Did you know how helpful the Timesheet Required checkbox is on the User Demographic form?

On the User Demographic form in the Timesheet options area, there is a checkbox called ‘Timesheet Required’.

This checkbox is useful in 2 major areas that you may already be familiar with

1. Timesheet alerts – including those in the reminder emails that are required to submit timesheets
2. Timesheet status report – an Advanced report that shows user timesheet status such as Approved, Submitted, Missing, Open, etc. You can use the Timesheet Required checkbox on the report form to include only those users that must enter timesheets.

What is commonly overlooked, however, is the Summary reports of OpenAir have the ‘Timesheet Required’ checkbox filtering option as well.

How can this be helpful? Many times you may want to generate a report of only ‘active’ resources working on projects and entering – perhaps for billable hours reports, invoicing preparation reports, and so forth. OpenAir Summary reports provide the option to ‘exclude transactions associated to inactive entities’ but this is not a good option to use on Summary reports. Although you may be running summary reports with a specific base data type in mind like a User report or a Project report, checking this ‘exclude’ option will remove data from the report that is associated to ANYTHING that is inactive and related to the report including those projects you’ve inactivated that are closed, any customer POs closed, and so forth. Not an idea exclude filter when you only want to exclude users that are inactive and contributing to delivered time.

The Timesheet Required checkbox provides an alternative. When inactivating a user, uncheck the timesheet required checkbox as well. Running reports for active user time then becomes dependent on the Timesheet Required checkbox and voila! You’ve got your inactive user filter basically.

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Did you know you can limit the timeframe someone can proxy?

Proxy is a handy feature in OpenAir to allow administrators to log in as users for troubleshooting and for reviewers of timesheets, expenses, invoices, and so forth to setup a backup while they are unavailable. By default the proxy feature allows a user to have a list of proxy or ‘log in as…’ resources along with their OpenAir role. Once setup, the user can continue to proxy in as other resources in their list until that resource becomes inactive or when an administrator removes the proxy setup.

There is a feature in the system that allows you to automatically expire proxy by a certain date as well as have the option to keep the proxy in place until the resource becomes inactive. If you navigate to the Administration module -> Global settings tab there is an option called Proxy Expiration (for those on the Account module, this can be found under Company -> Settings).

When you activate this feature, the proxy table on a user changes slightly to provide a date for expiration. By leaving this date field blank, the proxy will not expire.

This way you can setup ongoing proxies as well as auto-expiration proxies! Auto-expiration is a good option to consider when you have someone stepping in for management while they are on vacation.

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Did you know that you can allow task creation but not allow copying, duplication, or moving of the task?

When you define your business roles and OpenAir user role permissions, many times you have conflicts in how you want people to create or edit data in the system. Project tasks, in particular,are a good example of this. Let us say you want to allow people to create tasks. When a person is given permission to create a task, they also get the permission to duplicate, copy, and move the task once the task is created. You can find these controls below the schedule management options of predecessor, split, etc. which are below the Notes field.

Like many forms in the system, the task form has form permission controls to change fields to read-only or required, or even to hide them from certain user roles. One thing you may notice is that there is no field associated to the copy, move, or duplicate functions found on the task form. Can you get rid of these to make sure users who create tasks follow your defined task creation policy? An example task creation policy that would benefit from removing these functions would be project creation limited to defined project template copying. To enforce this policy, you usually want to prevent ad-hoc task or task structure copying which can taken from any project. If you need more tasks, you must complete a blank task form from scratch to ensure all required fields are set correctly. By allowing task copying from any project, you may be causing inconsistencies in your data setup which, in turn, is impacting reporting.

There is a way to allow task creation but hide the copy, move, and duplicate features at the same time. It is how permissions are set on the OpenAir role. On the role, there are 3 checkboxes for permissions related to tasks

1. View all tasks and phases
2. View and modify tasks and phases
3. View and modify tasks and phases, but not create new tasks and phases

• If you check or enable only ´view all tasks and phases´, a user cannot create tasks manually.
• If you check or enable only ´view and modify tasks and phases´, a user can create and modify tasks and phases. NOTE: you do not have to have #1 checked then but most accounts do by default.
• If you check or enable only ´view and modify tasks and phases, but not create new tasks and phases´, a user can change tasks and phases but cannot create new ones. Usually OpenAir configured accounts have EITHER #2 or #3 enabled, but not both. Checking this option removes the copy, move, and duplicate functions but also removes the ability to create tasks and phases.

What happens if you enable both #2 and #3? It seems like they would conflict with each other but actually what happens is that a user is granted permission to create a task (and modify it) but the feature control from #3 removes the copy, move, and duplicate feature. So you can hide these task functions by just enabling all task edit controls on the OpenAir role like this

and the task form ends up looking like this – copy, move, and duplicate features removed.

Did you ever want to lock a column while scrolling through your data views?

There are quite a large number of data columns that can be added to your customized view or report results when displayed on the screen within OpenAir. Usually the columns on the far left are reference columns to the data in all of the right hand columns. Scrolling many times gets confusing or frustrating if we ‘lose’ your row place as you look at data across the screen. The color differentiation between rows that OpenAir provides helps some but what you are really looking for is a ‘column lock’ function.

Look above the first couple of columns in your list view or report results data view for a lock symbol. If you don’t see it, check your personal settings to make sure you have the following enabled (check): ‘Enable anchoring of left columns when scrolling horizontally’. This option allows reference columns to be locked in place so you can scroll to the right and not lose that reference column on the left.

Once enabled, you should be able to see a lock symbol in columns on the far left. Not every column will have a lock symbol – those columns which are a ‘combination’ of columns like the project list view which has an Hours column with sub-columns of planned, worked, approved, and so forth doesn’t have a lock symbol. The project name does, however.

To lock a column, click on the lock symbol. It should highlight to a yellow color and a freeze line will appear at the end of the column – now you can scroll to the right. To unlock the column, simply click on the highlighted lock symbol and it will return back to its gray inactive state!

Unlocked view: (Click image to enlarge)

Locked view: (Click image to enlarge)