We've released a few fixes in the last week or two and none were big enough to justify their own post, so here's the roundup.

- The Public API docs didn't document errors very well (or at all in some cases) so you had no way to know why a call might fail. We fixed that, the docs now tell you all the failure modes and what to do with them. 📋

- We fixed an issue where if you were locked out of your account due to too many incorrect login attempts you couldn't get back in if you didn't get the password right first time. Sorry about that - we reset all lockouts at the time and we've got alerting on them now so we can see if there's an issue going forward ✅

- We've brought the backend right up to date which has brought the usual raft of security and speed fixes. ⬆️

- Quite a few security things have been improved, we've been really tightening down on edge cases with improvements to account enumeration prevention, better rate limits, smoother login flow for incorrect passwords/2fa, tighter access controls on email verification emails 🔐

- We've done a whole raft of improvements to performance which should result in speedier email summaries, general email delivery, loading of the Wallchart and loads of other places throughout the app. ⚡ 

We've seen a few issues around Google Workspace disconnecting and all of your users being suddenly charged for. We've pushed some improvements out to reduce the chances of this happening and also give you more warning when it does: 

1) If we lose connection with one of your Admin users (say they're archived or lose permissions in Workspace) we'll try and continue the sync with another user we have permissions with, automatically with no input from you. If we find another user, they'll become the new impersonation user (we log this on your Timetastic Audit log so you can see when it happened)

2) If we still can't find another user to sync at that point or the sync continues to fail we'll send your Timetastic Account owner(s) an email letting them know and you'll get a 7 day grace period to resolve the connection issue. If we still can't sync after that, we'll disconnect Workspace and start charging for your archived users.

Sorry to anyone that's been affected by this but hopefully the changes above will help reduce it happening and stop the billing shock when it does disconnect.

This one has been....quite heavily requested since we launched absence summaries 😅 so it's nice to bring it out into the open!

Admins can now restrict Absence Summaries to either Admins only or everyone. The toggle is in Settings > General with all the other privacy options: 

When it's set to Admins then everyone in the organisation who isn't an admin will have all email absence summaries turned off and won't be able to turn them back on: 

When it's set to Everyone we will not turn them back on - they'll stay off until users go back into Preferences and turn them back on again.

Mobile apps will also support this setting and we'll be rolling out updates as they go through approval in the app stores. 

In preparation for the new Rota product offering we've updated the terms to cover 3rd party sharing agreements.

The main changes are

• Adding Citation Group to our 3rd party processors list
• Adding Agendrix (part of Citation Group) to the 3rd party processors list
• Updating the Data Processing Agreement
• Updating the Data Protocol document

You can find the updated terms at https://timetastic.co.uk/legal/ 

We've addressed some issues with Outlook calendar syncs disconnecting and not updating bookings correctly - there's ongoing work behind the scenes on this which will be rolling out in the next couple of weeks which should make Outlook calendar syncs much better 🗓️

Also, a fix/improvement to the insights Annual trend graph:

Bookings spanning multiple months (maternity/paternity, sabbaticals, long term sickness for example) now show up in all of those months 🙌 and we're weighting bookings better so 8 bookings of 15mins doesn't show up as strongly as 8 users booking a week off. 

We've got lots planned for Insights in the future - stay tuned!

Just a small update to fix an issue where our full day events in Office365 weren't aware of the organisation's timezone so bled into the next/previous day if you were viewing another user's calendar in a different timezone. It's a bit niche but it matters!

This fix will only affect new bookings after this release.

API:

We've recently rolled out new API endpoints for updating/adding/removing Leave Types and Locked Dates.

We've also added UTC and work schedule corrected times to /absences and /holidays endpoints so you don't need to know the Organisation Timezone if you want to know the UTC date of a booking. 

Mobile app:

Android and iOS users will soon see an app update for Timetastic which shifts our mobile app onto a more robust and easier to update backend (hello Expo!). We've added no features to this release and just concentrated on bugfixes, some updates to stability and performance. 

Performance:

On the 9th March we rolled out an update to the Wallchart, Calendar and user list to improve loading speed by roughly 3 times. This made the biggest difference on the Wallchart as you can see on the graphs where we now return the majority of wallcharts in under 100ms: 

There's more to do on this - big wallcharts with lots of users and big user lists are still too slow. We're now serving over 1000 wallcharts per minute at peak time and our goal is for performance to only improve over time.

We've just made a couple of changes to the list of third-party services we use to help run Timetastic.

The main changes are:

1. We've moved our customer support over to Intercom, so Zendesk is no longer on the list.
2. We've added Churnkey, which helps us manage subscriptions.

As always, we have GDPR-compliant processing agreements in place with each provider. You can see the full list on our 3rd party apps page.

Thanks, and have a lovely week :)

We're continuing with quality of life improvements and trying to reduce friction. We hear you folks! For those of you who need to update everyone's work schedule in one go you can now do it from the multi select user menu: 

Handy if you've added all your users and not set your business hours quite right or if a whole department has changed their hours in one go.

Hi there 👋

We’ve made a small tweak to a couple of our reports to keep things nice and consistent.

What’s changed?

• In the Annual Report, Carried Into Next Year is now shown as a positive number, bringing it in line with the other columns.
• In the Individual Employee Report, both Taken and Carried Into Next Year are now reported as positive numbers too.

If you use any macros that rely on these columns, you may need to give them a quick update the next time you download a report.

As always, give us a shout if you have any questions 😊

— The Timetastic Team