What's New in v2

New View Options

• Timegrid view – Events are displayed as horizontal blocks along the timescale (Screenshot). The timescale contains major and minor time units (which can be adjusted) and a time selection bar (Screenshot). With this view, end-users can easily obtain a chronological perspective of individual events.
• Year view – Allows end-users to view their annual schedule and long-term plan at a single glance (Screenshot).

Event Reminders

• Notifies end-users of upcoming and overdue events. The ExpressScheduler's reminder sub-system has all the major features found in MS Outlook® including:
  • Built-in controls within the event editor which allow end-users to set a reminder and specify its lead time (Screenshot).
  • A bell icon which is located in the event's rectangle. It indicates that a reminder has been set for a particular event (Screenshot).
  • A Reminders box which is displayed when a reminder triggers, informing end-users about the upcoming event and prompting them to perform any of the following actions: dismiss the reminder (or all of the reminders), snooze the reminder, or even to open the event editor for the event which has been selected in the box (Screenshot).
  • A set of associated events which allows programmers to easily develop schedule-driven applications.

Resource Scrolling

• The ExpressScheduler continues to make it easier for end-users to work with resources. A new tool - the resource navigator - gives end-users quick and easy access to any desired resources in any time view (except the year view). With the resource navigator, end-users can scroll through resources sequentially or in blocks. It also allows end-users to limit the number of resources which are currently visible in the time view (Screenshot). For those who need to extend the capabilities of this new feature, it's a simple matter of adding custom buttons and writing appropriate event handlers for the new buttons.

Event Operations

• Optional prevention of overlapped events. You can choose between two scheduling modes - whether events can be scheduled simultaneously or only sequentially. If overlapped events are allowed, you can obtain information on intersected events for a particular event (or for a particular period) and information on time gaps for a specific time range. (Screenshot)
• Sharing events between specific resources. In the previous versions of the ExpressScheduler the approach to scheduling events with resources was not fully exploited. Only one resource or no resources could be assigned to the scheduled event. With version 2, end-users can easily specify as many resources as required to a given event. (Screenshot).
• Cloning and moving events. Previously, end-users could only drag events within time views or move them to different dates using the Date Navigator. Now end-users will benefit from standard clipboard operations when moving or copying events within an application. Standard Windows cut/copy/and paste operations are fully enabled for this purpose.

Enhancements to the Visual Elements of Events

• Custom icons can now be created and assigned to events, making it much easier to identify events which have custom states (Screenshot).
• If the set of built-in color labels is not enough to represent all types of events, you can now extend the color scheme to apply any color you want to any group of events (Screenshot).

Changes to the Day View

• Optionally hide non-working hours in the time view (Screenshot).
• Optionally show minutes in a time ruler (Screenshot).
• The start and end times of events can now be made permanently visible regardless of whether event times match the timescale's units or not (Screenshot).
• The ability to hide the all-day event area located at the top of a day to increase the screen space available for scheduling (Screenshot).

Changes to the Week View

• When scheduling within the week view, days can be arranged across one or two columns (Screenshot).

Enhancements to the Standalone Date Navigator

• Now the standalone Date Navigator control can be bound to the scheduler. In such cases, it behaves in the same way as the scheduler's built-in navigator (Screenshot).
• Unlimited date selection. Prior to this release, only fourteen days (on a day basis) or six weeks (on a week basis) could be selected by end-users in the Date Navigator control. Now, there are no such artificial restrictions on the time range that can be selected, though the old limits can still be applied if required.

Data Processing Improvements

• Smart refresh mode. A new data processing feature gives the ExpressScheduler a significant perfomance boost when dealing with large blocks of data. If smart refresh mode is active, the ExpressScheduler only loads the updated values rather than all the data.
• Smart refresh mode means the scheduler does not update the view if changes to the bound data source are made outside of the scheduler (by another control). Using the programming interface, developers can manually synchronize the ExpressScheduler with its dataset if a concurrent control updates data in the shared store.
• Filter the events displayed in the scheduler view. You can now easily control which events are loaded into the view from storage by specifying criteria in an event handler.
• Improved query performance. Two new fields have been added to the scheduled events table. They store the date ranges of all kinds of events (including chains of occurrences). These fields can then be used to specify ranges in the query's conditional clause, thus significantly improving performance.

MS Outlook® Synchronization

• In addition to standard export and import operations, bidirectional synchronization between the ExpressScheduler and MS Outlook® has now been added.

Miscellaneous

• Resource icons. The ExpressScheduler now allows you to add icons to resource headers (to make resources more informative) and the icon's position can be specified in relation to the resource's caption (Screenshot).
• Multiline resource captions. You can now specify whether the text of a given resource caption is wrapped or clipped if it's too long to display as a single line in the caption's rectangle (Screenshot).
• Customizing event hints. With a new event handler it's now up to you as to what information is displayed in the hint window when an end-user hovers the mouse cursor over an event.
• Modifying the look and feel of dialogs. To unify the appearance, the look and feel of all the dialogs in the scheduler can now be completely configured through the available settings.

Printing (available via the ExpressPrinting System, sold separately)

• Yearly print style - represents the year view in the report (Screenshot). The layout options allow end-users to control how the periods in a year are split across pages (Screenshot).
• Support for the new features that have been added to the new Time Views.

For more information on the new and improved features of the ExpressScheduler Suite v2, please refer to the What's new section in the ExpressScheduler 2 documentation and the What's new in ExpressScheduler 2 Report Link section in the ExpressPrinting System documentation.