Release 40 (2 April 2024)
Improved mobile performance:
Improved layout, especially on roster pages and for administrators undertaking edit functions.
Improved performance when in areas of unreliable connectivity.
Allow users to request amendments to approved leave requests; updated audit trail for such requests and approvals.
Further improvements to self-roster functions:
Ability to preview a roster on the main roster page, in context of all other rosters, rather than being confined to the self-roster finalisation page.
Ability for roster administrators to see block-outs when editing shifts after the roster is finalised.
Show payroll periods on the self-roster selection window to assist users when picking their shifts.
Show users the selections they have made at other hospitals, even if those selections have not yet been finalised or published.
Work rules can now select multiple roster types as part of a single rule.
Warning note if a rule is constructed that does not apply to any rosters or shifts.
New leave request rule to aggregate non-continuous leave over any period, e.g. to auto-decline any request that results on more than 5 leave days per month.
Improved notifications for reminder acknowledgements.
Improved Excel export flexibility.
Allow administrators to apply Default permissions to any user, even if they are part of another permission group.
Improved layout of the 'Pattern' admin page, to better summarise the details of existing patterns.
Improved editing and naming of roster views
Reinstatement of Event QR codes - decommissioned in February 2022 - to allow automatic attendance recording for events and meetings.
Allow users to set their own custom week colours, rather than rely on HosPortal defaults.
Enhanced 'teams' invitation to repeating events, to ensure invitations and reminders are automatically updated as users are added to and removed from teams.
Improved ability to add skills and teams to an existing shift template
Bug fixes:
Properly reflect a user's change in role when the roster is viewed in 'staff' mode.
Prohibit users taking shifts off the market where the shift is past their role end date.
Better identification of valid rosters when selecting multiple days in building/editing shift patterns.
Various useability improvements in response to customer feedback
Various other minor bug fixes.
Release 39 (29 February 2024)
Substantial enhancements to the self-roster block-out functions:
Optionally allow entire day block-outs, not just shifts
Allow block-out quota structures to be defined independently from the shift quota structure.
Allow unlimited block-outs
Improved visibility of block-outs in the roster-building rosters
Improved 'Fill with pattern' function when there are multiple shifts available on a single day: automatically assign to the next available shift, do not fill multiple shifts by default, and allow users to override default selections.
Ability to define custom 'shortname' formats. Previously HosPortal default was the surname followed by the first name initial (Jane Smith would be 'SmithJ'). You can now define almost any pattern you like which will automatically apply when you add or upload new users (e.g. 'JaneS', 'Smith-Jane' and 'SMIJ'). You can even apply different patterns to different roles (so Consultants might be 'SMITH' and trainees might be 'SmithJane').
Improved presentation of rules for the shift market, especially for obsolete rosters.
Improved presentation of role start and end dates on staff exports.
Fix bug prohibiting users with appropriate skills picking up shifts from the main shift page (market page was unaffected)
Improved SMS counting function, to report both the number of communications sent and the total individual SMS transmissions (used for invoicing purposes).
Improved treatment of leave in self-roster and algorithm calculations: leave days reduce the hours/shifts that users need to be assigned to over a period.
Improved behaviour of noticeboard items:
Clearer messaging when users dismiss pinned noticeboard items
Improved ability for administrators to edit existing noticeboard items
Improved reminder acknowledgement function.
Fix bug related to timezones when subscribing to iCal.
Fix bug for incorrect time reporting for ad-hoc shifts.
Various other minor bug fixes and user interface improvements.
Release 38 (1 February 2024)
This is a hygiene release related to HosPortal updating some versions of the software it uses. Admin users may need to refresh their browsers to ensure they get the optimal performance from the new software.
Release 37 (23 January 2024)
New 'pre-launch' message option for self-rosters, to flush out users who are not intending to participate before quotas are confirmed.
Ability to update quotas in automated roster building after draft rosters have been generated by HosPortal's algorithm.
Scheduled exports can now do a single day.
Leave export date range extended from 3 months to 12 months.
Improved user login timeout function to improve security.
Various other minor bug fixes and user interface improvements.
Release 36 (15 December 2023)
Improved power of Teams and Skills functions:
Send direct messages to people on specific teams or people with specific skills.
Create events that invite all people of specific teams or skills
Improved 'Move user' function to better identify slots that require certain skills and teams; improved UI to allow selection of slots.
Leave pre-approval analysis can now filter by team and skill requirements to assess where there might be shortages of critical staff.
Ability to automatically vacate all affected shifts when someone needs to take leave after their shifts have been published (providing the leave approver also has permission to manage all the relevant rosters).
Improved admin dashboard: when showing conflicts, only show the assignments that are in conflict, not all assignments on conflicted shifts.
Significant enhancements to the 'finalise' process in self-rosters
Finalise process is now managed on a separate tab
More control to users about how to treat vacant shifts
Better feedback on the implications of self-roster decisions
Better tracking of obsolete reminders and alerts, e.g. if reminders are being sent to no-longer-active users: better visibility on the Admin Dashboard; better insight into the obsolete personnel.
Various improvements to PDF exports to show additional data and improve legibility.
Ability to identify the templated staff after a shift is published.
Ability to highlight Cancelled sessions on the roster page, as you can already do for vacancies and conflicts
Show shift/roster colours on each user's calendar. Previously the colours were for the roster group only.
Bug fix: can now override someone's specialised permission group with the Default permission group.
Various other minor bug fixes, useability and performance improvements.
Release 35 (6 December 2023)
Complete rebuild of shift conflict rules to allow greater flexibility and power:
Apply shift conflicts to roster tags, roster types and specific roles
Multi-select rosters
Allow exceptions (e.g. 'applies to all rosters except night shifts'; 'applies to all roles except Consultants')
Clean-up of the types of conflicts allowed to make them more intuitive
Greater clarity to roster administrators when they break the rules: more description on the rules themselves; more information shown in many more locations where knowing the rules might be appropriate.
Improved application of shift conflict rules to prevent user swapping into inappropriate shifts.
New work rule for 'contracted hours', which reflects FTE status.
New 'fill with roster' function visible on a staff view that allows a user to be assigned to any roster over any timeframe with a few clicks. Short-circuits the need to create a pattern when there is only a single roster.
Improved self-roster and auto-fill functions:
'Test email' function for self-rosters to allow a roster administrator to see a mock-up of the email that will be sent to any user. Includes self-roster reminders and emails sent after the roster is finalised and shifts are published.
Improved management of the self-roster finalisation process to make it more efficient and intuitive.
Fill algorithm now considers teams and skills. Great for medicine and imaging.
Removed ability to delete shifts when finalising a roster. Instead unfilled shifts are always marked vacant.
Optional ability to show roster name attached to the shift name as part of the view settings.
Improved calculation for invoicing when a shift is split.
Better warnings when an administrator tries to delete a site-wide roster view.
Better and more explicit management of the option that allows user to vacate their own shifts within certain rules.
'Direct message' function adds the ability to remove people who have not yet started from broadcast messages.
Improve multi-select when replacing someone on a shift that allows multiple role types. Previously multi-select assumed replacing a user with another of the same type, rather than allowing selection of other types that could fill the assignments.
New leave rule: limit on the number of leave days over an arbitrary timeframe. e.g. limit of 5 days per 4-week cycle.
Bug fix: clean up shift swap requests once a shift has been reassigned by an administrator.
Bug fix: leave exports were only showing dates of the originally-approved leave and not any later updates.
Various other minor bug fixes, useability and performance improvements.
Release 34 (12 October 2023)
New work rule option: limit on number of shifts over a timeframe.
New change request rule option: allow non-administrative users to vacate their own shifts.
Improved presentation where a user might break a shift conflict rule or work rule:
Combine all users who break 'work rules' and 'conflict rules' into one category
On mouse-over show all the rules that a user might break.
Fixed an issue where team conflict was shown even when a user was in one of the allowable teams.
Improved ability to use team-based staff views on the roster pages:
Team-based staff views will now respect the master team order
Can filter to show only specific teams in each view.
Improved roster views and view options:
Ability to show roster tags on the roster page.
Ability to change and save view settings on the templates pages
Show the count of people in each sub-heading category of leave, unallocated, available, etc.
Highlight unallocated users with leave requests that have not yet been approved.
Fixed bug when hiding unused locations.
New alert option if a shift name has changed.
Improved ability to see where patterns apply to specific teams.
Further improvements to leave analysis:
Show draft shifts to leave approvers.
Check skills and teams when determining staff supply and demand.
Various minor user interface improvements, efficiency enhancements (especially when using patterns) and bug fixes
Release 33 (21 September 2023)
Completely rebuilt leave analysis for when administrators consider whether they will approve leave:
Separate tabs for seeing information about (1) this user's shifts and templates, (2) the number of other users on leave, and (3) the impact of approving leave by considering supply of staff and demand of shifts.
Rethought approach to analyse the impact of any leave on the roster, using the Hungarian Method to try to optimise the placement of remaining staff into vacant shifts.
Ability to consider unpublished templates in leave analysis, to decide if those shifts will go ahead or be cancelled. So leave analysis can work on future days when there are no published shifts (e.g. in 12 months' time) or only some of the shifts have been built.
Ability to select the impact on leave on different roles, which is helpful if there are shifts that multiple roles can be assigned to.
Improve reporting to combine multiple roster groups in the one report, e.g. to show hours worked across clinical allocations and on-call in the one summary.
Ability to see roster types and shift tags on the Admin Dashboard.
Improved performance and UI when using roster 'types' on conflict rules and work rules.
Improved leave alerts: send automated alert if someone requests leave within a certain period of time. Useful to automate alerts to an administrator if someone needs sick leave today.
Improved user experience on self-rosters.
Allow administrators to attach files to self-roster reminders, e.g. to attach hospital by-laws or other roster rules and instructions.
Improved staff duplicate matching on uploads if first and last names are accidentally transcribed.
Improved approach to checking unallocated staff when there are different standard session times, or overlapping standard session times.
Various minor bug fixes and user interface refinements.
Release 32 (27 August 2023)
This release contains three major and long-requested improvements:
Completely rebuilt, more intuitive and more visual user interface for managing user templates on location-based rosters, such as clinical and theatre allocations. Many roster administrators have had a chance to explore this already in a beta version.
Further improvements to work rules and shift conflict rules to allow roster tags and HosPortal's in-built roster types, and allow individual rosters. This considerably simplifies rule creation and management. For instance, to create rules that prohibit staffing within 12 hours of any night shift (even if there are 8 different night rosters); or limit users to no more than 5 endoscopy sessions per month.
Team-based permissions, for instance to allow Consultants to manage the rosters and leave of people in their own team.
But there is more...
Allow shift alerts to apply to specific roles types.
On staff-based roster views, allow filtering and selection of individual staff, e.g. to just show 3 people you are interested in managing.
Ability for users who are eligible to do a shift to see any custom invoice rate applicable to that shift on the Market page. People unable to do the shift cannot see the special invoice rate.
New leave request rules to allow checking for shift conflicts, for instance to automatically deny leave if someone is already staffed on that day.
On staff export, option to include custom data in the export, e.g. AHPRA number or employee ID code.
Various improvements to self-roster and the finalisation process.
Improved process to work out if newly-added users already have a HosPortal profile elsewhere.
Various minor bug fixes and user interface improvements
Release 31 (2 August 2023)
Improved functions and useability enhancements for self-rostering functions:
Ability to administrators to see all users' leave when building rosters, even for days a user has not selected.
More feedback and warnings on changing the state of a self-roster, particularly if aborting a live self-roster process or changing self-roster settings after launch.
Greater flexibility to change certain self-roster settings once a process is launched.
Ability to set priorities for HosPortal's automated shift-filling algorithm: our algorithm will attempt to fill more important or difficult shifts first.
Ability to use work rules to automatically fill shifts (e.g. 'no more than 38 hours per week; no consecutive shifts'); no need to use quotas at all.
Ability to decide whether HosPortal's auto-fill will attempt to fill shifts even where no user has made a selection.
Improved staff layouts on rosters, including a setting to show the number of hours each staff member is working across all shifts in the view.
For private hospitals that allow doctors to automatically invoice for on-call shifts, allow invoice rates to be set for individual shifts, overriding the standard shift invoice rates. So now administrators can apply a bonus payment for a certain day which will automatically be included in any invoice.
Allow different work rules to be applied to different roles.
Improved search/filter and editing functions on shift conflict rules; checks to prevent duplicate rules.
Improved efficiency in applying shift patterns to multiple users.
Improved layout of roster administration pages, and ability to filter rosters by team and skill.
Various bug fixes, and a number of useability, speed, cosmetic and interface enhancements.
Release 30 (27 June 2023)
Ability to track full-time-equivalent (FTE) staffing for part-time staff. Many employees are part-time and have FTE less than 100%. Administrators can now:
Optionally assign FTE to staff, e.g. 100% FTE (works 5 days per week) or 40% FTE (works 2 days per week)
See FTE staff status in various locations
Optionally, use FTE in work rules, e.g. a limit of '38 hours per week per FTE' will limit a 50% FTE to 19 hours per week.
Use FTE when calculating self-roster quotas.
Check this short video on Shift Work Rules
A number of improvements to Self-roster picking and shift-filling tools:
Improved self-rostering shift-picking functions, to select and de-select preferences for an entire day with a single click, rather than selecting every shift.
Improved identification of shifts created by self-roster algorithm vs ones picked by a user.
'Priority' function on self-rosters involving multiple types of shifts to identify which s shifts HosPortal's algorithm should try to fill first. Useful in cases where there are not enough people or selections to fill a roster.
Self-roster algorithm now considers any work rules (e.g. 'no more than 76 hours per pay period'), not just shift quotas and shift conflict rules (e.g. 'cannot do consecutive night shifts').
In other changes:
Staff view can optionally show the number of hours each person is working. This is based on the current view: changing changing the length of the view (e.g. 1 day, 1 week, 4 weeks) recalculates the hours.
Improved leave conflict checking: requesting all-day leave will now clash with an overnight shift finishing that morning.
Minor bug fixes and some user interface improvements.
Release 29 (19 June 2023)
Update to self-roster email templates to make them more flexible for different use cases and be more flexible to meet different customer needs, with a focus only on the necessary information.
Various bug fixes and usability enhancements.
Release 28 (4 June 2023)
Shift work rules and pay periods. Two of our most anticipated and material improvements in recent times. Administrators can now define timesheet periods (e.g. every 2 weeks starting on a Monday) and set hours-based rules reflecting many award structures to prevent over-staffing. Example of the new rules include limits on the number of working hours per pay period, the number of weekends per month, or the number of weekend hours per month. Further enhancements and additional rules are anticipated over time, too.
Live mode. Built specifically for showing HosPortal's rosters on hospital corridor display monitors, e.g. for nursing staff or emergency departments. The new mode will show any roster page in full screen (e.g. without navigation bars and buttons) and will update dynamically in real time as the roster changes. Previously roster updates were only shown when a user made a screen-click.
Other improvements:
Updated email templates for self-roster communications to make them clearer and more suitable for more varied self-roster use cases.
Improved conflict checking on invoice rates to ensure it is not possible to set overlapping rates.
New audit log on self-rosters to report administrative changes by timestamp.
Improved efficiency by remembering prior settings when using the '+add user' function.
Improved clarity of the application of 'available' sessions to overnight shifts.
Improved PDF exports.
Improved filtering of vacant shifts on roster pages, including filtering vacant shifts by what role is eligible to do those shifts.
Improved performance when building and editing self-rosters.
Greater visibility by site administrators on the emails and SMS messages other users have sent via the Direct Message function. Previously site administrators could only easily see messages received by users.
Improved presentation of bulk emails and SMS messages in the message history log.
Greater flexibility on setting send times for SMS reminders. Now that admins can set specific send times HosPortal no longer requires its arbitrary 'unsociable send time' block-out.
Various bug fixes and useability enhancements.
Release 26 (14 April 2023) and Release 27 (9 May 2023)
These releases have been focused on general maintenance, bug fixes, useability improvements, cosmetic improvements to the user interface and email templates, and lots of back-end preparation for some new powerful functionality coming soon. Also to allow for customer-specific Sender IDs for SMS messaging.
In addition:
More protections, alerts and feedback when launching self-rosters to reduce the chance of unintended consequences.
Change in the appearance of document permissions, to make it clearer who has what permissions.
Ability to use Excel spreadsheets to import contacts into HosPortal's 'Directory' function (a shareable contact list that includes personnel and contact information of people and places not listed elsewhere on HosPortal).
Where rosters are shown in 'Staff view', allow user to group staff by team and put team names in separators.
Allow login with mobile numbers, in addition to other login usernames.
Release 25 (5 April 2023)
Ability to define shifts in relation to a holiday for activity-based rosters. For instance to define a shift that only occurs on the day before or after a public holiday, or to define a shift that occurs on the Monday of a week that contains a holiday.
Various cosmetic and useability improvements in many areas, e.g.
Reference to the spreadsheet line number when there is an error or unexpected data in a staff upload
Improved sorting options for various lists, such as on the leave page and the site administrator dashboard
Improved compatibility between Auto-build features (see Release 24) and existing shifts
Improved formatting of auto-generated self-roster emails
'Smart' pattern-based rostering to pre-populate the role and user when applying a pattern
Improved approach to creation of automated 'shortnames' so that they do not clash with existing users, e.g. Dr Adam Smith and Dr April Smith will now be assigned SmithA and SmithA-1, etc. Site administrators can still edit to whatever they prefer at any time.
Some minor bug fixes, particularly in editing draft self-roster settings and selection windows.
Release 24 (24 March 2023)
Auto-build is our first fully-automated roster building tool. It has all the flexibility of our self-roster functions and the power of our automated roster-filling algorithm, but does not require any input from staffed personnel. For some types of rosters an administrator can now fill rosters of any arbitrary length, staffing any number of people, in seconds.
Other features this release:
See all shifts created from a pattern. Bulk delete all shifts created from a pattern.
Improve performance and useability of self-rosters:
Include full names, rather than just short names, on the staff tab
Improve speed when editing settings
Improved shift alerts: more flexible rules and more activities included in rules
Improved archive functions to optionally hide old data
Archive old roster invoice rates
Hide archived rosters and roster groups from admin settings
Improved admin control over problem emails:
allow admin users to un-suppress bounced email addresses
clarify when an email recipient has marked HosPortal as spam
Various cosmetic and usability improvements and minor bug fixes.
Release 23 (10 March 2023)
'Blockout only' self-rosters. Allow users to participate in preference-based self rosters but limit them to only selecting blockouts, rather than expressing positive preferences for shifts. Great for junior doctor rosters.
Users can now opt to show events in iCal calendar subscriptions, and can now elect to show each of leave, events and shifts separately.
Further flexibility in self-roster design and specification of roster quotas: nominate any value to any shift on any day by using 'custom dates'
Sort staff by team in roster view, Great for physician rosters to show each subspeciality together in the one view.
Simplified staff selection when editing shifts: only show categories (e.g. assigned, conflict, leave) when there is one or more staff in that category.
Improved feedback when applying patterns to users: show when a user's role does not span the pattern; allow you to quickly select and deselect already-filled shifts.
Add week names to patterns.
Force-end roles automatically removes leave requests.
Various cosmetic and useability improvements; minor bug fixes.
Release 22 (17 February 2023)
Updated and improved 'reminder acknowledgement' function, including acknowledgement timestamps in sent communication logs.
Ability to filter leave by team.
Ability to edit the name of a roster that is already in use, and keep track of obsolete roster names.
Greater flexibility in self-rosters, including the ability for users to see their own leave requests in the selection page, and roster administrators to more easily amend quotas after launch.
Many minor improvements and some minor bug fixes.
Release 21 (3 February 2023)
Real-time shift alerts to affected users. Roster administrators can now set rules that can immediately alert all affected staff when certain changes happen on a shift. For example, to alert users if they are a late addition to a shift that starts within the next 4 hours. In conjunction, we have reduced email and SMS alerts that were being sent to those users unaffected by changes to their shifts that do not directly affect them.
Other enhancements:
Ability to filter approved and requested leave by team.
Greater flexibility in self-rostering: where the self-roster process overlaps existing shifts; adding and removing shifts, windows and quota bands to self-roster processes prior to launch; ability to add administrative notes even after the process is launched.
Increased ability to export to Excel from the admin dashboard: market shifts, vacant shifts
Improved ability to require users to acknowledge shift reminders.
Stricter management of users exempt from particular rosters, to reduce the risk that they will be staffed in error.
Improved audit trails on certain changes.
Various minor bug fixes, enhancements, user interface improvements and performance/speed improvements.
Release 20 (6 December 2022)
Self-roster blockouts to allow users to mark unavailable dates in both preference-based and selection-based self-rosters. These can be used on their own, or in addition to normal shift quotas. Administrators can determine the number of blockouts to allow, and can decide how to use these in self-roster processes when building rosters.
Other enhancements:
Ability to sort conflict and vacant shifts on the administrators' dashboard, e.g. by date, location or roster.
Simplified invoice rate-setting rules and improved user interface for invoice management (more of this to come in later releases).
Improved ability to append large attachments to emails on the Direct Message page.
A 'What's new' function that allows all users to know when we update this page.
Improve search functions for HosPortal communications, in particular to find self-roster shift confirmations.
Ability to export shift notes when exporting rosters in Excel.
Term dates can be assigned to roles, for instance to distinguish the term dates that apply to Registrars from the term dates that apply to RMOs.
Various minor bug fixes, enhancements and performance/speed improvements.
Release 19 (17 November 2022)
Fixed bugs and improved functionality of self-rosters, including an error that incorrectly transferred quota when swapping shifts.
Improved security protections and policy to insist on multi-factor authentication for some users.
Improved performance for site administrators before a site is in 'live' mode.
Improved checking of shift rules and conflicts when using the 'move user' function.
Improved details on shift and slot history logs.
More powerful 'force-end user' functionality.
Release 18 (27 October 2022)
Improved daily digests by reducing the types of shift updates that will be reported in the digests sent to each user.
Hide inactive site administrators
Further improvements to leave calculations and leave rules (refer Release 17).
Further improvements to pattern-based rosters (refer Release 17)
Various minor bug fixes and performance enhancements.
Release 17 (13 October 2022)
Staffing patterns to allow the creation of any pattern of shifts, of any length, across any roster groups that can be easily applied to any users. You can apply repeats of the pattern over any date range, and shift the offset of the pattern (e.g. apply the same 4-week pattern to 4 people, but each person starts in a different week of the pattern).
Other enhancements:
Additional leave approval rules to consider:
the length of the leave, e.g. auto-approve leave less than 3 days long
the number of people on leave, e.g. decline leave where there are any days where there are more than 5 registrars already on leave.
More powerful multi-select function to edit many shifts at the same time:
add tags
cancel shifts
change location
A rethink of the way role filters are used on the roster pages. Previously filtering by ‘Consultant’ would show all shifts, including all the people on the shift, where a Consultant is currently - or is eligible to be - staffed. The new filter will only show the Consultants. Clicking into the shift to edit it will then show everyone to provide context to allow user to make changes.
Improved functionality in staff-based views (where staff are listed down the side of the page for instance), including improved consistency between the staff views and other views regarding treatment of ‘available’, ‘conflict’ and ‘unallocated staff’.
Improved PDF exports for rosters to show role icons, tags and conflicts, and improve presentation for various common formats.
Improved and more detailed shift history logs.
Improved presentation of day views with large user photographs.
Use term dates to quickly assign users to teams, rather than manually enter start and end dates.
Improved management of public holidays
The results of leave rules presented to leave approvers at the time of manual approval.
A new ‘clean-up’ section of the admin dashboard to show administrators areas of attention, e.g. where there are shift or leave alerts being sent to people who are no longer active on HosPortal.
Ability to see a table of leave on all roster pages.
Various minor bug and cosmetic fixes and performance improvements.
Release 16 (22 September 2022)
A new permission option that allows users to view draft shifts but not edit them. Previously, draft shifts were only visible to users who also had edit permissions on those shifts.
Ability to attach tags to users on templates. Previously tags could only be applied to shifts, and were not able to be applied to users on the templates. By putting the tags on the template the tags are automatically applied to the users each time a shift is published.
Conflict flags are now shown on templates. This allows templates to be checked for conflicts without needing to publish any shifts. The conflict flags are updated when the conflict rules are changed.
Better alerts and checking if adding or changing a user template results in a conflict.
Ability to update roster times and names, and apply these changes selectively: to all shifts already published in the past and future, only shifts after today, or only when for shifts published in the future.
More flexibility to edit in-use templates, such as names and locations, and more flexibility to bulk-edit shifts and templates.
Enhancements to roster reports and reporting filters:
run roster reports on published, draft or template shifts
report on cancelled shifts by tag (e.g. by cancellation reason)
report on ad-hoc (non-template) shifts
add user profile information, such as an AHPRA number or employee ID, to improve reporting and analysis.
ability to report on shift hours by the true date that a shift falls on: rather than report all hours based on when a shift starts, an overnight shift can now have hours before midnight reported on one day and the hours after midnight classified as a second day.
Change in colour scheme on self-roster pages which made it difficult for colour-blind administrators to see the status of shifts.
It is now easier to fill a user’s template with ‘unallocated’ shifts, e.g. for staff specialists and trainees who might be unallocated for 4 or 5 days per week.
Improved formatting of PDF exports, including the ability to see shift tags and ability to include a locations phone number (e.g. the Theatre 1 landline) in the PDF.
Fixed presentation of ‘all day’ events in iCal subscriptions.
For new customers, we can now set up sites in ‘dark mode’ hidden from any non-administrative users even if rosters are in published state. When an administrator sets a site live all users will be invited automatically and all email and SMS communications are then enabled.
Various minor bug fixes and UI improvements.
Speed and performance improvements.
Release 15 (25 August 2022)
The major enhancement for this release is to allow draft and published shifts to be reallocated from one roster to another. Previously we did not allow this. If you change the roster of a shift then it is similar to deleting the shift altogether and rebuilding it as an ad hoc shift on the new roster with the same staffing:
the staffing, name and configuration of the shift is retained. You can edit these separately.
The shift becomes an ad hoc shift, which means that any connection with an underlying template is broken.
Other enhancements in this release include:
Allowing tags attached to users to be moved with the user. If there is a tag attached to a user and you use the ‘move user’ function then you now have the option to decide if the tag stays with the old shift (which was the old behaviour) or you could move the tag with the user to their new assignment.
The option to show Events (such as regular staff and training meetings) on the location-based roster page, similar to seeing leave and staff availability.
Ability to see conflicts on the templates. Previously conflicts would only be shown on draft and published shifts.
Many small bug fixes and performance enhancements.
Release 14 and earlier (5 February 2022 - 28 July 2022)
There have been many small and large enhancements since we launched the all-new HosPortal V2 in February 2022.
Term templates that allow creation of repeating patterns of work, such as training terms, and quickly applying them and reassigning them over periods of time. More details can be seen here.
Other enhancements:
HosPortal now subscribes to a public holiday database service, that significantly simplifies the work involved - and improves the accuracy of - public holidays for all users in any jurisdiction.
Ability to manage rosters, availability and templates in '‘staff view’. Most customers user a ‘roster’ view or ‘location’ view to manage rosters. You can now also list the staff down the side of the page and manage their activity by date.
Improved self-roster management, including more flexible preference-based rosters and more power to roster administrators to create and manage selections on behalf of other users.
A more complete audit log to track and report all changes made to a shift, including deletions and not just assignment changes
Ability to export customer-specific staff profile information in addition to standard contact details
Improved tracking of SMS messages and reporting of send status
Many and varied cosmetic and flexibility improvements to PDF and Excel exports and reports
Ability to export and print templates, for instance for clinical allocations
Ability to count draft shifts in statistical reports
Ability to ‘force terminate’ users without first managing all their outstanding activity after their termination date: all shifts can be marked vacant.
Ability to ‘force end’ repeating shifts, that will now automatically remove all user templates associated with that shift
Restructure of file folders, to make them easier to use
Ability to duplicate even the most complex self-roster, to more easily run the next cycle
Ability to add tags to templates
Ability to see tags using icons on the roster pages, and ability to add and see tags on individuals on a shift
Inclusion of functions to find and more easily manage template conflicts
Ability to hide leave types from non-administrative staff - users can now see when someone is on leave, but not the leave type or reason for leave
More options for setting and saving views
Lots and lots of speed and performance improvements in almost every aspect of HosPortal
Lots of small bug fixes