As the current calendar year draws to a close and a new one is about to begin, this is often a good time to take a moment to reflect on the past and plan for the future. With that in mind, this article will be a short review of what happened with Dovico Timesheet over the past year as well as our plans for 2024.
To start off, let’s take a look at what happened in 2023.
2023 in review
A few years ago, we started a continual process to improve our hosted architecture, and Timesheet itself, so that Timesheet runs better and we can improve it easier.
Framesets
Part of our continual improvement work on Timesheet was the removal of framesets from the UI that we released in May of this year. With framesets gone, we can now work towards making Timesheet more accessible with tools like screen readers and we can more easily improve the UI.
Tasks linked to Task Templates
We added a feature to enable easier editing of tasks that are repeated in a project or across projects.
Now, tasks can be linked to a task template. Rather than having to manually adjust each task, and potentially missing some, you just need to edit the task template itself and all linked tasks across all projects will get those changes.
The following article explains the task template feature in detail if you’d like to learn more: https://www.dovico.com/blog/2023/05/09/dovico-timesheet-updates-for-may-2023/
Quick Assign view
Thanks to tasks now having the ability to stay linked to a task template, we were able to create a Quick Assign view that lets you assign tasks and employees to multiple projects at the same time.
If you’ve used the previous version of Timesheet, this view behaves in a similar manner to the view that was there but this one does have some differences. If you’d like to learn more about how the new Quick Assign view works, feel free to check out the following article: https://www.dovico.com/blog/2023/11/22/dovico-timesheet-quick-assign/
Machine Learning and AI
We’ve been looking at the different opportunities machine learning and AI can provide within our organization for things like helping our support team find solutions to your questions or issues faster.
We’re also working with a local university to come up with a way to use machine learning and AI to make your lives easier in Timesheet.
Now that you know what we’ve been up to in 2023, let’s take a look at some of our plans for 2024.
Plans for 2024
New Billing view
We’ve been working on the creation of a Billing view for Timesheet that will allow you to create invoices right in Timesheet. If you’ve used the previous version of Timesheet, you’ll be familiar with this view.
We’ve started testing the new view and plan to release it in early 2024.
Note that the following screenshot is what the new view looks like at the moment but things may change slightly before it’s released.
Machine Learning and AI
Earlier in this article I mentioned that we’re looking into machine learning and AI both for internal use to serve you better as well as to include in the software to make your lives easier. We hope to have more to share about this soon.
API
When we originally built the API, it was created as an MVP and we expanded it out over the years as needs arose. One of our goals for this year will be to start expanding out the API so that you can do everything in the API that you can do in Timesheet itself.
The API will also be improved with things like better filtering and sorting.
We plan to release improvements as they become available.
Modules
We’ve been working on the idea of modules for a few years but haven’t opened it up for others to build on yet. Modules are basically a way to plug and play views in Timesheet.
In 2022 we released the Menu Configuration view that helps you adjust what shows up in the menu system. This view will eventually become more of a Dovico Play Store where additional views will be made available by Dovico and 3rd parties. Down the road, you’ll be able to see things like which are the top 5 most popular views or which ones have been recently added, for example, and then enable them for your employees to use if you wish.
By the end of the year, it’s our hope to have an API portal that will allow you to create your own private views for use by your own company. This would allow you to create things like dashboards, views with different features via the API, or perhaps a view that accesses data from a different system and is simply displayed side-by-side with Timesheet so that you have everything in one place for your employees while also eliminating the need to provision your own infrastructure for it.
Maintenance windows
One of my hosted infrastructure goals is to no longer need to schedule maintenance windows for server work.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been able to modify about half of our infrastructure to allow updates at any time of day without impacting you. My goal is to have the rest of the infrastructure adjusted by the end of 2024.
In Conclusion
We have more tasks planned than what was mentioned but work hasn’t started on some of those items yet so they might be a bit further out. Stay tuned because I’ll update you as more information becomes available.
We value your input. If there is something you’d like to see in Timesheet, or something you feel could be improved, let us know: dovico.com/contact
If you’re not yet using Timesheet, check out our pricing page where you can sign up for a free 30-day trial to see if Timesheet is right for you: https://www.dovico.com/pricing
Gerard Gallant,
CIO of Dovico Software
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