We are pleased to announce an update to Workbooks that adds many new features including a new Wizard to help you make all the right changes to records when a Person moves from one Employer to another, and the ability to restrict the values on a picklist to just those relevant for the record you have open.

Note: The Workbooks service will be intermittently unavailable between 08:00 am – 09:00 am UK time on Saturday 16 May 2015. If you log into your database on Saturday, you may get a message informing you that your database is being upgraded. Your database should be available for use within approximately 30 minutes of receiving the message.

Change Employer Wizard

When you change (or delete) the Employer field from a person record, Workbooks will launch a short wizard to help you make all the right changes to the CRM system.  It will ask you when they left their previous employer, will create the ‘previously employed by’ relationship and also prompt you to archive their previous work email address and contact details.  This wizard will make it easier for you to deal with people who have left, rather than just putting (LEFT) after their surname!

External Links

You will now be able to use a unique URL in notification and scheduled emails as well as in email templates and reports which, when clicked, will allow the recipient to link directly to the relevant record within Workbooks (assuming they have an enabled login), thus saving time looking for the right record.

You will also be able to copy the URL link into an email or other communication to send to a user that has a valid login to the same database.  When you first login after the new release, you’ll see a request to allow Web Notifications on your screen.  You can Dismiss this request but you’ll see the message again at every login until you either Accept or Deny/Block the request.  We encourage users to accept Web Notifications so that Workbooks can offer a better interface when loading External Links.  If you change your mind later, you can change the setting in your browser’s configuration area.

Constrained DLIs

We have extended the capabilities of Dynamic Linked Item (DLI) custom fields so you can constrain the picklist of results using a value from a form field.   This is very useful to reduce the number of search results returned by a DLI report to only include entries that are relevant.  For example if you want a DLI on an organisation record for the finance contact, you will be able to constrain the report to only include people that are ‘Employed’ by the organisation by passing the organisation field into the report as a constraint. 

Configuration, export and print activity audit

We have extended the audit functionality so that changes to the configuration of Workbooks are also audited.  This means you can see who added a custom field and when.  In addition, auditing functionality has been extended so that it’s now possible to see audit records showing who has exported or printed data.

Import Template Generator

Using the Importing tool you can now generate import templates to make it easier to load your data into Workbooks.  The import template generator will create a CSV file with the correct column headings into which you can populate your data.  The templates will create columns for all the standard fields and any custom fields you might have created.  You can even generate import templates based on page layouts, which will only include the fields that are relevant for a specific page layout. 

Enhancements to Advanced Security functionality

Recalculate Permissions

If you’re using the Advanced Security functionality and change the sharing rulesets that you want to apply to records, it is now possible for you to update all the relevant records so that they adopt the new sharing rulesets, making controlling the security of your data much quicker and easier.

Resetting Permissions on Queue assignment

Now when setting up a Queue you can decide whether or not adding a record to that Queue resets the Permissions that apply.  This functionality will enhance the control of visibility of records within a workflow.

Matching on blanks in import

When importing data, looking for matching records based on blank values can slow the import down considerably.  Our import wizard no longer defaults to matching blank values, although a user can make a conscious decision to enable it if required.  By not looking up blank values for matching purposes your imports will run much more quickly.

Reporting on relationships

It is now possible to build a report that includes one column listing all the relationships that between Organisations on your database, rather than having to create different columns for each relationship type.

Custom Fields on Notes and Emails

Custom Fields can now be added to Note records or Emails, which can be positioned on the Main area of the form or within the Additional Fields area.

API data is reportable

To make integration work more maintainable, API data is now reportable.  This also opens up possibilities to use API data to build Dynamic Linked Items and Dynamic Picklists.

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