Ever since Enhanced Filtering was introduced, we’ve been in awe of how quick and easy it has become to navigate around TaskRay and focus on the most important things at hand.
Need to view all tasks that are due this week? Or maybe a list of projects that are set to kick off in the upcoming month? Or perhaps view a set of records that match a combination of project and task criteria? Easy. All of this can now be done frictionlessly and on-the-fly.
And it’s not just us who are excited about this. In fact, we have received feedback from our customers that enabling Enhanced Filtering has been a game-changer for them as well. So, if your organization is still using Classic Filtering, we are here to tell you all about why you should consider making the switch to Enhanced Filtering.
Yes, the rumors are true: Classic Filtering will be deprecated (a.k.a. no longer supported… at all) on May 10, 2023.
To make sure the work of your users is not interrupted on May 10, we strongly recommend transitioning onto Enhanced Filtering before the date comes.
Although Enhanced Filtering does introduce a new way to think about filtering, as well as a new filtering architecture in general, the switch is actually much easier than it might seem. In fact, it could be as simple as just enabling Enhanced Filtering for your org and using the default options provided out of the box.
Let’s take a look at an example. With Classic Filtering, we found that many organizations would create many similar versions of custom board filters with slight variations for criteria. Using an example of filtering projects and tasks by a related account, organizations had to create a custom board filter for every account that projects and tasks needed to be filtered by. That’s a lot of filters!
As for Enhanced Filters? It is all much simpler! That same requirement could be addressed using even one of the standard Board Filter options combined with a Flex Filter. More specifically, for this case, a Flex Filter could be set up to include the Account field as a refinement option. Such a configuration would allow users to first select a broad Board Filter to pull in projects and tasks, and then use the Flex Filter to select a specific Account value to dynamically refine the projects and tasks visible on the board.
Think of this as any e-commerce shopping website: you start by navigating to a broad category (i.e. women’s clothing). Then, within the selected category, you have the option to refine the visible items using filtering options provided (i.e. by color, size, or fabric). To apply this example to Enhanced Filtering in TaskRay, the broad category is the Board Filter, and the refinement options are the Flex Filters.
The bottom line is that Enhanced Filters do not require rebuilding all of those custom Classic Filters from before. In fact, we strongly recommend keeping things simple and using Flex Filters to refine data dynamically.
With TaskRay Admins in mind, we provided some additional configuration options that will make the transition seamless.
First and foremost, Enhanced Filtering can be enabled in preview mode for designated users. This allows those users to have a designated workspace to configure filtering without impacting other users’ work. And, any filters that are created in preview mode will be transferred whenever Enhanced Filtering is enabled for the entire org.
But that’s not all. It is also possible to configure and roll out Enhanced Filters in phases, such as by department. This can be especially helpful for larger organizations as it allows focusing on smaller individual groups of users, rather than doing it all at once.
With Classic Filtering, ongoing maintenance of filters was quite the task. Since Classic Filtering required making many versions of similar custom board filters to address various requirements, that meant that all those custom filters needed to be maintained long-term. That’s a lot of maintenance for a lot of filters.
But now, that is just a ghost of the past. Not only did Enhanced Filtering eliminate the need to create (and thus maintain) so many custom filters, but there is also now a single centralized place to manage all filters for all users right within the app.
Just like dessert, we saved the best for last. Ever since its not-so-distant launch, Enhanced Filtering quickly made its way to become one of the top favorite TaskRay features among users. Yep, that’s right: Enhanced Filtering has proven to be a huge wow factor for organizations that have enabled the feature. Just saying.
With Enhanced Filtering, users have the flexibility that they need to effectively manage their work and visualize data in any way that they need. Back in the old days of Classic Filtering, end users had to make requests for TaskRay Admins to create custom filters whenever there was a new requirement for data visualization. But now that Flex Filters are a thing, end users can make a one-time request for the fields that should be included in the Flex Filters, and then dynamically filter project and task data as they manage assigned work.
If all of this sounds too good to be true, it’s not. It IS true. And your organization could be next to see all this filtering beauty in action.
Refer to these resources for additional information:
Still have questions? We’re here to help! Reach out to your CSM if you have any questions or email success@taskray.com for further assistance.