Batch jobs for everyone

When you use Next® for everyday work, you mostly deal with one document or one task at a time. Probably many documents and tasks in total but a few at a time.

Some times you deal with multiple documents and tasks. You select 5 expenses, and approve them in one go. Or select 3 invoices and share them with the customer by email.

If you want to process more than a handful of documents at a time - maybe export all of last weeks invoices into Excel - we call that a batch job.

To keep Next® fast and responsive, such batch tasks are run in the background without tying up your workstation.

Until now, such background tasks had to be run from the admin module in Next®. But from now on, you can run them from anywhere in Next®. The first feature to use this is our One-click export to Excel. Any list of documents (or tasks) you see in Next®, you may now export to Excel. All it takes is a single click on one of the icons below the list. 


Click Export to Excel below the list to create an Excel file with all your documents


Background jobs may be huge. That's why you get a chance to confirm. 


When a background task is completed, you get a notification email (will be in the Notification center when we deliver that) with a link to the resulting file. 

Click to access you Excel file in Next®.


You can see your running (and completed) background tasks in Your profile.


The number behind Background tasks, tells you how many of your background tasks are still active. 


If you miss out on your completion email, you can always access the Excel file from Your profile, and Background tasks.


You can remove your background tasks, when you have no more need for the result


When you click 'View result', you open up your Excel file in Next®. Ready to share. 

One-click export to Excel was only the first feature to showcase the ability to let anyone run batch jobs in Next®. 

Any changes or processing you make on a regular basis, are candidates to become a List Action 

  • Export to one PDF
    Create a single PDF with all documents to a customer, or from a vendor. 
  • Export data to BI 
    Export all open invoices to your BI tool
  • Change owner
    Change the owner on all contracts belonging to someone leaving the company 
  • Change project ID
    Change the project ID on all document filed under one or more project IDs

The business log

When you start a background task it's logged in the business log.

ADLEO Started Export to Excel

And whatever changes your background task may perform to documents, will be logged as well. 

Future enhancements

In a future release of Next® you will be able to schedule your background task to a later point in time using a graphical calendar..

For the techies

The fact that we now can enable action buttons on search form hit lists, can be used for much more than a simple export to Excel. 

If you have users who occasionally do archive cleanup, you can allow them to do a Delete documents. Or batch update documents with new tags. Or export tasks to your BI solution. Or export customer documents into PDF. The options are limited only by your imagination. 

Export to Excel, is by default available on all search forms, and to all users. 

You don't want every option to be available to everyone. And also not from everywhere. You may define dedicated search forms for specific tasks and restrict access to the search form.  Or enable the action on widely used search form, and restrict access to the action. 

Please refer to the online product guide for additional information on this feature, once it is released.

Commercial terms and conditions

This feature - including the exporter to Excel - is available at no additional cost, to users with an active service plan. Any consultancy assistance will be invoiced.

Additional exporters and batch tasks may be offered for free or at a price. 

Disclaimer

Despite our best efforts, we may be forced to change both content and expected delivery of future product updates without notice.

Details

Title:

Batch jobs for everyone

Type:

New feature

Status:

Released

Release time:

January 2020

Affected products:

Next® Bank Statements
Next® Contracts
Next® Emails
Next® Enterprise Archive
Next® ExCustody
Next® Invoices
Next® Mailroom
Next® Processes

Audience:

Admin

Classification:

Public

Responsible product manager:

Kim Hellum

Updated:

10.12.2019

By:

Kim Hellum