Q & A
Suggestion for Improved Upgrade Notifications
Hi zzTakeoff Team,
Firstly, I’d like to thank you for all the ongoing updates and improvements you’ve been making to zzTakeoff. It’s clear a lot of effort is going into developing the platform, and it’s genuinely appreciated, and it is great to see the team pushing forward.
I’d like to share some constructive feedback based on a recent experience.
I’m located in Australia, and while I understand that you sent out a notification regarding the scheduled system upgrade (based on U.S. time, and around the world times), I must admit I had forgotten the exact timing of the update. The software became completely unavailable at around 12:00 PM Australian time while I was actively working on an estimate. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of building a complex formula and did not have the opportunity to save my work before the system went offline.
I understand that disruptions like this can happen to any user depending on timing, and it’s always someone who is affected, lol, this time hopefully it happened to be me only, I really mean it, and I completely understand and respect the need for system upgrades, but as constructive suggestion, it would be extremely helpful if, in addition to the email notification, there was an in-app warning or pop-up message ahead of the shutdown re.. something along the lines of:
“Please save your work and finish any critical tasks, as the system will be going offline shortly for a scheduled update, the same way the upgrade warning was issued when access is no longer available.”
This would give users on any different time zones a fair chance to prepare, save their work, and avoid disruptions especially during critical estimating tasks, wherever we may be around the world.
I hope this feedback helps improve the user experience even further, as zzTakeoff is a very powerful tool and continues to move in the right direction.
Kind regards,
Steve G
Pushing for smarter estimating systems in zzTakeoff
From Australia
Hi Steve. Thank you for the feedback, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We will work to improve.
We have some updates along the lines of what you describe mostly completed, but didn't quite have it ready in time for this update.
For Updates with Scheduled Downtime
In the future, for a major update that will have downtime, we will show a countdown timer at the bottom of the screen with a message:
"Scheduled Maintenance - 18:10" (18 minutes, 10 seconds remaining for example, will continue to count down until the update starts). We're open to feedback how soon to start the visual countdown in the UI. We could start it 1 hour before, or 30 min before, whatever you guys want. We will also try to apply these on weekends if possible.
For Smaller Updates with No Downtime
We are also working on improvements to the more regular updates that will show "Update Available" at the bottom of the screen so the user knows they can click that to apply (or it will auto apply when the user changes pages). When an update is applied, it will do a page refresh to load the latest code (but at least the user will have some prior warning). Currently, when we deploy a smaller update through the week, it forces the page to refresh when the user navigates to another page. We realize this is not ideal since the user didn't have a prior warning. Also, very importantly, we are working on updates so that when the page refreshes (to apply the update), it remembers and restores the expand/collapse state of the sidebars and the zoom/pan location so that it will be restored as closely as possible to the state before the update was applied.
Hi Heber,
Is there a place we can go to see when updates are implemented? I know there is the "Product Updates" blog but it seems like there are a lot of small updates made that are not announced?
It's quite possible they are announced and I'm not looking in the correct location.
Let me know, thanks!
Hi Justin. We're working on a list of updates and will post that in Product Updates. We wanted to be sure to do the update over the weekend, so we got a little behind on putting out a list of the details for what changed. We'll get it soon though 🙂