After an intensive development period, we have released a major update of portatour® today. To read details about the new features, simply scroll down or use the following links:
We wish you lots of fun and success with the new functions and look forward to hearing from you at feedback@portatour.com.
Would you like to use appointments and public holidays that you manage in Outlook also in portatour® for scheduling without having to enter them twice manually? With the new calendar subscription function, you can do this in just a few steps. Appointments are automatically transferred to portatour® on a regular basis.
Important notes in advance:
To add a calendar subscription, proceed as follows:
Important note: Adding or editing a calendar subscription can only be done by the user themselves. Administrators or supervisors have no access to the subscription configuration of users, as this requires individual permissions of users at Microsoft. Nevertheless, as a user, please note that appointments from subscribed calendars are visible to supervisors and administrators in portatour® and may be transferred to third-party systems in your company. Therefore, to protect your privacy, proceed with caution when subscribing to private calendars .
Go to calendar view to check whether appointments have been successfully imported from the subscription. Please note that the automatic import process can take up to one minute for many appointments.
To edit or delete a calendar subscription, click on the name of the desired subscription in “Options > Calendar subscriptions” and then “edit” or “delete“. Deleting removes all subscribed appointments of the deleted subscriptions from portatour®.
The regular import of appointments from calendars happens fully automatically. If you actively use portatour® and one hour has passed since the last update, the update is automatically carried out in the background. This happens transparently, without blocking or notifying you.
However, if an error occurs, you will see a red warning in the main menu.
To see when the last update took place, click on the cogwheel in the top right-hand corner of the calendar view. Any errors that occurred during the update will also be displayed here.
You can also start an update manually here at any time. To do this, click on “Update calendar subscriptions“.
You can recognize subscribed appointments in all views (calendar, appointment list, schedule) by the Microsoft logo.
In addition, in the detailed view you will find a section containing information for the subscribed appointment.
In Online-Meetings you will find a “Join now” button.
Compared to normal appointments, subscribed appointments are restricted in two important ways:
Carry out these processes in Outlook instead. To quickly open the appointment there, click on “Open in Outlook” in the context menu or in the detailed view of the appointment. Any changes or deletions made there will be transferred to portatour® the next time the calendar subscription is updated.
Subscribed appointments are included in the schedule by default. If you do not want this for an appointment because it should not have any influence on your day trip, click on “Exclude appointment from schedule” in the context menu or in appointment details under “Actions”. In the calendar, these appointments are displayed in gray with the corresponding symbol.
It is important that appointments, which take place at customers, also have a reference to the corresponding customer in portatour®. This ensures that customers are not suggested more than once in schedules or that the last visit date of customers is updated correctly.
By default, portatour® attempts to automatically determine the customer reference for subscribed appointments using email addresses. For this purpose, the email addresses of appointments (organizer, participant) are searched for in the email addresses of your portatour® customers. All custom fields with the data type “e-mail address” are taken into account.
If exactly one customer is found in this way, the customer reference is set automatically.
If no customer is found, the appointment is provided with a warning – visually recognizable by a red question mark. Use the context menu or appointment details to select a customer for the reference or remove the customer reference, which will also remove the warning.
If several customers are found, the appointment is also provided with a warning. The customers found are offered for selection.
Note: You can also configure the automatic determination of the customer reference or the warning behavior for each subscribed calendar in the options, depending on your requirements.
When determining the appointment address, portatour® proceeds as follows by default:
Since an exact address is important for route planning, you can change the address yourself, edit and geocode it as you would with normal appointments. However, an address changed in this way is not synchronized back to Outlook. The change is retained in portatour® as long as the appointment address does not change in Outlook.
Note: You can also configure the automatic determination of the address or the error behavior yourself for each subscribed calendar in the options, depending on your requirements.
Appointments play an essential role in the visit plan calculation. Accordingly, their data quality is important. portatour® now displays a red message in the main menu if there are warnings for future appointments. Appointments from calendar subscriptions are also taken into account.
Click to go to the list of affected appointments. Open the detailed view of this appointment to see the respective warning message in red font. We recommend a prompt elimination of the causes to ensure a high quality of schedules.
The extended search now also supports relative values in the filtering of date fields.
Example: “customers, for which the last visit date is in the last 7 days.”
Relative filters allow you to reuse saved searches with date filters without having to adjust them every time you use them.
How to use relative date filters:
Proceed as follows to use the new print mode for printouts or PDF export:
To exit print mode, switch to “Print mode: off“.
This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.
The new display modes are available in every map of territory optimization and are suitable tools if you prefer manual optimization of areas instead of automatic optimization.
Click on the cogwheel at the top right. In the selection field “Display” you will find three new entries: beeline, distance zones and driving routes.
Note: In these display modes, the customers are automatically hidden so as not to cover the lines. To additionally show the customers, click on “customers: Show all” on the cogwheel.
For each employee, direct connecting lines are drawn between home location and all of its customers.
An intersection with the lines of another area can be an indication that customer assignment is in need of improvement. However, we recommend using the more modern route display to analyze the situation correctly.
The distance zones provides information on how long your employees have to travel to reach the individual regions of your sales area.
Light or non-colored regions indicate that the support of customers is associated with more driving time there. However, to analyze the situation correctly, we recommend color of customers after driving time.
By default, the system is divided into the following three zones, which are displayed in different shades of blue: up to 60 minutes driving time, up to 120 minutes driving time and up to 180 minutes driving time. To change the distance zones, use the “zone” selection box by the cogwheel.
The distance zone for a region is determined based on the nearest employee. If you only want to determine the distance zones based on one employee, switch from “All territories” to the desired region.
In “Routes” display mode, there are two options for Selection: “Routes from home location” and “Typical routes“.
Due to the complexity of the calculation, this display cannot be performed simultaneously for all territories. Select the area to be analyzed using the cogwheel.
All routes are displayed, which the employee must drive from his home location in order to reach each of his customers, which has entered a call interval, directly in the fastest way.
The green/orange/red color of driving distance indicates how long it takes to get there. You can use the cogwheel to change the limits for this color.
The thickness of the route indicates how frequently a road must be used to reach all customers.
This display is similar to “Routes from home location”, whereby the routes between adjacent customers are also visualized.
This illustration provides a good insight into which roads the employee is likely to drive on and how often on his tours in order to visit his assigned customers in the desired call interval.
If you wish, you can switch to “With neighboring territories” to see any overlaps in routes between employees. These overlaps are an indicator that there is potential for optimization.
After an intensive development period, we have released a major update of portatour® today. To read details about the new features, simply scroll down or use the following links:
We wish you lots of fun and success with the new features and look forward to hearing from you at feedback@portatour.com.
This news concerns administrators from company accounts with at least two users.
Previously, the user export was limited to the most important user fields. Since this update, the export contains all user fields that can be imported, e.g. also home location and working hours. This applies regardless of whether the export is carried out via the user interface or via API.
If you have previously imported organization-wide data – e.g. customer import, then a maximum of 100 users could be affected by this process. This limit has been removed. However, the limits for file size (30MB) and number of data records (100,000) of the imported file still apply.
This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.
The display of the territory surfaces is available in each map of the territory optimization.
Click on the cogwheel at the top right and switch to “Display: Customers + areas” or “Display: Areas”.
portatour® uses zip code boundaries when coloring areas. If there are several customers of several users in one zip code, it is assigned to the user that has the most customers there.
Depending on the space available, the area name is displayed complete or abbreviated.
Selectable key figures can be displayed below the area name. The number of customers in the area is displayed by default. To display other key figures, proceed as follows:
Up to three key figures can be displayed simultaneously.
This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.
For many tables in territory optimization, you now have the option of exporting them as an Excel file. To do this, click on the link “Export table / customer data / postal code-user assignment…” below the tables. The following window opens:
Select which data you would like to export: