We are currently rolling out an improvement to the load times and performance of Tasks in Smokeball, aiming to alleviate these issues especially for firms with a large number of Tasks in matters.
What to expect
This article details the expected behavior in Smokeball that you may experience if your firm has this enhancement enabled.
General behavior
- Logging into Smokeball is now significantly faster if you have a high number of tasks.
- The following actions may take around 20-30 seconds to update, as they will be downloaded by the server:
- Changes to Task Description data when reporting on Activities
- A task recently marked as Completed and viewing this completed state in the Tasks List
- Changing the due date of a Workflow Task
- Changes logged in Task History
- Deleting tasks as a result of deleting a matter
- Seeing a change to a linked reminder to a task
- Edits to sub-tasks will not be applied until the parent task is saved.
Viewing tasks in the Task List
- Task lists on the main Smokeball window and matter window are show tasks in pages of 50/100/200 tasks per page, instead of needing scrolling indefinitely to view the entire list of tasks.
- You can no longer sort tasks by Category or Assigned to.
If the Filter Count on the main Task List fails to load, due to timing out or being offline, click on it to refresh it.
Task searching
- When searching for tasks, you must search from the beginning of the term, instead of searching using letters contained in the term, e.g. search for "Advanced" instead of "vanc" to display results containing the word "advanced"
- You can no longer sort tasks by the following columns in the search results:
- Category
- Matter
- Matter Number
- Description
- Settlement Date (however you can sort by Settlement Date on Task Lists elsewhere)
- Assigned to
- Assigned by
- Created on
Exporting tasks
There are now two options to choose from when exporting tasks:
- Export this page brings the current page of results into a .CSV file
- Export all pages exports the full task list into a .CSV file
Creating a Next Step in the matter
The Next Step section in the Matter Widget has been redesigned, making it easier to select an existing task and view task details.
Changes to Workflows
You can now unlink a Workflow Task from a matter when another Workflow Task's due date is linked to its due date or completion date. If this is done, the second Workflow Task will still be linked to the first Workflow Task's due date or completion date.