Version 2 Build Notes

• Dashboards
  • Improvement: The Teams Overview tab is now an executive view instead of a pie chart per team. Headline tiles show how much work is in scope, how much has no team yet, how much is approved, and what is waiting on you. A table lists every team with a progress bar by state, its approved share, what it is waiting on you for, and where its work currently sits. Sort it by workload, by what needs attention, or by how complete each team is, and open any team or any waiting list straight into a spreadsheet.

• Installing
  • New: A Windows Installer (MSI) package is available for PCs whose security policy blocks the one-click install. It is signed by ActivityExchange and installs the same app. Ask us for the link if you need it.
• Schedules and Primavera P6
  • New: Percent complete in the P6 progress export can now be weighted by activity state, so work that is submitted or accepted counts for more than work that has only started. The weights are set per project.
  • New: Activity due dates can be filled in from the work package dates in your schedule. Right-click a work package in the schedule to apply its dates to the activities under it. Dates you have set by hand are kept.
• Performance
  • Improvement: Dashboards, tree views and activity lists open much faster on very large projects.
• Linked data
  • Improvement: The linked data for an activity now shows where the linked item sits in its hierarchy, along with files inherited from the levels above it. This applies to the Desktop app, the Web Portal and the mobile apps.
  • Improvement: The Desktop app's activity details window is one page again. The header reads like a sentence, the activity on top and the thing it is about (a door, a cable, a drawing) underneath, and four tabs say what you can do: Work, About, History and Plan. Attachments on the Work tab show the activity's own files and the item's files together. Nothing on screen names the data store any more.
• Other
  • Improvement: The Change Log lists events in the order they happened.
  • Behaviour: The Internal and External team types have been merged into one General team type. Existing teams keep working as before.

Version 2 is a rebuild of ActivityExchange from the ground up. It keeps the way of working you know: projects, teams, activities, sign-offs and spreadsheets. Underneath, everything now runs on one shared platform, so the Desktop app, the new Web Portal and the new mobile apps all see the same data and behave the same way. This first beta is for early adopters. Please send feedback through the usual support channels.

• Getting started
  • New: Version 2 installs side by side with version 1. Both can stay on the same PC and both keep working, so you can switch between them while you get used to the new version.
  • Improvement: Version 2 runs on the latest Microsoft .NET platform (.NET Desktop Runtime 10). The installer will prompt you to install it if it is not already on your PC.
  • Improvement: Links to activities (the links you receive in emails and notifications) now set themselves up the first time you open the app. No separate installer step and no administrator rights are needed.
  • Behaviour: You sign in exactly as before, with the same account. Nothing changes about who can see what.
• Desktop
  • Improvement: A refreshed look across the whole app, with a consistent light and dark theme on every screen.
  • Improvement: Raising an activity now opens a single streamlined window from the toolbar. Search for an activity type, pick from your recently raised types, and fill in the details, team, comments and email recipients in one place. You can raise several activities at once by separating the descriptions with semicolons.
  • Improvement: Spreadsheets now accept files dragged straight from Windows File Explorer onto a row, and Excel exports write real dates and numbers so they sort and format correctly.
  • New: Documents filed against a folder now show on everything underneath that folder. Attach a drawing or a datasheet once, at the equipment type level, and every item of that type sees it.
  • New: Primavera P6 exchange now works both ways. You could already import a P6 schedule. You can now export progress back out of ActivityExchange: each linked work package’s percent complete, actual start and finish, and status are worked out from your sign-offs and saved as an updated schedule file or a spreadsheet for your planner.
  • New: A Schedule view shows the planned window for each work package, for projects that use work breakdown structures. It appears automatically on projects set up for it.
  • New: An Operations and Maintenance dashboard, with ageing and forecast views, for projects set up for maintenance work. It appears automatically on those projects.
  • Preview: Earned Value and Dependency Mapping are included in version 2 but switched off by default. Ask us if you would like them enabled on your project.
• Web Portal
  • New: Version 2 introduces the ActivityExchange Web Portal. Sign in from a browser with your usual account, pick a project, and work without installing anything.
  • The portal gives you a project overview, full activity details (summary, data, files, alerts, change log, work history and linked data), search, read-only spreadsheets, and the Raise Activity wizard.
  • Team leaders can switch the overview between “Assigned to me” and “Entire team”, the same as on mobile.
  • Access requests and notification preferences can be managed from the browser as well as from Desktop.
  • Behaviour: Some tasks remain Desktop only for now, such as setting due dates and project configuration. The portal will keep growing.
• Mobile
  • Coming soon: The version 2 mobile apps for iOS and Android have been rebuilt from scratch. They cover the day to day work: browsing and updating activities, submitting work, notifications, search, barcode scanning, linked equipment data and working offline.
  • Behaviour: When the new apps are released they will arrive as an update to the existing ActivityExchange app on the App Store and Google Play. Until then, beta builds are available to invited testers only.
• Scheduling and due dates
  • Behaviour: Every activity now has one due date, shared by everyone who can see it. In version 1 different teams could hold their own due date for the same activity, which led to confusion about which date was right. Version 2 keeps a single date, so what you see is what everyone else sees.
  • Behaviour: Recurring activities and the twelve month forward view are driven from the same single date, so they always agree with what is shown on the activity.
  • Behaviour: Team specific work breakdown trees have been replaced by one shared schedule per project. If your project used per-team breakdowns, please talk to us about how your schedule will look in version 2.
• Notifications
  • Improvement: Notification preferences are saved reliably and the app confirms the save. Previously the first attempt to switch a notification type off could silently fail.
  • Improvement: Mobile push notifications now arrive even when the app is fully closed, not only when it is open in the background.