Altus General Availability – January 23, 2024

Notable Improvements in this Release

Synchronisation of Timesheet Actuals to Altus Tasks Project Managers can now easily track actual effort recorded by resources using timesheets in Altus, eliminating manual data entry. This allows for a comprehensive assessment of actual effort at the task level, with the option to apply it to the schedule.
*Click to view GIF
Updated Views and Grids using Power Apps Grid Control Views and grids now leverage the new Power Apps Grid control, providing performance and usability enhancements along with extended grid customization options.
Improved Navigation to Documents Enhanced navigation features have been implemented, streamlining access to documents for increased efficiency.
Upgrade of Altus Schedule Altus Schedule has undergone an upgrade, resulting in improved stability, performance, and usability.
Resource Grid In-line Editing and Arrow-key Navigation: Users can now perform in-line editing of resources directly within the grid. Additionally, arrow-key navigation has been introduced for a more intuitive and efficient user experience.
Enhanced Resource Heatmap Colours on Availability in the Resource Heatmap are now applied, offering a quick visual representation of resource availability. This feature is particularly useful when the heatmap is filtered to display availability only.

 General Updates
#9989
Increased where possible the character limit for Name fields for Altus tables/entities.
#14656
Improvement: Business Process Error message is no longer shown when dynamic lookup config is null.
#15869
Views and grids have been updated to use the new Power Apps Grid Control, which brings performance improvements, features pageless infinite loading, and enables new grid customisation options via configuration.

#17884
Documents Tab now allows for drill through within the component and also allows for SharePoint style navigation.
*Click to view GIF
#17885
Consultants can now disable the Altus Scheduler for New Projects. Additionally, if the inbuilt scheduler is disabled, users will not be able to unlink projects from external schedules either.
#18853
Wave 1 implementation of Microsoft’s opt-in new look and feel (public preview 2023) for model-driven Power Apps.
#19235
Updated display name of Bookable Resource to ‘Target Utilisation (%)’ field to denote that it is a % value.
#20398
The Global Quick Create button is now be hidden by default in Altus to reduce user confusion. Configuration setting added to allow it to be unhidden if required.

Project Management

#19948
The My Active Project Tasks and All Active Project Tasks views now show tasks from external systems which do not track effort (e.g. Planner, JIRA, DevOps) if their Percent Complete value is not yet 100.
#21522
Incomplete tasks with no effort are now being displayed in My Active Project Tasks and All Active Project Tasks.
#21663
New feature: Timesheet Actual Update. There is now an ability for Project Manager to review actuals from timesheet. They can then choose to publish the actuals to their Altus schedule. This feature can be activated from configuration setting.
#21874
New feature: Timesheet Actual Update. A new preview window is added to show the impact of the incoming timesheet actuals on existing scheduled tasks.
#22055
New feature: Timesheet Actual Update. Visual prepresentation of unsaved schedule changes. The Altus Schedule when updated will now show what the initial state of each task was using a black line below the task.

Portfolio Management

#12079
Ensured that the % Complete bar is displayed for Portfolios when the % Effort Complete field is added to a Portfolio View.

Schedule Improvements

#19942
Upgrading the Altus Schedule for improved stability and performance.
Also, visual theme updated for improved usability and cohesion with recent Dynamics updates.
#19944
Altus’s scheduling component now gives the ability to show/hide columns.

Finance Improvements

#19897
Generate transaction dialog now allows a desired end date to be selected.
#20603
Include locked periods on the calendar picker of generate transactions dialog to make it easier to identify locked periods.
#20604
Updated error messaging on Generate Transactions activity in Finance. When generation of transactions overlaps closed fiscal periods, the names of the conflicting periods are now specified to the user.
#21723
Previously certain fields were excluded from the custom columns shown in finance. We now honour the view for fields such as Project.

Resource Grid Improvements

#20004
Resourcing grids improvements:
Enter and shift-enter enabled for vertical navigation
wrap-around navigation from top row to bottom and vice versa
Full cell contents selected on first click, cursor placed on second
All non-active cells now have formatting applied uniformly.
*Click to view GIF
#21119
Colouring on availability heatmap applied to availability column for consistency between views where other columns may be hidden.

Resource Planning

#18361
Introduced the ability to configure the resource selection available on the Projects Resource Plan to ‘Generic’, ‘Named’ or ‘Generic and Named’ (default). This can be configured via the Resourcing > General Settings (resourcePlan) configuration setting.

Technical Improvements

#20659
Added support within our new grid column renderer extension the column image provider JavaScript functions.
We do however limit our own functions now to only interact with the current column and not manipulate other columns. This unsupported approach can break our new functionality.
The new functionality makes a best effort to co-exist with the existing functions to prevent duplication.

Administration and Configuration

#15701
Configuring the Security Role applied to the Team assigned to a linked Office365 Group (i.e., for Projects, Programs and or Portfolios) can now be done via the configuration setting in Config Settings instead of the form definition. This removes the need for customisations changes and existing customisations to this form definition will be respected.
The Setting is available for Projects, Programs and Portfolios and is called “Group Owner”.
The Security role highlighted will be applied to the Dynamics Team that is created/linked to be the owner of the Project/Program/Portfolio.

#19574
Business rule implemented to ensure all new resources have an associated enterprise calendar.
Existing named resources without enterprise calendar now show a warning icon and tooltip message informing that a calendar needs to be associated with the resource.
#21517
Config settings improvements to give more meaning to lists of settings by providing a label and the display name instead of the internal name with little context.
#21674
Improved the configuration experience for parent fields in the Status Update – Information Panel Calculations.

Business Project Flows

#19255
Altus will now start tracking the progress of the business project flows on the Project Table, specifically the Major and Minor Enterprise Project Types. This data will be stored in our data structure and will be reportable for custom reports.
Additionally if you require this functionality to be present for other business process flows this can be configured for those too.
Important: If you are using custom security roles and no OOTB Altus security roles, you will need to add the new audit entity to your security roles to enable proper processing.
This new entity is called Business Process Flow Log.
Note: A future feature will make this data available in our data model allowing for it to appear in standard Power BI reports.

Register Improvements

#19498
Matrixes can now be implemented to other lists/registers as has been available to the Risk Register. Added capability to present labelled axis and to filter based on selected grid cell.

Bug Fixes

#10045 Fixed an issue where Document tab is still displayed after project group has been deleted.
Documents Control will now provide a more informative message to let the user know the actions to take to remedy this issue.
#16921 Fixed issue where externally tasks and the unit on resource assignments were being recalculated by the gantt according to different rules.
#18917 Control styles updated for modern UI compatibility.
#19341 Fixed an issue with arrow navigation keys not automatically scrolling the grid when there are many rows.
*Click to view GIF
#19532 Non visible resourcing data is not loaded in Capacity % mode, which avoids performance impacts.
#19588 Fixed an issue where using report with embed method navigates user to the Work area within app. Site Map now loads the Dashboard first and then redirects to the web resource if there is no environment variables set.
#20392 Convert Risk to Issue – new issues don’t appear in the linked issues subgrid.
#20060 Fixed an issue where empty space is shown under calendar picker in some situations.
#20081 Fixed an issue with adding timesheet comment.
#20281 Resolved a bug where the Resource Plan would error out in scenarios where the values entered did not result in a valid FTE or % Complete mode calculation.
#20624 New Grid: status update options are blank in customer environment breaking KPI icon on grid.
#20638 Fixed an issue with inconsistent results when new grid has conflict with old column icon method.
#20639 Fixed an issue where no notifications were being received for a rejected timesheet.
#20804 Resolved an issue where configuration settings were not loading correctly into the form control.
#21109 Fixed edge case issue impacting currency symbols in tooltips.
#21117 Resolved issue preventing Planner sync from occurring when Project form is first loaded.
#21120 Resolved an issue where System Users we unable to be selected in Resource Demand from the project level Add Resource menu option.
#21227 Resolved issue where the Availability heatmap was not showing availability for resources that don’t have resource requests for any project/proposal.
#21280 Fixed inconsistent behaviour of the Feedback button.
#21282 Resolved an issue relating to the Priority field for Issues incorrectly displaying as blank in a subgrid.
#21390 Timesheet to Finance sync functionality has been swapped to synchronous mode to address potential data loss scenarios.
As result of this, a small delay has been introduced when approving or recalling timesheets. Additionally, the batch operations for approving and recalling timesheets have been temporarily disabled while we are moving the Timesheet->Finance functionality elsewhere in the application.
#21421 Resolved regression issue with the custom image provider for KPI icons.
#21567 Fixed a bug preventing conditional display of Configuration Settings properties from displaying in a panel.
  Resolved an issue preventing the Documentation link from displaying in Configuration Settings.
#21651 Fixed Landing Page heading styles to allow for configuration of longer heading names.
#21981 Resolved an issue where the Timesheet task tooltip was not rendering in a readable format.
#21988 Fixed a bug wherein request data is not being loaded when in Capacity % mode.
#22057 Resolved an issue where the Resource to Finance Sync options were appearing in the Finance Grid to users who had read-only access to the Project.
User with read-only access:

User with write access:
#22262 Resolved an issue where the Change Request Summary Config is using a wrong schema.
#22264 Resolved an error on the task grid when turning off the “Try the new look” toggle on the globar bar.
#22613 Fixed an issue where changing a field on a project connected to P4TW, click Save and then go to Tasks tab resulted in an error message.
#23581 A prompt has been introduced to warn a user if they attempt to close a timesheet that is still being saved by the system.  This will prevent users unknowingly disrupting the save process, avoiding issues in data processing and accuracy.