Introduction
Xytech is pleased to provide our first release of 2023. This is a major release and delivers 100s of enhancements and improvements across every feature area. We are looking forward to our existing and new customers evaluating and ultimately upgrading to this release.
This release also represents many firsts for Xytech including a name change. We will no longer be using MediaPulse as a product name. With this release we are officially changing the name to Xytech Media Operations Platform. This name better represents why customers use our product, as the central platform for managing their media operations. We suggest using Xytech Platform, Ops Platform, Xytech, or simply Platform for a shortened name, depending on the context you are in.
Another first is this release uses a release name, Granite, and a Release Season, Winter 2022, rather than just a technical release number. Just as many other enterprise software product and operating systems companies, Xytech is adopting the practice of using a release name to provide customers a simple and easy-to-remember label for our major version release series.
We will still be tracking version numbers to help with in communications of detailed support cases. The technical version of this Granite Winter 2022 release is version 10.1 and is the first General Availability release of our v10, Granite Series. An earlier version of v10 has been in production at a small set of early-adopter customers and within Xytech’s internal operations for many months.
This release has been named Granite, because it is a foundational release that provides more than 3 years of product enhancements and improvements and makes them available to all active customers. Granite provides over 400 new and improved features and 1200 fixes for customer reported defects that was built with 14,000 hours of development.
We have worked hard to broaden our capabilities, enhance usability, improve performance, and improve our quality. We have much more work to do, but we have waited long enough to provide our customers the accumulated capabilities developed and delivered in various combinations to our customers over the past several years.
Xytech is Changing 2022 brought many changes to Xytech including new ownership and a new executive management team. These changes also bring a change in how we are executing the business of developing and delivering the Media Operations Platform. A Platform that can improve our customer’s operational efficiency from planning, through production and delivery execution, to paying and getting paid for work completed.
One notable change is signalled in the product name, Xytech Media Operations Platform, and highlighted in the marketecture diagram above. The system provides a core platform with security, storage, scalability
management, business rules execution, APIs, and more. The Apps enable our customers and prospects to easily identify the collection of features and functions that address their different work processes and better highlights all that we can provide. You’ll see more of this structure in future releases of our product as we better structure the user experience to represent collections of related work processes. We also plan to expand the number of Apps we deliver to address work processes that are related to but not yet available in our product. Our plans are to focus on using our deepest industry expertise to deliver the most comprehensive and integrated Media Operations Platform available.
Another significant change in Xytech’s product operations is moving away from our traditional focus on
delivering small updates and releases to individual customers on an as-needed schedule. While this has helped Xytech to become the industry leader, we are now at a scale of business where we must change to grow further, and our growth is just as important to our customers as it is to us. To do this and still address the dynamic nature of our industry and customers changing needs, we are planning for frequent General Availability (GA) releases delivering new features, enhancements, and fixes to all customers at the same time.
Conversely, we will be rapidly reducing the number of customer-specific releases we agree to provide. Xytech Media Operations Platform is an extremely large software application with a very complex, integrated set of features, business rules, and user experiences. We can develop more and improve our quality results faster if we can focus on fewer, larger releases than hundreds of smaller, individual releases.
To do this, we recognize that our customers will still need a responsive platform provider that can address their concerns in a timely manner. And that is why we will be delivering quarterly releases (and likely more frequent in the future) – to give our customers the release windows that align with their needs without having to deliver one-off combinations of our capabilities.
All these changes will take time to become routine for Xytech and for our customers. We are dedicated to
finding the right balance of responsiveness, capabilities, and quality and look forward to working with our
customers to identify how and when they update, upgrade, or migrate to the Xytech Media Operations
Platform. Thank you, our customer, for being our partner in working through these changes. We’re confident the results over the next months and years will prove valuable to all of us.
Release Highlights
There are 100s of changes in this initial Granite release as you will read in the Change Log document that
provides a quick but detailed summary of all the changes. The following are a few highlights.
Schedule Book
A majority of our customers use the Platform for managing the work assignments for their employees and contractors. Managing work schedules is a daily, even hourly, effort.
New Scheduling Filters
To make this work more efficient we have added abilities to filter scheduling views to see just the information needed. This feature is available in Work, Media, and Transmission Orders. You can filter bookings by Order Number, Phase, and Order Type in Schedule Book and Calendar Gadget. And you can save your views to access them quickly later.
Changes to Payroll and Scheduling Management
There is now a list of 51 Penalty Types for Payroll and Scheduling management making it easier to report specific payroll tracking for the common (and uncommon) situations that change pay for workers based on contracts, union rules, and government or company regulations Scheduling Counter Rules are now configurable to easily apply different rules to groups of employees
• You can see the impact of Counter Rules on Rates for Individuals or Groups
• You can now see entitlement accrual on the Scheduling Views:
Additional Schedule Book Highlights
• A new Quick Filter is available on the Calendar Gadget to toggle between displaying the full 24hours of a day and only the official business hours
• You can define colors to Time-Card activity types so that you can understand all the activities by type at
a glance
Bidding Highlights
Repeat Occurrence Management
The Bidding module now supports defining Occurrence Dates for actions that will be identically repeated on multiple days. You can select the days an activity will be repeated using the calendar widget. A new computed field, Occur, will display the number of days selected. This field will be used to calculate the Occurrence Bid Amount, FC Amount, Discount Amount, Cost Total, and Mark-up Amount fields.
When orders are generated from the bid, work orders will be created based on the Occurrence dates and other options set upon Order creation. During approval, Work Orders and transactions are created once for each Occurrence date.
This dramatically reduces the data input effort and the potential for mistakes on events that repeat multiple times.
Bid Comparison
It is now easy to do a side-by-side comparison of Bids to analyze their differences including automatic color highlighting values across the same field in multiple bids that visually display lower and highest values.
New Module - Long Term Planning
Available for licensing, we have added the new Module, Long Term Planning. Long Term Planning is focused on analysis of resource capacity, demand, and comparing these two to help you quickly and easily identify when and what type of additional resources you need or what additional capacity you have for any variety of resource types across selectable timelines, ensuring you have the insights needed to optimize your capabilities.
Capacity Management
The first feature area is Capacity management. For capacity, there have been new properties added to groups and resources that support various methods of calculating capacity. For each group or selected resource you can Exclude, Set Constant, filter for Roster On or Roster Off and set other filters such as Holidays and Maximum Overtime.
This allows you to focus your understanding of capacity on an individual resource, a resource type, or large groups of resources.
Demand Management
Conversely, Demand Management lets you see how much resource demand you have for a selected timeframe.
You can filter by Group, Resource, Project, Jobs, Orders and by Types of each. Scale can be set to report by Hours, Weeks, Months, and even Years. The report can be summarized by Hours, Weeks, Months, and Years.
Capacity Planning
Capacity Planning brings Capacity Management and Demand Management together to analyze resource gaps and opportunities compared against the demand. Results can be scoped to Group Type, Group, Resource Type, or Resource and scaled by Hours, Days, 100 Hours, or 1000 Hours. You can include Bids and/or Orders, by Bid Type, Order Type, or neither to select Demand with options for Order Phase and Bid Status. Optionally, Statistical Absenteeism can be applied.
You can also generate graphs to help analyze your capacity.
Long Term Planning offers a quick way to identify and plan for your capacity needs at the scope of resources, projects, and timelines you select giving you actionable insights for running your business.
Platform Improvements
With 100s of additional improvements you can find more detailed list in the Release Change Log. Here are select highlights:
API and Integrations
• Updated our support for OpenID and Azure Active Directory
• Upgraded our support for Exchange and Exchange Online to the latest Microsoft supported APIs for
Calendar integration
• Added integration to Google Calendars
• Added support for MS SharePoint as a source for adding Attachments
• Added and/or updated integrations with Acumatica ERP and Interra Systems Baton
• Updated our QuickBooks integration and added support for QuickBooks online
Order Enhancements
• Ability to Group Billing Codes, Grouping by Parent not just by Job
• Transaction Hierarchy support with Hierarchy templating
• You can define Confidential Classes
User Experience
• 100s of tweaks to theming, navigator, views, reducing clicks
• New Search capabilities to get to answers easier and faster
Performance, Scalability, Responsiveness
• Page and Content load-time improvements for Schedule Book, Chart data retrieval, Media Orders and
Dashboards
• These use the new Flexlist functionality where only the subset data rendered is retrieved
Quality
• 1,200 customer reported issues and defects have been resolved
• Four hundred Hours of Customer User Closed-Beta Testing before release
• 1000s of Hours Internal and Early Release Adopters Usage
Security
We are happy to announce that this release of the Xytech Media Operations Platform has passed our
contracted, industry-respected, third-party Security Audit for Penetration Testing with 0 defects reported on our final release candidate.
Summary
This is a massive release for Xytech and our customers. It encapsulates over 3 years of efforts at Xytech that we are excited to get into the hands of all our customers. We’re here to help you plan and execute your upgrades and we look forward to growing with you.
Thank You for being our customers and partners.
-Dave White, CPO, and the entire Xytech Team