Case reporting, and talking to Lamplight 26/06/2019

There have been a couple of updates in the last few days.

The first to the case report updates the calculations on how many cases were open and closed during the reporting period, when grouping the results by e.g. case category. We had realised that these figures could be incorrect, depending on the grouping and date treatment. We have also updated the labels on the table to make it clearer what the figures mean.

We’ve also enabled an option to allow you talk to Lamplight. If you use Chrome, it has built-in dictation, and so you can now talk to Lamplight to write your work records or other text.

This is enabled overall in the ‘security’ tab of global settings. It’s there because you may have privacy concerns about this: Google will receive the audio of what you say in order to turn it into text. You can check their privacy policy at
https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#speech – you’ll need to decide if you are happy to enable this. Once you have, when you click on a text box you’ll get a request to access your microphone: if you say yes, you’ll be able to dictate, and after each pause the text will appear in the box. You only need to allow access once on a particular browser, and you can revoke it at any time.

Change to systems using ‘my user’ restriction 07/06/2019

The ‘my user’ restriction means that operators with lower access levels may only view profiles to whom they are related using the ‘my user’ relationship. This would also mean that they could only see work records attended by their own ‘my users’.

What should happen to work records with no attendees? Previously this was not well defined: as it happens they would not be visible to any operators affected by the my user restriction, but this was a side-effect of the my user restriction, rather than a part of it. We have had a number of requests from customers who need to be able to see these records, mainly for room booking.

Operators can now see work records that are not attended by anyone, as well as records attended by their ‘my users’.

Changes to SMS sending 25/03/2019

We’ve just released some changes to sending sms through Lamplight. System administrators will see some new options in global settings:

• Your 24x account details – this is the company that sends the actual text messages. This means you can access your 24x account directly to top up with credits, view reports, etc. You can log in to the 24x control panel at http://24x.com/ . You no longer need to contact us to buy text message credits – get them directly and you’ll see the credits appear instantly in Lamplight.
• An option to make sure that text messages sent can only use 1 credit each. With mail merge options, someone with a long name may mean the text message you thought would be less than 160 characters ends up going over and costing you double. Ticking this option will cut off the message at 160 characters so you can be sure that each message only costs 1 credit each.
• Enable ‘reply to email’ – which lets sms recipients reply to the text message, and the reply is then forwarded to the email address you specify. Please note that each reply costs an extra credit, and recipients will see a different ‘from’ number. If you enable this, when you come to send an sms you have the option of providing an email address – if you do, then that sms will be replyable-to through email. Otherwise, the mobile number you provide will be the reply-to number.

Scheduled text messages

When you come to send your sms messages, you’ll see a new option so that you can specify when to send it – either immediately, or schedule it using the ‘date from’ on the communication record (note system administrators will also need to enable dates and workareas on communication records in global settings)

New system admin page 08/03/2019

We’ve just updated the main system admin page to make it a bit clearer and easier to find what you need. System administrators will see we’ve moved the things you use most on a day-today bases to the top, re-arranged the rest, and added some nice shiny icons!

We have also been making regular updates over the last couple of weeks:

• new lists (groups) with project sharing don’t restrict to profiles ‘owned’ by the project – they will include everyone visible in the project that meet the other criteria.
• you can’t create a relationship between a profile and itself – you couldn’t before, but the profile you’re in now won’t show in the searches.
• a new global config setting to allow mobiles phones using UK, International, or either format.
• resolve an issue with passwords occasionally not working
• Admins can now edit groups locked by others
• minor improvements to table downloads
• ensure case information for empty cases is shown in group data views

Brexit and Lamplight 28/02/2019

We’ve had a few customers asking us for reassurance about Lamplight in the event of whatever flavour of Brexit we end up with.

Your data is held in London, UK – we use the Amazon Web Services London region. So we do not believe that there will be any impact to your use of Lamplight from any changes to the law as a result of Brexit.