Symptoms: Manually setting the claim status to "Closed" could be done if the current status was anything except "Assignment Received".
Explanation: Now the claim status can be set to closed (by the claim originator only) regardless of what the status currently is.

 

Symptoms: On the Totals page of an estimate, the total market conditions of all items that used this unit price component is calculated. The calculation however only factored a quantity of 1 for each item, thus would be wrong if any items used a quantity greater than that, and this would result in the estimate total being incorrect too.
Explanation: An email was sent to all users regarding this bug. It has been fixed.

 

Symptoms: Certain Allstate claims were created with these values not entered during claim creation. Contractors who were assigned these claims were unable to save the claim because of an error—mobile claims was not anticipating "null" values for these fields.
Explanation: Fixed.

 

 

 

When a claim was uploaded to Symbility.NET before, a journal entry was not created automatically...this now happens.

 

For each notification method you create, you now have the ability to instantly test that it works by generating a test message to the destination (SMS number or email address).

 

The long-awaited "undo" feature is now available, allowing you to correct an "oops" and "undo" the last 20 things you've done in a floorplan, a roofplan, the Wall Editor, the Ceiling Editor, the Stair Editor (not completed yet) and the Item Pane. Pocket PC users can undo the last 10 operations. For desktop users, the standard keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z will work.    

 

You can now apply an item to only a portion of the walls to which it is attached, instead of only the full wall. To do this, use the wall height button on the Property Bar (above or below your list of items that are attached to a room). Unless you change it, the label "FH" appears beside the icon on the Property Bar—indicating that the quantity of the item is being calculated based on the full height of the wall.

 

To use a different wall height to calculate the quantity of the item, click the wall height icon on the Property Bar. This will open up the wall editor and will show you a vertical dimension on the right-hand side (which will be the same as the height of the wall). Alter the dimension using the feet/inches gizmo or type it (support for wall height capture with the Disto is coming soon) and voila! the item's quantity is based on this wall height.

 

Note that if you have an item that applies to multiple walls, but only one wall area should be calculated with a partial wall height, you'll need to add the item multiple times—once for each wall height to be used (when adjusting the wall height of an item, it affect all wall that the same line item is attached to).

 

Coming later is the ability to adjust the wall height by dragging the orange area with your stylus, plus the ability to set the height of an area in the middle of the wall (i.e. a horizontal strip that starts below the ceiling and above the floor).

 

This is a tremendous time-saver that we're really proud of, and it's fun to use! Take this scenario: before, when you had a closet that was part of a bedroom (meaning it's within the outside boundaries of the bedroom) like this:

you used to have to draw an L-shaped bedroom, then a rectangular-shaped closet. With this new feature you can draw a rectangular bedroom:

then draw a rectangular closet inside the bedroom (then add the bi-fold door):

You'll find it much quicker to create complex floorplans, without having to add rooms of different shapes and rotate them to the correct orientation. Inside an existing room you can draw any other shape of room—L-shaped, 3-sided, any shape of stairs.

 

Note that the two rooms (the existing room and the room you're drawing inside that room) must share at least one common wall.

 

When you do something with a claim that triggers a notification to be sent to another claim participant (for example if a contractor releases ownership of a claim that has a completed estimate, the adjuster is sent a notification), and the other claim participant uses SMS messaging as their notification method, you can't be sure if in fact the SMS notification was delivered. Until now. Although it's rare, sometimes SMS messages do not get delivered in a timely manner—for example if the other participant's cellphone is off or out of range, or if the network operator has some internal logistics problems (Telus is particularly bad for this). This new feature will inform both the sender and the intended recipient of a non-delivery of an SMS notification after 2 hours:

1. The intended recipient is sent an internal notification (the notification will appear in a yellow box the next time they log in to Symbility.NET or mobile claims).

2. The administrator of the company that generated the SMS notification is sent an email advising of the failed SMS delivery.

 

Here's another feature to address the issue of the large amount of information that enters the New Activity box on your Symbility.NET home page. You now have the option to group all records by claim (use the "Group Entries by Claim" check box, which will be checked by default. By default, you'll only be shown one record for each claim (the main record for that claim—the white rows in the above illustration), the date and time of that records being the date/time of the last bit of activity on that claim. To see the detail of all activity for that claim, click the symbol to expand the records (the journal entries for that claim are the grey rows in the illustration above).

 

When downloading a claim to mobile claims that had embedded photos, the photos were not downloaded, which prevented mobile claims users from taking advantage of being able to inspect them. You used to have to view the claim in Symbility.NET to see the photos. To save time and respect bandwidth limitations (for example when using a wireless modem which tends to be a fairly slow connection), mobile claims still won't download every photo automatically when you download a new claim. It will however download the photo thumbnails (which are small and quick to download on any connection).

 

Each photo thumbnail will have a checkbox labeled "Download full image". This allows you to specify which photos you are interested in seeing the full image for. The next time you synchronize mobile claims, the full image of all thumbnails that you checked "Download full image" will be downloaded. When each checkbox is checked, a "Synchronize" icon will appear, which allows you to immediately download the full image for just that photo (if you are connected to the Internet).

 

Note that this is only relevant to claims which you didn't add the photos to originally. If you were the one to take the photos and embed them in the claim, you will already have the full images on your device.

 

You can embed photos directly in a floorplan, attach them to items so they appear right in the estimate...and now there's a dedicated photo section of each claim. To use this feature, find "Photos" in the claim explorer and double-click. You'll be presented with a blank virtual page (always in portrait mode, and the full page is always viewed) to which you can add photos. Here's a summary of the features associated with this:

1. You can add new photos to a photo page, or select one that has already been embedded elsewhere in the claim.

2. Each photo you add to a photo page is automatically laid out for you—it does all the work making the photo pages neat and professional-looking. New pages are created automatically as needed.

3. You can customize the layout used—select from 2-up (2-per-page), 3-up or 6-up.

4. You can add a caption to each photo you add.

5. Remove a photo from the photo page by selecting it and tapping Delete.

6. Each photo can be viewed full-screen just like on the floorplan or in an estimate by double-clicking the photo.

7. You can view one page at a time or view multiple pages at a time.

   Viewing multiple photo pages

8. You can re-arrange the order of photos by moving a photo to another location using drag-and-drop. Simply drag a photo and drop on top of another one—this will move it AFTER the photo you dropped it on. When you view multiple photo pages at a time, you can move photos between pages.

There are still some features that will be added later:

• the ability to annotate photos with the standard annotation tools (scribble, callout, textbox) and format each annotation (this feature also allows photos embedded in the floorplan and estimate to be annotated.

• the ability to rotate any photo.

 

We're already working on the next release, due two weeks from now. From Symbility's design, development and testing teams, enjoy estimating on the go!