What's Coming in CMap Spring 2023?

Moving to our “Seasonal Release” approach in 2020 enabled us to significantly improve the quality of our releases. Three chunky periods of the year with dedicated focus. The good news is—before you panic—they’re here to stay.

To determine what makes it into a Seasonal Release, we start by analyzing the feedback we receive from customers. What are the big themes? Which upgrades will benefit the widest number of users? Etc.

The biggest “theme” for some time is “Booking time off in hours”.

Now, on the face of it, this sounds like a simple undertaking. Just “flip” days to hours and, hey presto, you’re done. However, it’s anything but straightforward.

Bringing time off in hours essentially involves a fundamental rewrite of the way CMap thinks. And the ripple effect is huge (changes to databases, the API, Direct Data Access, Report Builder, etc.).

How do we know this? Well, given its demand, we started to plan this upgrade a couple of years ago … before quickly realising the little snowball we’d started to roll was growing into an almighty boulder.

Back then, given the enormity of the undertaking, we made the decision to cancel the upgrade.

Fast forward two years and booking time off in hours remains the number one request—by some margin. This left us with a decision to make …

Do we simply say, “it’s too big”, and leave it? Or do we address the number one theme once and for all?

We’re delighted to announce that we’re rolling our sleeves up and bringing booking time off in hours to you!

To do it, things are going to work a little differently.

The lion’s share of the work is (a) back-end work, taking place behind the scenes, and (b) needs to be front-loaded (to a large extent). This means that summer, from a Seasonal Release perspective, won’t containing anything tangible to release.

It’s for this reason that Summer 2022 is being rolled into a single Spring 2023 release.

Spring 2023 feels a long way off. But there’s more good news. There are other items that we’re going to develop and release between now and then. These are impactful items that require little to no change management.

We’ll announce more in due course, but by way of a little sneak peek, they include “bulk updating fields in grids” and “associating a contact with multiple companies”.

You can also check out Feedback Portal, which lists other upcoming updates in the “Upcoming Committed Work” tab.

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