November 7th, 2022: Meet your new Pursuit Assignments

For those who use QorusDocs to streamline the ton of collaboration that goes into producing RFx responses, strategic proposals, pitch decks, and other business critical documents – this upcoming release is for you. 

In our next release, planned for November 7th, we couldn’t be more excited to be bringing you some brand-new functionality and a host of UI/UX improvements around Pursuits and assignments, including: 

1. The all-new Pursuit assignments (woohoo!)
2. Document-level assignment UI and UX Improvements (in the Office Add-ins)
3. Pursuit UI and UX Improvements
4. Other UX/UI enhancements

1. The all-new Pursuit assignments

Up until now, you could only create and respond to assignments within the context of a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, using the QorusDocs Add-ins for Microsoft Office. 

With this release, we’re bringing all the assignment functionality you’ve come to know and love to the QorusDocs Hub (our web app) that you access with your web browser – so you can create and manage assignments directly within a Pursuit’s workspace, to handle all your processes and tasks that happen outside of the documents associated with that Pursuit. 

For example, during a team meeting, someone might volunteer to take on the task of identifying the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) you’ll be working with and scheduling a kick ‘off call with them. So that you don’t lose sight of that task, you can create an assignment for it within the Pursuit. 

The rest of the assignment workflow is the same for both pursuit-level and document-level assignments. QorusDocs will send out email notifications and reminders at the right time to the right people, you’ll be able to keep track of comments and progress, as well as update the statuses of assignments, within the Pursuit’s workspace.

Here’s an overview of how this new functionality works: 

a. Creating Pursuit assignments

b. Email notifications for Pursuit assignments

c. Responding to Pursuit assignments

d. Commenting on Pursuit assignments

e. Editing Pursuit assignments

f. Pursuit-level vs Document-level assignments in the QorusDocs UI

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a. Create Pursuit assignments

In your QorusDocs Hub, go to the ‘assignments’ tab in your Pursuit’s workspace, and click on ‘Create’: 

In the ‘New assignment’ window that pops up next on your screen, the first thing you’ll do is select the person(s) you’d like to allocate this assignment to. 

If your Pursuit has a defined list of Team Members (as opposed to being open and visible to any user in your QorusDocs Hub), QorusDocs will save you some time by pre-populating a drop-down list of all the specified Team Members for that Pursuit. This way you don’t have to search, you can just pick them from the list: 

If the person you’re creating the assignment for has not been added as a named Team Member to this Pursuit, they won’t be in the Team Member list. 

You will however have the option however to search for them by typing in a few letters of their name, surname, or email address, and then select them: 

QorusDocs will then display the following message, alerting you to the fact that this person is not a Team Member of that Pursuit, and asking you if you’d like to add them. Since they’ll need access to the Pursuit in order to action any pursuit-level assignments, click ‘yes’ and QorusDocs will handle the rest: 

Back to the all-new Pursuit assignments

b. Email notifications for Pursuit assignments

QorusDocs will send out the same email notifications for Pursuit assignments as with document-level assignments: 

• when the assignment is created
• when the assignment status is updated
• when someone comments on the assignment
• every day, as part of the daily digest or summary of outstanding assignments
• 24 hours before the assignment becomes due if it has still not been actioned

For Pursuit assignments, the only real difference is that there is no document links in the email notifications: 

Back to the all-new Pursuit assignments

c. Responding to Pursuit assignments

All assignment status updates occur within the Pursuit workspace itself. Recipients can click on the Pursuit link in any of the email notifications QorusDocs sends, or they can navigate to the Pursuit workspace directly in their QorusDocs Hub. 

In the Pursuit’s ‘assignments’ tab, they can click on the assignment’s status, and then update it. 

Back to the all-new Pursuit assignments

d. Commenting on Pursuit assignments

To the left of the assignment status and below the ‘comment’ icon, there’s a number in blue text. This indicates the number of comments each assignment has. 

To view any comments and/or leave a comment of your own, click on that number: 

Next, a ‘Comments’ window will pop up on your screen, where you can type and post a comment, as well as view the full thread of comments for this assignment: 

Back to the all-new Pursuit assignments

e. Editing a Pursuit assignment

When you click on the cog or gear icon next to an assignment, you’ll find the options to edit the assignment, view a full audit trail, and delete it: 

When you edit an assignment, you can modify the assignment name, the people you’ve assigned it to, and the assignment due date – all while optionally providing a comment:

When you click to view the Audit Trail, you’ll see a full history of the assignment: 

And clicking on ‘Delete’ will, well, delete the assignment. That is if you have sufficient privileges to do so. 

Back to the all-new Pursuit assignments

f. Pursuit-level vs Document-level assignments in the QorusDocs UI

In your QorusDocs Hub (that you access using your web browser), QorusDocs offers two easy ways to differentiate between pursuit-level and document-level assignments. 

The Location column

In the grid or tabular view that lists all the assignments across your QorusDocs Hub, or all the assignments for a particular Pursuit, there’s a ‘Location’ column that lists where the assignment was created. This is not only useful information that’s good to know, but the location is also clickable, so it opens the right document in the case of a document-level assignment, and the right Pursuit in the case of a pursuit-level assignment.  

For document-level assignments, the icon will be a Word document, a PowerPoint presentation, or an Excel spreadsheet. 

For pursuit-level assignments, the icon is an orange bullseye, which is what QorusDocs uses for Pursuits: 

The Assignment Type Filter

With this release, we’ve introduced a new filter that you can use to automatically filter your view of assignments based on assignment type: Document or Pursuit. 

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2. Document-level assignment UI/UX Improvements in the Office Add-ins

We’ve made a bunch of improvements to the document assignments you’re already familiar with. These include: 

a. The new and improved assignment page layout in the QorusDocs Add-ins

b. Responding to document-level assignments

c. Commenting on document-level assignments

d. Editing an existing assignment you’ve already created

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a. The new and improved assignment page layout in the QorusDocs Add-ins

One of the first things you’ll notice when you click into the ‘Assign’ menu in any of your QorusDocs Add-ins for Word, PowerPoint, or Excel, is that where before we used to have three tabs: ‘To do’, ‘Created’, and ‘Users’ – we now no longer have any tabs at all.

Instead, we have three new filters: ‘Assignee’, ‘Status’, and ‘Owner’:

This brings the assignments user experience in the QorusDocs Add-ins in line with our recent changes to the assignments view in the QorusDocs Hub. 

By default, when you first land on the Assign pane in your QorusDocs Add-ins, we’ll automatically have it pre-filtered to show assignments where the ‘Assignee’ is you, and the ‘Status’ is ‘Assigned’. This way you immediately get to your To Do list of assignments. 

You can of course clear each of these filters and adjust them to bring into view the assignments you need. 

 

In addition to filtering, you can also sort assignments. With this release, we’ll automatically sort assignments based on their Due Date, so that the most urgent assignments are bubbled to the top of the list. 

You can of course also sort assignments alphabetically (‘Name’) or by last modified date (‘Last Modified’) by clicking on the sort icon. 

Back to the document-level assignment UI/UX improvements

b. Responding to a document-level assignment in the QorusDocs Add-ins 

With this release, we’ve made it more intuitive and easier to respond to assignments. Gone is the drop-down list of assignment statuses, now we have buttons that clearly spell out the options available to you. 

To action an assignment, just as you would before, you would first click on the assignment name, and then click on the relevant button to either ‘Reject’ or mark an assignment as ‘Done’:

It’s important to note that you’ll only see assignment action buttons if: 

• you have the ability to respond to or claim an assignment (if you’re in the list of assignees or a proxy for another user).
• the assignment status is not currently set to ‘Done’. 

Back to the document-level assignment UI/UX improvements

c. Commenting on document-level assignments

For each assignment, next to the cog or gear icon, you’ll see a chat bubble icon with a number. If this number is greater than zero, then that means there’s at least one comment for that assignment. 

To see these comments, and optionally leave a comment of your own, click on the chat bubble: 

This will bring up a new window with the full thread of comments and a space to leave a comment yourself if you wish: 

Back to the document-level assignment UI/UX improvements

d. Editing an existing assignment you’ve created

Clicking on the gear icon will bring up a drop-down menu that will take you to the assignment edit screen, view the assignment’s audit trail, or delete the assignment:

The ‘edit’ option will be available for assignments in an ‘assigned’ state. 

If the assignment has been rejected or has been marked as done then instead of the ‘edit’ option, as the assignment owner, you’ll see a ‘reassign’ option:

The ‘Reassign’ option however is not available for assignments that have been finalized.

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3. Pursuit UI/UX improvements

You can also look forward to a whole bunch of improvements in the Pursuit UI. These are:

a. Better button placement for better navigation

b. Avoiding empty states and wasted clicks

c. Re-ordering ‘Content Tabs’ for the QorusDocs Add-ins for Office

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a. Better button placement for better navigation

When creating a new Pursuit

QorusDocs provides a wizard-like experience for creating Pursuits. To more clearly guide users, we’ve updated the way the ‘Next’ and ‘Save’ buttons work at each step. 

When you’re creating a new Pursuit, you’ll now see a ‘Next’ button on the right-hand side of the screen as you fill in the Standard Fields and then the Smart Fields. At the final step, the button text changes from ‘Next’ to ‘Save’, indicating the conclusion of the Pursuit creation process. 

When editing an existing Pursuit

Once a Pursuit has been created, provided you have sufficient privileges to do so, you can edit ‘Standard Fields’, ‘Smart Fields’, and ‘Members’ independently from one another by simply clicking into the relevant tab and then saving your edits. For this reason, you won’t see a ‘Next’ button but rather a ‘Save’ button on the right-hand side of your screen for all three tabs. 

When navigating to your Pursuit workspace in the QorusDocs Hub from the QorusDocs Office Add-ins

We’re making it easier to see which Pursuit you’re currently working in and more intuitive to get to your Pursuit workspace using the click-out button in the QorusDocs Add-in, by placing these at the top of your Pursuit pane: 

Back to Pursuit UI/UX improvements

 

b. Avoiding empty states and wasted clicks

No user has ever claimed that they enjoy wasting a click on a menu item or a button, only to find that there’s really nothing they can do there after they’ve clicked. 

For this reason, for QorusDocs Hubs that do not have any Pursuit Types configured yet, we’ll now hide the Pursuit menu item in the top nav in the QorusDocs Office Add-ins. 

In the QorusDocs Hub on the web, we’ll also only display the “Recent Pursuits” screen on your Hub home page, if you have configured at least one Pursuit Type in your hub. Otherwise it will be hidden. 

Back to Pursuit UI/UX improvements

c. Re-ordering ‘Content Tabs’ for the QorusDocs Add-ins for Office

As an Admin user, for each Pursuit Type, you can specify which ‘Content’ tab users should land on when they access their Pursuit workspace in the QorusDocs Hub web app, and the order in which the ‘Content’ tabs should be arranged. 

For example, for some Pursuit Types where you’d like to provide as much guidance as possible on the right content and templates to use (like a pitch deck), you’ll generally want users to see ‘Recommended Content’ first. For other Pursuit Types where there’s a lot of documents to collaborate around (like an RFP), you might want the ‘Pursuit Content’ you’re collaborating on to be the very first tab users land on.

With this new release, this useful feature of re-ordering your ‘Content’ tabs will also update the order in which these appear in your QorusDocs Add-ins and not just the Pursuit workspace on the web. 

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4. Other UI/UX enhancements

Since we’re giving Pursuits and assignments much love in this release, we’re using the opportunity to bring you a host of small but mighty UI/UX improvements: 

• We’re removing the ‘Associate Pursuit’ text that appears at the bottom of the QorusDocs Add-in in the Pursuit pane. You can still however click on the icon to fix any Pursuit association issues, after making sure your document is saved in the right location for your Pursuit team to collaborate on.

On the assignments tab in a Pursuit, the total number of assignments for that Pursuit will be displayed in the Pursuits workspace, while next to ‘Results’ you’ll see the number of assignments currently visible in your view. This number could be different if you have a filter selected.

• We're also making it possible to delete Pursuits, even if they have assignments associated with them. So, if you've been waiting to be able to do some clean up and getting rid of test and training Pursuits, you'll be able to do that soon. 
• We’re improving hover effects and text colors in the UI so you can better see where you currently are, and which options are clickable.
• We’re also tweaking some of the assignment icons (and their colors) slightly to make them more intuitive.

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