Two Ideas for Simplifying Workflows with Code and Creativity
A new coding framework in Trimble Cityworks allows you to add custom buttons and widgets to Trimble Cityworks apps—and put them right where your users expect them to be.
When you’re in the groove of your daily work, the number of clicks or manual searches it takes to complete a task can have a big impact on the time and effort required to move through a workflow. That’s why we added new functionality to help you further streamline navigation among Trimble Cityworks apps and third-party solutions.
Starting at Trimble Cityworks 15.8, HTML5 apps such as Respond support a new extensibility framework that allows administrators to add coded widgets that bring in data from other systems and buttons that help users quickly navigate to other Trimble Cityworks apps or third-party sites that are part of their workflow.
The extensibility framework can be accessed in Style, the Trimble Cityworks customization app. A new page in Style allows you to write code for new features—such as a button, link, clock, or weather widget. This creates an item in Style that you can insert into an available widget slot within the HTML5 app. The item appears for users with the specified Style profile, allowing you to further customize the experience for distinct groups of end-users. Here are a few examples.
A quick display button in Respond allows the user to toggle through a display of useful information about the work order.
1. Make Training Materials Easy to Find
Many organizations create training materials and workflow instructions to guide end-users through standard procedures. For example, water utilities may create step-by-step guides to help their crews standardize hydrant flow tests. These documents, when used regularly, can help maintain data entry standards and empower users to do their job quickly and effectively. But crew workers may have a hard time finding that quick start guide in the truck. If the guide gets lost or damaged, it won’t be used.
With the new extensibility model, you can create a button and link it to a document hosted on an internal intranet or file-sharing site. And because buttons can be customized according to the user profiles configured in Style, you can also customize which resources are made available to specific user groups within Trimble Cityworks.
A custom button on a Work Order page in Respond will send data to another system.
2. Simplify Tab Navigation
Permit technicians often navigate between several different software tabs in order to manage the plan review process. Trimble Cityworks and partner solution APIs make it possible for Trimble Cityworks to pass permit and licensing data to and from electronic plan review solutions, and certain tasks must still be done in each system. By adding a new button to the attachment panel in Respond, users can launch the third-party system in a single tap, simultaneously passing important data and taking the user to the next step in their document management workflow.
A custom button can trigger an API call, with a warning asking if the user would like to continue.
By taking advantage of this functionality in Trimble Cityworks HTML5 apps, you can help simplify everyday tasks and reduce manual navigation between tabs and systems. This means happier users who can find the tools they need, exactly where they expect them to be.
View this Converge presentation for a more in-depth look at how you can utilize Trimble Cityworks’ new HTML5 extensibility model: