Mobile envelopes and working offline
General information on working offline
The Work assignments app module has 'offline capabilities'.
This basically means that app users can continue to update their work's progress on the app while temporarily working offline. To handle 'being offline', the initial data passed on from back-office to mobile device is processed via mobile envelopes. To handle subsequent updates (from device to back-office, or back-office to device), the concept of messages is used.
 | Planon administrators can keep track of successfully processed mobile envelopes in the dedicated Mobile envelopes TSI, which can be added to their navigation panel. See Mobile envelopes TSI for more information. |
Technically, a mobile envelope is created in the back-office for each record that must potentially be available offline on a mobile device. This happens as soon as the back-office assigns a work assignment to a field engineer, provided that the corresponding order is of the user-defined type that is configured on a sub web definition. See Making the Work assignments module ready for use for the procedure.
Every envelope that is sent out to a mobile device and eventually returned to the back-office contains specific information that 'maps' the order data onto the correct records in the Planon database. Once the data is processed by the back-office, the envelope and all its data is deleted from the mobile device. Thanks to this mechanism, app users do not have to worry about data synchronization or data loss when working offline.
| | Planon administrators are advised to use a scheduled task to regularly clean up the list of successfully processed mobile envelopes. See Scheduled tasks for more information on scheduling the SYSENVELOPE_CLEANER task. Only if the envelopes have the status Completed or Revoked and are at least older than one day will it be possible to remove them. If the envelopes still have unsynchronized messages linked they cannot be removed. |
Good to know: if field engineers (internal tradespeople) have opened a work assignment on the app, while in the meantime the back-office removes or changes the work assignment (for example a different Internal tradesperson), they will receive a warning message. When they follow the warning message, the work assignment will be set to Stopped and removed from the device.
User accounts
Mobile envelopes will only work for app users with a user account that is also linked to a Person in the Planon database. Additionally, in Accounts, on the User groups > Settings > User settings selection step, the field Enable work assignment 'envelopes'? must be set to Yes for all relevant users (those who are linked to the Work assignments module via their user group).
Business object settings
See Field definer > Settings for the Work assignments business object for the procedure to activate mobile envelopes.
Downloading assets before working offline
Since fields engineers can (temporarily) work offline in the Work assignments module, it may be very convenient for field engineers to be able to download the most recent asset information from the Assets module, before they go offline.
For that purpose, the Assets module also supports 'offline' cases, with a special type of sub web definition designed for offline use. See PMFS solution - Asset module configuration for more information.
Planned maintenance order restrictions
 | If a mobile envelope contains PPM order data, the number of maintenance activities and the number of checklist items per maintenance activity are checked by the system. If the number of maintenance activities exceeds the limit (100), or the number of checklist items for a single maintenance activity exceeds the limit (100), the mobile envelope cannot be opened and you will receive an error message. See Limits applied in the PMFS solution for more information on limits in the PMFS solution. |