Current CrewBrain innovations

Office 365 Sync

As already mentioned at the beginning, the Office 365 Sync received a lot of votes on our roadmap within a short time, so we decided to implement it promptly - also because it has comparatively few dependencies on the overall system and no major changes to the basic logic of the system were necessary.

Activate sync

First, the sync must be set up by an administrator. To do this, it is necessary to enter the endpoint in the Azure configuration, among other things. If you want to use the sync please contact our support team to learn more. The individual users can then activate the sync under My account > Office 365.

Data transfer

The data is transferred automatically. Historical data is initially transferred within a few hours, changes in CrewBrain or new data records are then transferred almost in real time (a few minutes).

Outlook Calendar

Your own Outlook calendar can also be transferred as a third-party calendar via sync. In this way, it is also possible to use the calendar entries as a basis for checking for overlaps by schedulers. This function must also be activated, the synchronization initially takes place at intervals of 2-3 hours. The extension to real-time processing is planned, but requires additional server resources.

Costs

The O365 Sync is available to all customers on our Enterprise plan. As the sync is permanently active in the background and has to synchronize the data between the systems, we incur additional costs for extended hardware resources, which we can only cover in the Enterprise plan. A 30-day test of the feature is possible in all plans.

Statements & time recording

As in almost every update, we have once again made adjustments and enhancements to the statements & time recording system.

Notification for missing times

Previously, employees had to use a dashboard widget to identify days with missing working hours. With the new update, employees will automatically receive an email notification if no working hours have been recorded for a day on which they should have worked.

Divide working time into days

If the daily working time is divided between the weekdays (e.g. 8 hours Monday - Thursday and 6 hours on Fridays), this was previously not possible for the calculation of vacation and public vacations. The 13-week average had to be used here. With the current update, the hours for vacation and public holidays are also calculated by day according to the specification.

Extension of the CrewBrain API

We are currently working regularly on the expansion of our new CrewBrain API. In recent weeks, we have been able to add many new endpoints here, for example for accessing price lists, working hours and additional information in jobs & projects. The new API has already been available as a beta version for several months and will continue to be expanded regularly.

Further adjustments

Of course, we have also adapted and expanded many small things in the system in this version. We would like to present the most important ones to you here:

• In order to optimize the systems and prevent long loading times, extensive reports (e.g. PDFs, CSV or Excel downloads) will no longer be displayed directly in future. Instead, document requests will be placed in a queue and processed sequentially. As soon as the respective document is generated, the user receives a corresponding notification and can download the document.
• If an employment contract is sent to employees for signature via CrewBrain, it has been saved in the documents after signature since the last update. Until now, however, it was not possible to send further contracts for signature without changing the existing contract. From now on, additional contracts can also be created.
• The document categories for employee documents are now sorted alphabetically. This provides a better overview when uploading documents.

Our roadmap

We are delighted that more than 30% of our customers are already actively participating in the future design of CrewBrain via the roadmap. The roadmap can be viewed by all customers directly in the system under Administration > Roadmap. We will shortly be publishing an update on the implementation of the current roadmap topics on our social media channels - stay tuned!