4.6 Release Notes

Released 10 January 2019

Release Highlights

Personalised Dashboard Widgets

This feature represents a major enhancement in how the Travel Platform Dashboard can be personalised right down to a user level for Travellers, Travel Arrangers, Travel Managers and even Consultants (TAMs).

Users now have complete control over how they choose to configure their dashboard with all existing widgets available in both small and wide formats, along with an exciting new companion widget to our Care application as shown in the following example.

To customise the dashboard configuration, all widgets (tiles) on the dashboard will now display 2 icons in the top right corner when you hover the mouse cursor.

Widget Settings

This panel provides a dedicated view to manage Dashboard widgets.

Your existing dashboard layout will be visible under Active Widgets allowing you to rearrange your dashboard in the preferred configuration by either dragging widgets into new positions by either using the drag Navigation icon or by adding widgets as tabs in the main Dashboard widget.

You can only add tabs to the widget titled Dashboard. Any widget can be displayed in tabbed mode and the first item in the list will always be displayed as the open tab.

Inactive Widgets will appear at the bottom of the Widget Settings panel and include any widgets not currently positioned on your dashboard along with any new widgets that are added to the system based on user access level.

Rearrange Widget

This feature has been designed to allow for quick dashboard rearrangements without having to open the Widget Settings panel.

To use this feature, Drag and Snap to the widget placeholder indicated by a light blue box with a dotted border, as shown in the following example.

When this appears if you release the widget it will snap into place and will be immediately updated in the user’s profile settings.

Care Widget

As part of the release of our new Care application, a new Traveller Tracking companion widget was added that is accessible to Travel Managers (TM) and Consultants (TAM) via their dashboard.

Once added the widget will provide a visual map representation of your current traveller locations with real-time risk assessment at both the country and city levels through our innovative pulsing risk markers.

The Care widget works in either the large or small widget configuration providing additional flexibility in how your dashboard is personalised.

To add the Care widget to your dashboard, open the Widget Setup panel and either select Traveller Tracking from the Dashboard Tabs to add to your existing tabbed display or drag the Traveller Tracking widget from the Inactive Widgets section at the bottom of the panel.

Once happy with the layout of the widget, select Save and the dashboard will be refreshed and saved against your user profile.

Visa Check Widget

Our new Visa Check widget is available to all Travel Platform users and brings the automated Visa Checks from Request straight to your Dashboard. Simply add the widget to your dashboard, select a traveller from the search list and then select 1 or more countries to check visa requirements.

The system will then perform a real-time Visa Check using the passport(s) loaded against the selected traveller profile, and display business visa requirements by country.

New API Endpoints for Destination Risk Check

To provide the best possible user experience a big focus of this release has been on performance, and more specifically optimisation of existing APIs used within the Travel Platform coupled with higher levels of compression when delivering content to the user’s browser. This translates to our users having an even faster and more responsive experience than ever before.

Our proprietary Duty of Care API is used extensively within the Travel Platform to provide real-time risk information for Trips, Requests, and Care.

The new API has been rebuilt providing the following benefits and enhancements:

• 8x faster response times for all requests

• 66% reduction in response size

• City & Country advice in the same endpoint

• Affected Destinations returned for increased visibility

These enhancements are noticeable throughout the entire Travel Platform providing marked performance increases in the Upcoming Trips and Traveller Tracking dashboard widgets.

DFAT Travel Alert Broken Images

Recent changes to the Australian Government’s DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) web service involved a change in the regional map file name convention. Additional logic has now been included to handle map detection in Travel Advisory feeds and will gracefully fall back on a placeholder image in the absence of a suitable image.

Collapsed Menu - Access to Request & Intelligence

In certain browsers with the Navigation Panel collapsed, users were unable to access sub-menu items when the menu item was expanded. This issue has now been resolved and in addition to this tooltip, hovers will now also work for submenu items.

Platform Administration

Configurable News RSS Feeds

Company View: Custom News Feed

Another exciting addition is the ability for a company to have their own personalised news feed on the dashboard. The format required is either RSS2.0 or ATOM.

This feed will override the default news sourced from the Travel Agency’s setting.

The following example for the company Stark Industries is using the Engadget Technology feed to source updated technology news content for their travellers.

A company’s specific News RSS Feed is set up in Kudos Administration - Branding, by defining the source in the RSS News Field field, as shown in the following example.

The company’s RSS News Feed setup will override the Travel Agency’s.

Agency View: Consultant Desktop News Feed

Travel consultants will now see news content personalised to their Travel Agency location to create a more personalised and localised experience.

In the example below, a travel consultant associated with the Kudos Travel Agency will see their localised Consultant Desktop with news from Skift in the News widget.

For an optimal display of article images, the RSS feed should contain the following information to avoid the widget displaying article headers on a blank tile with a solid background colour. The platform’s news parser scans articles RSS for <content:encoded> and <description> elements for image content.

Theme Templates for Company Travel Platforms

As part of this release, the existing personalisation capabilities of the Travel Platform have been extended to now provide multiple theme templates providing additional creativity in how company brand colours are represented throughout the platform.

Some of the new theme features include contemporary gradient effects on backgrounds, buttons, icons and even heading text.  

Theme personalisation extends not just to the Travel Platform dashboard but throughout the system to all applications to ensure the entire platform’s ecosystem feels like an extension of the company branding.  

The following theme options are available as part of this release:

• Theme 1 – (Default)

• Theme 2 – Reverse Icons

• Theme 3 – Reversed Navigation

• Theme 4 – Horizontal Gradient

• Theme 5 – Vertical Gradient

Kudos Administration provides a new theme panel under Company Branding allowing for the selection and preview of different themes in conjunction with the company branding colours.

Online Dynamic Button Labels

To facilitate the Travel Platform’s ability to allow clients to pilot new Online Booking Tools (OBTs) in conjunction with their existing tool, the existing functionality has been enhanced to provide further flexibility.

Kudos Administration will now allow a custom button label if a Single Sign-On is configured for the OBT which will be displayed when the user clicks Online.

Remove Terminate Date - Profile Reactivation

When reactivating a profile from within the Travel Platform, the existing Terminate Date value was not being cleared and was still visible in Kudos Administration.