This month had a bunch of great upgrades and a lot of work going into meeting some newer requirements for the automations system. There’s also so some important update notices in here so Read On!
You all will have noticed this nice new filter feature appear about half-way through the month.
The dashboard filter tool is designed to help different of levels of user get to the types of information they’d like to see on their dashboard. For example, a standard employee is likely only interested in their own actions and records, whereas a team leader will be interested in their team’s open actions and records.
The dashboard filter allows users to filter down to what is relevant to them, and then use the save tool to lock the dashboard view in place as their default view.
With the removal of the location filter last month, and with a much wider, more diverse group of users using Donesafe than when this dashboard was first designed, we decided that this level of control was the first step in allowing users to see the information they need to see in order to best do theirs jobs.
If you need any clarification on how the filter works and how to use it. Head to help.donesafe.com for more information and assistance.
We’ve been teasing this one for a while, and though it’s still in its infancy, it’s already getting some nice use. Through the ‘Monitor’ section, you’ll now see a new report: ‘User Directory’.
This report shows basic contact details for all users in your location and is part of the larger ‘Emergency Management’ upgrade in Donesafe. As I’ve said, it’s still in its infancy, but as you can see from the screenshot, you can filter and sort by location, organization, and even tags if, for example, you’re trying to contact your Fire Wardens. You will also be able to see users outside of your location also. To do this, click on the locations filter and change to ‘All’.
The same applies to location and tags.
There’s likely going to be some more activity in this area in the coming months so, as they say, watch this space.
Head to help.donesafe.com for more information and assistance.
It’s been a while since the ol’ acknowledgment report got any love, and in that time we got a good chunk of feedback about what we did wrong when we first built it. Here are the upgrades:
One thing; since the locations security update we’ve had a couple of users reporting that they can’t pick any users on the Acknowledgement report. Don’t worry; it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to- your users need a home location in order to be found in that report. Here’s a help article on it.
There were two notable updates to the knowledge base this month, both off the back of some user requests (so keep ‘em coming!).
We’d started getting some feedback around businesses wanting more detail captured during an initial incident report. Rather than expand the incident form, however, we’ve introduced a new system that allows you to configure your incident report form to include the ‘Add Incident Participant’ and even ‘Answer Template’ sections as part of a reporting wizard.
To reiterate; this is a configurable system so there’s no need to implement if it doesn’t suit your business’ processes. However, if you DO want more detail captured at the beginning of a report, this is a fantastic and very malleable way of doing so.
Part of the incident reporting feedback we’d received was also around making sure, not only that admins could choose the order of requested details, but also, have control over who sees the additional forms and under what circumstances.
For example, using the wizard builder, you can now offer up a specific incident template if the incident was recorded as a ‘Safety’ incident or a different template if it’s a ‘Quality’ incident. AND you can also have the option of showing that only to users who meet certain criteria, such as, their role must be ‘Manager’.
If you set it up and how you set it up is entirely up to you; the system was designed to be as malleable as possible in order to meet the needs of a wide range of businesses, without impacting those who choose not to use it.
If you’d like a demo of what it does and to learn how to set it up along with some of the trickier configurations, click here to organize a trial or tutorial.
Last month we wrote about Incident Types getting an overhaul. Now, Hazard Types have gotten the same treatment. As with incident types, you can now go as many deep as you want with Hazard sub-types. The incident type update was recorded here, which covers the guts of how it works with hazard types, but a few more updates were made this month to improve some systems around this upgrade.
It’s a little one, but a good one. In the past, if you named a module, Donesafe would have a crack at naming the plural of that module for you, and to be honest, we weren’t always good at it which lead to some silly situations. (No Donesafe, the plural of ‘Competency’ isn’t ‘Competencys’). So now you can add your own.
Just go to Settings > Modules then select the module you’d like to edit and go to the edit menu. You’ll see a new setting there: ‘Plural Display Name’. It’s a simple, but effective tweak that arose of a common complaint.
… let’s be honest, we probably should have fixed that ages ago. Hopefully, this resolves some of your access issues though. Enjoy!
Last month we reported a big update to location security (which you can read about here). This clamping down on location security however brought up some bugs which our older ‘spongier’ rules managed to avoid. To fix this, we made some changes to locations in the admin section which also have the added bonus of fixing some older issues.
There were a couple of other tweaks, but those are the main ones. Let us know if you think we missed anything.
Automations got a bunch of really nice upgrades this month to help you streamline your processes, better target your users, and even personalize your messaging. To find out more, read on…
So it’s been a few months since the major overhaul of workflows and the introduction of the new automations tool. I’m the first to admit that we’ve been dragging our feet on new tutorial materials; partly because those systems were still settling in and partly because we’ve been so busy! Now though we’re ready to flood you with new articles and tutorial videos. Here’s some of the newest stuff:
All of these tutorials are on the more advanced side of Donesafe’s automations so take your time, get comfortable, and see how you go! If you think we need more materials, don’t hesitate to reach out to support. Regular requests or even good ideas for support articles do get listened to and you might find that you suggest something and a day later it appears in the help section – so don’t be shy! Request away!
For the automators out there, this is one of the most exciting upgrades to the automations system this month, so rather than make you wait for it, let’s be greedy and jump right in.
You can now use placeholder text in your automated actions and notifications to include information from the record. This means that instead of an automated action that says…
… you can have…
Cool right? At first, it seems like just a nice change, but in terms of streamlining workflow, it can have a huge effect. For example, rather than receiving an email that a team member was injured then having to log into donesafe to get the details, you can now opt to see the basic details in your email immediately, enabling you to quickly complete your action on the spot.
It has other huge advantages as well. If for example, a team member’s document is expiring, in the past you could have set up automations to receive…
…which didn’t tell who’s document was expiring, or what the document was, so it was effectively useless. Instead, with new placeholder text, you can set up automations to say:
As you can probably tell, we love this new feature. The best thing about it is that it’s really easy to use. When choosing your text for an automation simply type the @ symbol to bring up a list of available options, select one and away you go. Here’s a tasty GIF to demonstrate.
And that’s it, a tiny change with YUGE implications. That’s what we like.
Head to help.donesafe.com for more information and assistance.
Disclaimer: this is an advanced feature.
This feature is for more advanced account setups; but it solves a major problem with User Collections that some accounts were having. User collections are a super malleable way of passively grouping users for use throughout Donesafe. When it came to Automations however, it wasn’t able to take a dynamic view of users based on the location of the record.
Well, you can now target your automations to a dynamic group of users based on the location of the record.
Let’s say an incident occurred in Wellington and you wanted to be able to notify all user/s with the Role ‘Team Supervisor’ in Wellington specifically to send them an action or bring them into the record.
To do this in automations, when you’re setting your ‘For Every’ field, right down the bottom, select, ‘Quick User Collection’. This will bring a user collection rule set into your active window.
Then, choose the following rules:
[Role] [Equal] [role name].
AND
[Active Locations] [Contains] [Record’s Location]
This user collection will now target all users with the role ‘Team Supervisors’ in the location of the incident. In the past to get this working for all your locations, it would have been different automations for each location. Now you can do it in one.
PLUS, if you’re using the super cool new tagging system, you can refine this even more to very specific users based on your tag setup using a collection like this:
Again, this is a more advanced feature, but golly, the possibilities for automations are truly awesome.
Head to help.donesafe.com for more information and assistance.
This one’s little but mighty handy. On all action notification emails from donesafe, you’ll now also see a link that takes you right to that action on the actions screen. This will help you quickly close off simple actions as they come up. Anything to help with action management right?
We’ve been hanging out for this for a while. It’s been an ongoing request for users to have more control over how and when users are being automatically added as involved in incidents. (example: when a worker is injured, their manager is automatically added as an investigator). That control is now yours to wield!
In incident automations you’ll see a new option under the ‘Create a new’ title: “Incident Participant”
Selecting this when building your automation will mean that as the result of your rules being met you can now add an incident participant to an incident. For example, let’s say that if you have a safety incident, you’d like to not only notify but automatically add the team supervisor in your location as an investigator to the incident, you can do that using this new tool (combined with new Quick user Selection tool) Nifty hey?
Want to learn how to do that? Click here to organize a trial or tutorial.
This one’s an awesome new feature. In the feature above I mentioned that you can add an incident participant – as a result of adding an incident participant. I kinda glossed over it there, but it’s actually a fantastic upgrade.
This allows you to target very specific situations with your incident participant automations. Before you could only trigger automations for an undefined number of incident participants. Now though, if I wanted to, I could configure automations to fire when a person is added as a ‘Person Affected’ AND they lose time as a result of this, but ONLY if there’s a high risk of it occurring again.
It’s a super powerful feature and if you’d like to learn how to use it, click here to organize a trial or tutorial.
This was a long time coming. We’ve had a lot of people wanting to be able to configure the old hardcoded incident automations. Back in the day, if you were added as a person affected in an incident, your manager WOULD be added as an investigator and there was nothing you could do to turn that off or to have it behave differently. Now, with the new automation tools listed above, we’ve finally reached a point where you can.
Before you panic, don’t worry, the old behavior is still there, only instead of being hidden behind a wall of code, you can now see them happily nested in your automations section under the incidents tab. You’ll see three new automations there marked as (System) automations.
You can turn them off, edit them; it’s totally up to you.
The only real behavioral change you’ll see is a really good one: You can no longer add duplicate Incident Participants. SO, that means, you can’t add the same person as an investigator twice. This was a major pain point for heavy users in the past where they had some managers getting spammed by ‘Automatically assigned as an investigator’ emails as they were added to the same incident multiple times. This can no longer happen thanks to this glorious tweak.
… because nobody knew what a ‘Call To Action’ link was supposed to be. Literally, it’s a custom link; so we’ve now called it that. It’s a minor thing, just wanted to mention it.
Psst. This custom link feature is becoming super useful now in automations. It allows you to send a custom link to anything along with or instead of a link to a record. Don’t be shy, have a play!
Since updates are coming so quickly and consistently now, rather than list every update in a blog article, instead we’ve set up a new in the Donesafe help section. We update these logs once a week so if you need to check any recent changes you can do so there. These changes include new features as well as new bugs so it’s always worth a look.
Of course, if you have any questions about any of those items, don’t hesitate to reach out, either by commenting here or reaching out to support.
Until next time; stay safe out there!