This article provides an overview of the major differences between Agenda Manager 7 and 8.
New Features in Agenda Manager 8
- Department Level Collaboration: Before submitting an item for inclusion on an agenda, departments often need to collaborate on the item within their own team. Agenda Manager 8 extends the agenda workflow to the department level, allowing each department in an organization to have its own approval process within any meeting type.
- Flexible Re-Routing: Approvers can send an item back to any stage in the approval process for correction. This simplifies approval by sending the rejection directly to the person or department that needs to make the change.
- Approval Delegation: Delegate approval to someone else while you are not available to review submitted items. Both you, as the approver, and the delegate will receive e-mail notifications of item status, and Agenda Manager will track if the approver or delegate performed the approval. Administrators can also assign delegates.
- Observer Role: Interested parties, such as a department supervisor, can view the submission and approval process for a particular agenda. With Agenda Manager, users can have read-only access to any items submitted for an agenda anywhere in the process.
- Enhanced Notification: Add users who are not approvers to workflows so they're notified when items relevant to their department or office reach a certain stage in the process.
- In-Place Document Editing: With most Web applications, you have to save the document to your local drive, then make changes, then save it again, and then upload it back to the server. With Agenda Manager 8, you just open, edit and save, like it was on your own computer. It's all done through the Web interface--no plug-ins needed.
- Automated Check-Out: When an approver opens an item's staff report or other attachment, it's automatically locked until they close it again. This prevents their changes from being accidentally overwritten by other users.
- Recover Deleted Items: Preparers can delete items as long as they aren't already part of a past agenda, then restore them if needed at any time.
- Draft Agenda Items: Create working drafts of agendas without having to have every item ready for submission. These items can then be assigned to users to complete and submit.
- Add Comments/View Meeting History: Approvers can add comments to an item at any time, regardless of whether they are ready to approve or reject it. An item's history can be filtered to only display comments.
- Reorder Attachments: Drag and drop to reorder supporting documentation for a particular item in the way that makes the most sense to your users.
- Spell Check: Correct spelling and proofread items before they're submitted.
- Split Agenda Packet Publishing: Preparers can create agenda packets that split the actual agenda and its supporting documents into separate files, which can be published to the Web or to Laserfiche. This allows access to specific parts of the agenda packet without having to download the entire thing.
- Posting Version: Create an agenda without attachment titles or links, suitable for posting or for handing out at a meeting.
- Staff Report Linking: Automatically link items and their staff reports or other supporting documents when publishing the agenda packet. Reviewers can then move back and forth between an item and its supporting documentation effortlessly. This feature requires that you publish agendas using Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional. (Adobe is not included with Agenda Manager or Agenda Processor. Please see product documentation to determine which versions of Adobe are compatible with which version of Microsoft Office.)
- Publish to Laserfiche: Upload the agenda and agenda packet automatically to a Laserfiche repository when published.
- Microsoft Word Add-in Debug Tool: Receive feedback in real-time as Agenda Manager attempts to publish an agenda. If the publish fails, you will see which step the process failed to complete, which may help you or a support professional troubleshoot the issue. (You can copy/paste text from the debug window into an e-mail, for example.)
- Streamlined screens/processes: A number of functions and processes in Agenda Manager have been modified to make them more streamlined and efficient, including creating a workflow, submitting and editing items, and approving items.
- Action Confirmation: Automatic prompts let approvers confirm when they reject, approve, reroute, or add a comment to an item.
- Meeting Type Access: Users only see the meetings types they have access to. This makes working with Agenda Manager simpler, as users don't see the meeting types they aren't concerned with.
- Drop-Down Item Fields: Fill in item submission forms from drop-down lists, so submitting items is easier and more error-free.
- Web help: Help files are hosted online, allowing them to be updated by Laserfiche more frequently. An option is also available to use a locally installed version of the files.
Fixes for Agenda Manager 8.0.0
- Errors involving the Agenda Manager Microsoft Word Add-in and the Normal.dot Word template have been resolved. (22151, 21695, 17791)
- 1011912 If you publish using Adobe, hyperlinks in a published agenda packet PDF will function correctly. Links between agenda items and their attachments is not supported if you publish using FinePrint pdfFactory Pro.
- 1011806 "Access Denied" errors will no longer be reported when attaching a file to an agenda item.
- 1011752 An "Error 80040082" error will no longer be reported when publishing a packet with multi-page TIFF reports.
- Deleting submitted items is now supported. (16263)
- In previous versions, users browsing their Laserfiche repository via Agenda Manager may have been unable to see certain entries, even though those entries would be visible if they were browsing via the Laserfiche Client. This issue has been resolved. (48542)
Please see the following Knowledge Base article for additional information on Agenda Manager 8.0.0.
1012277 Known Issues with Agenda Manager 8.0.0