A few weeks ago, we had introduced the roster page for sumHR. The update had all our customers excited, and now we have made some really amazing additions to the HR product. We have also worked hard to enhance the back-end technology. Here’s more information about the whole set of updates:
Attendance reports galore
We’ve added a whole gamut of attendance reports in your account, available with just a click! These attendance reports and their formats have been prepared after gathering lot of feedback from our customers who are totally hooked onto our attendance features. Here’s a list of new attendance reports which you can access from your Admin accounts:
More powerful directory options
(view and re-activate in-active employees)
We’ve spruced up the directory with some nifty little options which can give you a lot more power and quick info.
(1) Toggle between 2 views, Active Employees / In-active Employees
This gives you the quick access to all your historical employee database information. All employees that you’ve ever had in your organization (who’re not longer working with you) will appear in the In-active employees view.
(2) Re-activate in-active employees
If you find yourself in a situation where an ex-employee is re-joining your organization, don’t worry about creating a new profile for him/her all over again. Just head to the In-active Employees view in your Directory and re-activate that employee’s old profile once again.
(3) Real time search number in Employee Directory
As the Directory is the central location from where you view, search and manage all your employee database, now you’ll be able to always know what’s the number of employees currently displaying in the directory. This will be very helpful when you’re filtering the data based on departments, employee types, office locations, etc.
Introduction of “Gearman” for data processing and cron job optimization
Alright, so I’m sure that this one is an unusual update for most of you, given that I usually only make announcements about features, functionality, etc., and seldom mention any new back-end technologies. But since Gearman will be helping us solve a couple of very critical recurring problems, I decided to draw a little of your attention to it too.
Recently, with the surge in companies signing up for sumHR (which is very good news), we’ve also been experiencing some issues in managing the hundreds/thousands of daily actions being carried out by all users. This caused 2 major issues:
1) attendance logs were not getting updated automatically every night (as they should be)
2) bulk actions carried out from the directory were not executing completely
In comes Gearman! It’s basically an open source application framework which can be used to distribute large volume of data driven tasks in such a fashion that nothing drops out of process. Using the Gearman technology, large tasks that involve lot of updates/modification/executions on our processors, can be done more quickly and completely. As a result of the Gearman addition, we’re making sumHR more powerful in terms of running cron jobs (automated system generated tasks) and perform large bulk actions more smoothly and efficiently.
Credits for building this open source framework goes to Brian Aker and Eric Day.
