No Approval Necessary, Delete All You Want and Previews Galore

This announcement is a couple of weeks late but here's a quick write up of the features we added in the latest update of AnyHow (1.3.4).

Here are some of the things that were released since our last announcement.

Major #

These are some of the bigger features or changes we've rolled out.

No Approval Necessary #

Previously when an employee submitted a timesheet someone had to review and approve it. That's always been our experience when stepping foot into any agency or consultancy we've ever done work for. It's how we've always run our business as well.

After a few requests we realized not everyone wants to be tied to this work flow. It can be tedious for organization or project managers to review each submitted timesheet, even though you can divide and conquer, and especially so for larger companies.

So, as of now there is a new setting in your Organization Settings that allows you to disable the required approval of timesheets.

Note: If you have active timesheets pending approval and you make the change to disable the approval process, all pending submitted timesheets will be automatically marked as approved.

Delete All You Want #

The Files section is pretty flexible. Simple, organized, public sharing, and with lots of filter and search capabilities. One feature that's used often is public sharing a group of files. This makes sense if you need to share, for example, new project timelines files with clients outside of your organization. You could select all the files you want, generate a share link, and done.

One thing we didn't have was the ability to delete multiple files at once. You had to select files, one by one, to delete them. This was truly annoying. Well, not anymore. Now you can delete multiple files at once. Just select all you want, click the delete button, confirm the deletion, and you're done.

Happy deleting.

Previews Galore #

In Discussions you can preview certain attachments that were uploaded with comments. Images and PDF's were easily viewed and then you could download the files should you need to.

We can't explain why we did not offer previews in the Files section until now. Honestly it was just a stupid oversight on our part. Well that oversight has now been corrected.

You can now preview supported file types in the Files section. Just look for the "little eye" icon next to a file name, click that, and preview the file before deciding an action to take on it.

Django 3.0.x #

This is something a bit more geeky and technical so we'll keep it short because we know that unless you're a Python geek like we are, this will not be interesting at all to you.

AnyHow is run on the Django framework, which is an amazing open source project and something that we're very passionate about. Previously we were running on the 2.2.x branch of the framework and once the 3.x branch was released as stable we monitored, tested, and debugged for months.

Finally, after we were satisfied with the switch we merged our Django 3.0.x branch into our stable environment and it is now powering the AnyHow app and website, where you're reading this very article.

Minor #

Here is a quick run down of some of the minor changes we've made that you may notice.

• General UI improvements
• Organization creation wizard now offers better guidance and even a video walk through.
• Discussion notifications will now respect read status. In other words, if you already read a discussion or update, you will no longer receive a notification for it as well.
• Updates to the welcome email feature.

Bugs #

Here is a list of the bugs we've fixed. We didn't list all of them because most you wouldn't have noticed or they may be very technical and explaining them here wouldn't make a lot of sense.

• Discussions: Fixed broken layout issue with large code blocks present in a comment.
• Automation: Fixed issue where default start date for a new task could be in the past.
• General: Fixed issue with meta tag displays.

Wrapping Up #

We have a long road map for AnyHow and we will continue to improve it and roll out new features as fast as we can.

As always if you have any issues please or requests just head to the [support page][support] and let us know. We're here to help.

[support]: https://anyhowhq.com/support/ "AnyHow Support"