Product Roadmap
Last Updated: January 10, 2012

Bob Towery, CEO

Please use the links below to jump to particular topics.

Summary

The purpose of this Product Roadmap is to discuss with you the planned development of the Escape Online 5 system over this calendar year.

We are breaking this down into these areas:

  • Core Functionality
  • New Functionality

At the end we will review completed road map items.

The items listed here are not to be confused with those on our Infrastructure pages, which deal with third party software employed by our system, mainly Microsoft products. Also, enhancements required due to government regulatory agencies are discussed on our Regulatory Changes page.

Core Functionality

Core functionality is our system's "activities." Journal entries. Requisitions. Employee records. Calculating and running payrolls. Generating W2 files. There are more than 250 of these activities that our users are using day in and day out.

In 2012, we have four releases, planned for March, May, September and December.

As in past years, these releases will contain a mixture of new functionality and fixes or enhancements to existing functionality. Ditto for reports. We anticipate continuing our past year’s productivity of 50-75 individual fixes/enhancements each month.

New Functionality

With the basics covered, we are now in a place where we can begin adding "the fun stuff." This includes both some great user productivity tools, and resources for employees as well.

Employee Self Service Portal. Status – Underway, scheduled for 2012. Our “Employee Online” self-service portal continues to be developed and will be available in 2012.

Report Favorites. Status - Underway, scheduled for 12.1 release. All of our Search screens allow for "favorites" or a preset group of criteria. Each user can develop up to 20 of these for every activity. We are extending this functionality to reports as well. Each user will be able to save report filter / sort criteria and recall it at will.

New HR Module Workflows. Status – Released incrementally in 12.1 and 12.2. One of our largest efforts for the year, HR Workflows are being made dramatically more powerful and flexible.

Additional Finance Module Workflows. Status – Released over several 2012 releases. The advanced Vendor Requisition workflow model has been widely implemented by customers. This year we will enable several other Finance module documents to use this more powerful workflow capability.

Enhanced Notification. Status - In development. Further notifications of events pertinent to transactions in all modules will be included, made available to users in the already completed Message Center.

More Data Export Options. Status – Research mode. We are looking into a few different ways to add even more exporting capabilities from within the Escape Online 5 application.

Mobile Client. Status – Research mode. Many of our users are utilizing mobile devices and would like access to Escape Online 5. More details to come!

Dashboards. Status - Not yet begun. We plan to make "dashboards" (graphical displays of data) available in numerous parts of our system.

Review of Completed Roadmap Items

In this section, we briefly recap the status of recently completed roadmap items.

Report Infrastructure Rewrite. In Testing. Both Escape and many IT staff at our customers felt overall system performance would benefit from moving the Crystal Reports engines off our app servers and onto dedicated report servers. The reporting infrastructure was one of the first modules we built for Escape Online 5, back in the 2003 era. With all that we have learned since then, we felt it would achieve many efficiencies with a complete rewrite, so we undertook that task.

Report Drill Down. Completed, In Q&A for Release 12.1. Users can “drill down” from one report to another. For example, in a Fiscal01 report, which has account data rolled up by fund/object (or whatever the user wanted), one click will launch the Fiscal02 report for that rollup. Where an individual record is shown (like a JE#), the drill down is to the associated snapshot report.

Report Quick Linking. Completed, In Q&A for Release 12.1. In addition to the above capabilities, users can run reports with “quick links” enabled. Clicking on the quick link in a report will launch that record in the application. For example, opening that Journal Entry.

Multiple/Undocked Report Viewing. Completed, In Q&A for Release 12.1. Users asked for our report viewer to launch in separate windows so reports could be compared to one another on screen.

New User Statistics Capabilities. Completed, Released January 2012. Several new statistics tables and processes were completed to enable customers to analyze their own statistics. An “all customer” stats database was created to allow Escape and our customers to compare performance across all participating customers.

Centralized “Help” Media Storage. Completed, Released December 2011. The media files consisting of our documentation, help files, tutorials and report samples total about 1 GB of space. Previously, these files had to be located on each application server. As most of them are updated with each update, that resulted in a lot of files being copied. With this enhancement, application servers now retrieve media files from a central media storage location on a single server.

Report Exporting. Completed, Released 11.03. Customers requested the ability to export our reports into several different formats. They can now be exported into PDF (default), Word, Excel, Excel Data (for extracts), RTF, and HTML.

New PERS XML Reporting. Completed, Released 11.02. Technically, this was a regulatory change, a different class of work for Escape. However, this one was so large in scope, that it deserves mention here in the Roadmap completed items.

New Data List Methodology. Completed, Released 11.02. We developed a new way to load the data so that lists of 3,000 to 10,000 or more rows don't slow down the user. Our testing showed a positively amazing increase in speed!

Message Center. Completed, Released 10.04. Each user now has their own message center in Escape Online 5. This is where notifications take place. In the first round, messages regarding Workflow are included. More to come.

Email Integration. Completed, Released 10.05. The ability to email payroll advices is now available. This functionality was requested as a high priority by our customers. The ability to email, instead of using the U.S. mail, has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of dollars per organization.

Direct Generation of Excel Reports. Completed, Released 10.04. This allows users to export report data directly to Microsoft Excel with a single click of the button. This one-stop button will save users a lot of time. Once they click the button, Escape Online will automatically launch Microsoft Excel and place the report data into a spreadsheet, where the users can manipulate the data freely.

HR Module Workflows/HRA's. Completed, Released 10.03. This is a powerful enhancement that will monitor and administer HRA's (Human Resource Authorizations). Much like "HR Requisitions," these can be used for new Positions or Employees, as well as any change to Positions (including funding) or Employees. One HRA can accommodate new/changes for any number of Positions and Employees, and can have multiple approval cycles as the HRA goes through its lifecycle.

Ad Hoc Reporting/Data Grid. Completed, Released 10.03. A data grid is similar to the lists we currently employ, but includes a great deal of extra functionality, such as grouping, master/detail (like vendor req/accounts), filtering and reporting. It's like Excel on steroids! And wonderful for end users. Including this functionality is our highest priority. Our implementation will be as a choice from any of our lists. Like right now you can do a one click export to Excel. Well, you'll be able to export the list to the Data Grid, but it won't just be the data on our list, it will be all the data for the "master" record (like employee) and then your selection of "detail" rows (like leaves, education, credentials, etc.). From there you can rearrange, sort, filter, remove columns, even print. And you can save the various "grid formats" that you develop. This looks to be the ad hoc reporting solution that our users have been looking for.

Detail Window. Completed, Released 10.03. This new functionality in the Adjust Pay activity allows access to one tab of our existing forms, without opening the form at all. Take for example when people are entering payroll data. First they get a list of the employees they want to do data entry for, or just review. In order to do that data entry, they open the form, and then enter information into the Addon tab. The detail window will be a window that opens up directly on the list, providing access to the Addon tab (or whichever tab is desired). Users can also click a row in the main list, which will load that row's detail into the detail window. This will reduce data entry/review time significantly. And it will be very useful in many areas, not just payroll. Leave entry, payment accounts, all over the system.

Finance Module Workflows. Completed, Released 10.03. We already have approval workflows for many of our financial documents. This year we are building a more robust workflow implementation, which will not only accommodate approvals, but many other types of actions, including notification.

 

Questions or Comments?

Please email Bob Towery: bobt@escapetech.com.