it and FOB3 performance has been great ever since. Apologies from Steve to everybody who was inconvenienced by this, and thanks to Andy for bringing it to our attention.
