Enhancements and Changes - .818


SERVICE PACK FOR SQL USERS

After you update PCRecruiter, administrators may see a warning message that the SQL is in need of a service pack update. This is due to several elements, among them the emergence of the “slammer worm" and a bug in un-patched versions of SQL that can interfere with PCRecruiter's Notes and resumes. Please contact your system administrator or visit Microsoft.com for complete information on updating your SQL Server with the most recent service packs, should you get the warning message. You may also view our SQL Update information, but please note that your version of SQL Server may have a slightly different update procedure than the one modeled.

UPDATE DATABASE STRUCTURE

This version of PCRecruiter contains database updates. Occasionally, PCRecruiter updates modify the underlying database structure, which is necessary for future features and enhancements. On very large databases, this may take a few minutes to run.

For SQL users, this is a transparent process as the changes occur automatically during logon. If you see a message that the database is being updated, please do not force PCRecruiter to close, or you will have to start the database update procedure over.

For the MSAccess users, please make sure you BACKUP your database(s) before proceeding with the process. It is imperative that the file is backed up as any updates to the tables and fields change the database file itself, and the possibility of damage via interruption, non-standard conditions, etc. is always present. For your convenience, PCRecruiter asks you if you want to back up your MSAccess database automatically when you run the update procedure.

Database updates need to be performed only once per database.

NOTES ENHANCEMENT

A feature that has been often requested has now been added to the system. When Notes exist for a particular Company or Name, the Notes icon on the main form now changes to show that the Notes exist. This is similar to the feature for the resume icon, which shows the drawer in the open or closed position to indicate whether a resume exists or not.

SEARCH FOR LAST ACTIVITY ENHANCEMENT

On basic searches for the Names/Companies/Positions there is now a checkbox to pull back results sorted by Last Activity Date. This feature will use Retro Maintenance to fill in existing records with Last Activity Dates. Retro Maintenance is a feature that updates your existing records to the new fields in the database in the background. This new feature is one of the items that can now be offered as part of the database structure update. Retro Maintenance runs in the background only when PCRecruiter has been idle for a defined period of time (similar to a screensaver) so it will not interfere with your use of the system.

LINKED SCHEDULE / ACTIVITIES ENHANCEMENT

This is a longstanding user request that required the above referenced database changes to add to the program. Now, when PCRecruiter creates multiple activities for one action, they are now linked together, so if you modify one, the others will also follow along. For example, if you create an activity and copy it to the schedule, the schedule's description will also follow the activity's description. If you delete an activity that is linked to other activities, you will be given the option to also delete the linked activities at that time. If you complete or close out the schedule item, the activity will then be modified to show it. In the past, once an activity was created, it would not be modified if future action on a copied to schedule item occurred.

The only exception occurs when you MOVE a schedule task from one day to another, during which activities will not move their date. The reason for this is that people will push task records to the next day if they did not get a chance to finish them the previous day. That does not necessarily mean that the activity date should also be moved.

POSITION DESCRIPTION HTML ENHANCEMENT

The position descriptions now are HTML format, which will now allow you to do more extensive formatting such as bullets/fonts/tables, etc. This will especially be useful for Job Boards that support HTML descriptions, and also allows you to hyperlink related information directly from the description. A full screen HTML editor has been implemented here to allow easy editing of the HTML text.

ZIPCODES ON POSITIONS ENHANCEMENT

There is now a zipcode field for positions. Most often, the position zip would be the same as the Company record zip for the Company that the position is connected to, however, if you need a different zip with a job, you now have that option.

SCHEDULE ENHANCEMENT

Schedule task items can now be edited more easily. The menu selection "Set Recurring Task" now reads "Edit/Recur Task" and gives you full editing to any part of the task record. You can also reassign it to another user. Each task record now has an alarm pre-delay that can range from 5 minutes to 3 days to determine how far in advance you wish to be alerted of a scheduled task.

ALARM ENHANCEMENT

The schedule alarms can now be individually snoozed for a configurable amount of time before each one will reappear. Previously, you could only snooze all alarms for 10 minutes.

ALARM BEEP FIX

The alarm Beep function had been found to rarely beep, if at all (a Windows bug). The code has been completely reworked so it should now make a beeping sound as intended.

ADD / REMOVE TASK ALARM ENHANCEMENT

On the Task Planner, you can now add/remove a task from the alarm directly from the right click menu, rather than having to click "Edit/Recur Item" to add in the alarm. This eliminates a step when you want to activate an alarm.

BULK RESUME INTERVIEW RECORD ENHANCEMENT

When using RESUME ROUTING from a position records, you now are asked if you want to create Interview Records (of the “Resume” type) for each Name Record that you use in the mailing.

JOB BOARD POSTING ENHANCEMENTS

You can now bulk post Positions more smoothly than ever. All posting features in the system have been condensed onto the same form now (whotochoose.com, Recruiters Online, etc.) Convenient links to sign up for the job board posting services are contained on the same form. To access this new form, from the main form menu select "Data Transfer->Post Positions / Candidates To Job Boards", Job Board posting was previously under the FILE menu.

AUTODIAL CUSTOM ACTIVITY ENHANCEMENT

You can now set a preference so that when auto-dialing a Name/Company, PCRecruiter will pop up an activity window so you can customize text to put into the phone call activity before that activity is saved. In the past, the activity was auto-created and not pre-editable.

PLACEMENT REPORT ENHANCEMENT

The placement report now allows you to pull records based on the Arranged Date (for Perm placements), or Ending Date (for contract/temp placements).

KEYWORD SEARCH ENHANCEMENT

When doing keyword searches, you can now modify the "common word" filter list. For example, A, AN, AND, THE, HE, SHE, IT, BE, OF etc. are normally excluded from searches, but if your needs require it, the filter can be set to that some of these words will be returned.

INDEXING ENHANCEMENT

The indexer has yet again been improved to make it more fluid while running in the background. There is now a governor on it to allow no more than 10 background indexes running at one time, which should be plenty to provide for apparently “instant” resume saves as you use the system.

COMPANY / NAME LOOKUP ENHANCEMENT

When pulling up large groups of companies or Names on the main form, the code has been optimized so it pulls the records much more efficiently, about 400% faster.

SIMULTANEOUS NOTES ENHANCEMENT

When adding Notes to a Company or Name, multiple users can now enter Notes simultaneously for the same record. The way this used to work is that if two people were editing the same set of Notes simultaneously, the last person to save and close the Notes would take precedence.

Now, if you unlock existing Notes to do freeform editing while someone else is entering Notes for the same record, it will alert you that the Notes have been modified since you unlocked them and give an option to abort your save (as you will delete the other user's freshly added Notes). If you do not unlock, but just type your new note and then save, this warning will not be triggered and both sets of Notes will be saved.

HTML / FORM LETTER ENHANCEMENT/ IMAGES ENHANCEMENT

When preparing form letters/emails (and other HTML email), PCR can now embed images located on your local hard drive (C:) directly into the email itself and save that image along with the letter. This will allow recipients of your email to easily see these images without needing to link images from another location or server.

Form letters now have a merge field for the 'country' field from Company Records.

FORM LETTER ENHANCEMENT

If you email a single form letter (as opposed to bulk sending), the activity created will now contain the entire textual body of the email. Form letter bulk emails will continue to only save the Name and date of the letter that was sent.

ATTACHMENT ENHANCEMENT

Attachments no longer ask if you want to add a new one if there are not any. Since it only takes a single click to add an attachment, and some people want to get to the global attachments, it was an extra mouse click for them to always have to hit "NO" first.

EMAILING INTERNAL ATTACHMENTS ENHANCEMENT

When setting up emails, any place that you could attach an external file will now also give you the opportunity to attach internal PCRecruiter Name/Company records. This saves the extra step of having to copy the Internal Attachments to an external file before being able to email them.

PERSONAL STATISTICS ENHANCEMENT

PCRecruiter now allows you to select a view in the form of an extra window at the bottom of the main form to display certain metrics. This will not be visible if you are running PCRecruiter in 'full screen' mode. As of now, the items included are: Open Positions, New Positions This Week, New Names Today, New Name Activities Today, Interviews This Week, Placements This Week and Scheduled Tasks Today.

There will be an open folder and a number next to each item that you may click on to jump to the records involved. For example, if you see "New Names today: 5" and click on the open folder next to it, it will take you to the 5 new records that you have entered today.

AUTOMATED BUG REPORT ENHANCEMENT

There is now an automated bug-reporting tool that should make reporting a bit easier. To use this feature, find it on the main form under HELP->SUBMIT BUG REPORT. All of your OS information and PCR information is filled in automatically. You need only select the category for the bug and add the step-by-step instructions how to reproduce the bug. It also checks to make sure our server receives the report and logs it. This feature will help keep PCR updates cleaner and allow Main Sequence Technologies to add new features faster.

SYSTEM TAB ENHANCEMENT / OPTIONS ENHANCEMENT

The SYSTEM tab on the main form has received a face- lift and most existing buttons have been placed into three categories: SETUP, MAINTENANCE, and PREDEFINED CODES. As the SYSTEM tab is accessed mainly by Administrators, options which are more conveniently user-defined have been moved, and the OPTIONS form has now been split into two items.

The first item is a button that remains on the SYSTEM tab marked "GLOBAL PATHS", which contains path information for external resumes and the email manager. The second item contains individual settings for email signatures and TAPI settings. This is now a menu item that can be accessed from the menu FILE->PERSONAL OPTIONS, and requires no special permissions.

ROLLUP LIST PLANNER ENHANCEMENT

You can now take a rollup list of Names and selectively assign Names on that list to a user's task schedule. This is useful to create a schedule list when you want to work on a group of records.

MULTIPLE ROLLUP LISTS ENHANCEMENT

You can now pull up multiple rollup lists at one time (similar to pulling up multiple candidate Notes simultaneously).

REPORT FIXES

We have been made aware that a few reports in PCRecruiter were having crashing issues in certain scenarios. All known problems with reports have been fixed and tested.

RESUME ROUTING ENHANCEMENT

The resume routing feature has had a few fixes, where we found some platforms were not sending the emails properly given the right scenario. We have also included the option to create bulk interview records for each candidate that you send using this feature.

EMAIL ACTIVITY ENHANCEMENT

The Email Manager, which pulls emails from a MAPI source, such as Outlook, now has an option to select an email and “Copy To Activity”. PCRecruiter will automatically find the associated Name in the system which matches that email address, and bring up a new activity form, completely filled out and ready to save, with or without additional text supplied by the user.

EMAIL HISTORY ENHANCEMENT

When you change the email address on a Name record, it will automatically save the old address in their email history file. This history is used primarily by the Email Manager, so if you bring up an individual’s email history, it will include all prior addresses as well. This email address history can be viewed/edited by right clicking on the email icon on the Name form.

ZIPCODE RADIUS SEARCH ENHANCEMENT

If you have not yet installed the powerful zipcode radius search, you will now find a button on the search form which will link you to a page on our website which explains, in detail, what this feature does with a link to download the plug-in. This feature can be very useful for locating records in a geographic range.

SMTP SETTING ENHANCEMENT

The MAPI or SMTP selector setting is now saved by individual user instead of globally. Since this setting used to be global, if two different users wanted to send email two different ways, they would be changing the
global setting back and forth, which could cause confusion. MAPI uses your local email client (like Outlook or Outlook express) while SMTP sends from your server. SMTP can send HTML formatted email, while MAPI does not support it. Contact your system administrator if you have questions on this topic.

BULK RESUME IMPORT ENHANCEMENT
When bulk importing resumes, it now allows you to turn off the annoying "unknown file format" message that hits for every single file that is unrecognized in a particular directory.

AS ALWAYS, REMEMBER TO BACK UP YOUR DATA!