What's New
Fall 2008 Release Overview
Innotas provides the only enterprise-class, on-demand IT Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution specifically designed to support the needs of any sized IT organization. Innotas PPM provides both senior management and day-to-day team contributors with tools to manage and monitor projects, resources and portfolios. The Fall 2008 release expands these capabilities with enhancements in Web Service APIs and portfolio and application portfolio management - specifically new API support for Requests, Portfolios, Application Portfolios, and Task Time, and multiple changes to portfolios to improve user experience.
Portfolio and Application Portfolio Management
As more and more customers have begun to model project and application portfolios in Innotas to provide visibility over all work that IT performs, several items were surfaced that will make this functionality even more powerful.
Benefits
- Easier creation and maintenance of portfolios
- Powerful roll-ups of data at the portfolio level
- Extended flexibility in modeling your portfolios with unlimited hierarchy levels.
Specific Feature Enhancements
- Users can now link projects to portfolios directly from a project and see which portfolios a project is linked to (including allocation % and other portfolio details) directly from the project
- For reporting, dashboards, and searches for projects and resources, the project filter has been enhanced to allow you to filter projects based on the portfolios to which the project is linked. For example, you can now filter resources in the Capacity and Demand screens based on all projects in a portfolio or you can define filters to generate project lists based on portfolios.
- Portfolios provide you with a powerful capability to model the hierarchies of your organization with portfolio-specific metadata. You can now add children portfolios of different portfolio types. For example, you can now define a “Corporate IT” portfolio with children for the various business units and a separate child portfolio for “Applications” that captures details and costs for applications managed by IT.
- A new report has been added that allows you to print the portfolio hierarchy. The report is accessed from a button on the portfolio screen.
- Portfolios provide automatic roll-ups of budgeted and actual costs and hours for projects linked to the portfolio. The Fall 2008 release adds roll-ups of capital and non-capital costs from projects and sub-portfolios.
- Several portfolio-related defects have also been resolved:
- Users with appropriate permissions can now delete projects that are linked to portfolios
- Users with appropriate permissions can now delete dashboards created for specific portfolios
The Fall 2008 release includes support for several more Innotas objects in the powerful Web Services API. Customers can now integrate Innotas PPM with other key applications by using the new Request, Portfolio, Application Portfolio, or Task Time entities.
Benefits
- Seamless interface for users into IT by automating the creation of project requests in Innotas from help desk tickets
- Automated creation of portfolios or application portfolios
- Synchronization of time sheets from legacy applications so you can leverage existing investments
Specific Feature Enhancements
- New Request WS API
- New Portfolio/Application Portfolio WS API
- New Task Time API
- Support for read/write of oversized fields via WS API for all entities
- New method for updating Program ID in the Project WS API
General Enhancements and Resolved Defects
In addition to the enhancements listed above, the Fall 2008 release also includes several general customer-driven enhancements and defect resolutions.
Specific Enhancements and Resolved Defects
- Integration with Radius (LDAP) has been enhanced to support a new optional feature that removes the domain from a user’s login before submitting it to the customer’s radius server for validation. For example, if a user’s login is test@abc.com, it would only submit "test" to the radius for validation. Note: if the user login is “test” it will submit “test” to the radius server for validation. This allows customers to utilize email addresses for user names in Innotas even if their Radius server is configured to use a shorter user name.
- Improved browser caching results in less data transfer between Innotas and each user’s desktop for faster screen rendering and data loading. This requires no action on the part of customers.
- Expense approval notifications now include a clickable URL to take the user directly to the approval screen.
- The Last Login field has been added to the All Users Report Source to allow you to report on the last log in date for your users to determine usage of Innotas.
- In certain cases, printing and saving a dashboard generated a “1024 – out of memory” error. This now works correctly.
- When using the email function on Attachments, users often needed to manually refresh the page after saving the “To:” information. This now works correctly.
- After changing the fields to view in Bulk Edit screens, the user needed to manually refresh the page to see the updated columns. The Bulk Edit screen now automatically updates when selected columns are updated.
- When allocating resources to a project team role on a project, the dates for the resource always reflect the dates for the role. Users can now update and save the dates on the resource allocation on initial creation.
- An error was generated when updating the configuration of a Request Type with a new resource filter. This now works correctly.
- In some cases, team members on a task team were unable to edit the schedule or view time and expense tabs. This has been corrected.
