When schools run both our technology and building work order systems, users will sometimes post a building work order to the technology system or vice versa.  The building department will be asked to change a firewall setting or the technology coordinator will be asked to replace a window.  This happens; it is easy to click the wrong link.  Up until now, it hasn't been easy to move a misplaced work order to the correct system.   Jim Thomas of the Poplar Bluff R-1 School District in Missouri suggested that we add a link to do this automatically (rather than manually canceling the order and asking the user to re-submit). 

Now, on the administrator edit option of the work order details page, there is a link that a building administrator or technology coordinator can use to automatically transfer a work order to the other system.  You simply click on the transfer link, change the job type (so that the newly re-submitted work order will have a job type from the appropriate system) and click the Transfer Work Order button.  The original work order is marked Cancelled by Administrator and a new work order is created in the appropriate system.  Emails go out to all involved telling them that their work order has been moved.

I mentioned at the beginning of the year that there were small issues that weren't really bugs (or issues, I suppose), but just things that bothered me.  Denise Ash of Bowling Green Schools in Missouri emailed me the other day with one of those things that I never really noticed, but definitely fell into the category of "I can live with it, it really isn't a big problem, but it just gets on my nerves".  Denise didn't call it that, but it was a tweak that needed to be made and I can't believe I didn't notice it.

In the technology and building work order systems, when you change the priority of a work order, you formerly had to select a priority from a pull-down menu then click a Set button.  Likewise, when you wanted to set a deadline, you opened a calendar, selected your date and time for the deadline, clicked Submit and then clicked Set.  Denise's suggestion was that you click submit on the calendar and the deadline would be set.  On the priority setting, why not just set the priority by changing the pull-down menu.

This just saves 2 clicks per work order, but, when you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of work orders, 2 clicks can turn into a lot of time.  Plus, it should work that way.

On the calendar, I can see how this happened.  The evolution of the program involved several versions of deadline setting.  The Set button made sense in an earlier incarnations, but not now.  On the priority issue, I have no idea why this slipped past us. 

Thank you all for the suggestions you send in and thanks to Denise for this one.  On an unrelated note, I'm really dropping the ball on my more regular blog updates resolution for the year.   I'll try harder.