Releases/Winter 2020

The Winter 2020 update (v13.3.0) was released on December 3, 2020.

• Release preview Blog
• What’s in store for partners? Blog
• Winter Update 2020 YouTube

Update webinars: YouTube

• Intro
• Inspections
• Platform
• Innovations
• Q&A

Inspections

Create a mobile report from the Questionnaire Designer

We have added an option to create and define a simple report directly from the Questionnaire Designer. As a part of the template’s Properties pane on the right, you can find ways how to visualize your answers on the report, including table formats and styles for questions and question groups. This report will be used for generating in the mobile app or web app. See Mobile reports for Resco Inspections for more details.

Advanced: Customize questionnaire reports further in the Report Designer

After you set up your report in Questionnaire Designer, perform additional customization in the Report Designer.

Preview reports in Questionnaire Designer

A new Report button has been added to the Preview section of the toolbar. It allows you to preview your current report structure.

Pre-defined report templates

Three predefined report themes can be selected directly in the Questionnaire Designer.

Run the questionnaire report for multiple questionnaires

One automatic report file can contain information from multiple answered questionnaires.

Switch apps in Manager’s experience

The manager can choose between two default apps while using the Inspections on Resco Cloud web app. This allows them to test the Inspections application without having to download the mobile version.

Rewrite or turn off welcome emails in Manager’s experience

When adding a new user, you can now choose whether to send a default welcome email with the users’ credentials or turn it off completely. This applies to the batch import of users through the Resco Cloud Admin Console as well. You can also rewrite the default email if necessary.

Innovations

Houston on Android

Houston is now on iOS, Android, and web apps. Although the augmented-reality (AR) capabilities are not available yet on Android, if a call is initiated from an AR-enabled iOS device, the caller with an Android device can do the drawings and provide remote visual guidance to the iOS colleague. The full AR integration and plane detection is planned for Q1.

Another good news is that Android support makes Houston available also on ruggedized devices such as Cat S61, Zebra, or RealWear HMT1.

Houston on any form

With the latest release, users no longer need an Inspections license to use Houston. Consequently, they can access Houston calls from a standard entity form. There is one difference between Houston on questionnaires and forms:

• On questionnaires, the Houston (or Remote Assistance) button is added automatically to the hamburger menu.
• On forms, you need to add this command manually for each entity.

Adding Houston to forms

1. Edit the app project.
2. Select the entity from the Project menu.
3. Click Show UI to display the list of views, forms, and charts.
4. Double-click the form where you want to add the Houston command.
5. Click Edit to display the command editor.
6. Add RemoteAssistance to the Selected Commands pane.
7. Save everything and publish the project.

Houston: calling from the web

Another functionality that was added is the ability to initiate Houston calls from the web app (until now you were able to only accept calls on the web). The process is the same as for a mobile app – open any questionnaire or a standard entity form and select the appropriate command from the hamburger menu. After the call is initiated, the caller operates within the standard web interface.

Houston: plane detection

By implementing plane detection, the precision of the drawing got to another level. The AR annotations now stick to the object even when the device is moving. The following example shows how in reality the “planes” or the surfaces are read by an iPad LIDAR Pro.

Houston video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byvxcuq9K1w YouTube

Houston security improvements

To keep your Houston communication safer, you must now enter an additional Agora parameter, the app certificate, into your Houston configuration in Woodford.

Resco on RealWear

RealWear is a ruggedized head-mounted tablet (HMT1) that is suitable for rough environments. It can operate in rain, dust, freezing, or very noisy environments. With the aim of covering as many use cases and scenarios as possible, you can now use simpler workflows (including Houston) on RealWear devices. It is fully voice-operated and Resco is one of the few (if not the only) providers of both digital workflows and remote calls. A yet more comprehensive set of features is planned for the next release.

YouTube videos:

• Resco on RealWear
• RealWear - raw screen recording

Platform

Salesforce Chatter

The support for Salesforce Chatter, the popular collaboration platform of the Salesforce ecosystem, premiered in the previous release of Resco mobile apps, is now out of beta. You can now configure when to synchronize your feeds and how to deal with images, allowing you to strike your own balance between API calls consumption and a seamless chatter experience, both online and offline.

See Chatter for more information.

Salesforce: synchronize shared records

Shared records require special attention during synchronization. With this release, we have implemented support for the synchronization of shared records with the Salesforce backend server. See Shared records on Salesforce for more information.

Home screen designer improvements

In the continuous effort to make Woodford more user-friendly and app design more intuitive, we have done several improvements to the home screen designer.

• You can now change home screen icons in a WYSIWYG manner, simply by selecting them from the Images pane. You can also easily upload new icons.
• The banner or logo image, displayed on the top of the menu, received a similar treatment.
• Sections are a new element that you can add to the home screen menu. They serve as a separator, organizing menu items into groups.

Multiple apps

Users can now switch between app projects in their apps:

• In the mobile apps, go to Setup/Settings to change between apps.
• In the web app, switch using the profile button.

In Woodford, in app project properties, you can use the App parameter to assign projects to app groups. Each group can include several app projects, and app users can switch between the app groups.

Beautified default templates

Resco set its foot to making the app more visually appealing – starting with some default templates. With the implementation of Sections into the home screen menu, you can also see new icons and default templates organization. Here is a list of the templates that were reworked:

• Resco Cloud – Sales
• Resco Inspections – Inspector
• Dynamics – Default Sales
• Dynamics – Inspector
• Salesforce – Inspector, Field Service, Sales

Create a new app project using these templates to benefit from these changes.

Synchronization: more finetuning

Advanced sync setup (in the sync config file) now offers an additional option, primarily for Dynamics users.

You can now configure incremental sync to not sort records by the versionnumber field. Microsoft recommends using versionnumber sorting as it greatly improves the performance of some fetches. However, our tests show that in some cases, it has the opposite effect. Setting on/off this flag can change fetch performance from minutes to a fraction of a second - or vice versa. The reason apparently lies in the SQL server setup (definition of indexes, etc.) and cannot be predicted. Use this flag as the last resort if you have an extremely slow fetch in incremental sync. See Disabled sorting by version number for more information.