Highlights

• Two-factor Authentication
• Reporting Groups in Program Schedules
• Administrators can Lock Approver Roles
• Enhanced Gantt Filtering
• Investment Dashboard Renamed
• Issues Resolved 

 

Two-factor Authentication

We are introducing an additional layer of security to your Amplify user account. In addition to your password, you can now set up an authentication key for identifying you on the system.

Setting Up

To configure two-factor authentication for your account, click on your username or avatar and go to the My Account menu. If you scroll down, you’ll see the “Enable Two Factor authentication “button. Follow the instructions on the screen to complete the setup.

You can use any third-party authentication app like Google or Microsoft authenticator to generate the authentication key. For more information, see Two-Factor Authentication.

Enforcement

If you are an Amplify administrator, you can enforce two-factor authentication for all users of your site.
The System Settings page has a new option that will allow you to do this. It also allows you to specify a date on which this will become a mandatory process for all users at your site.

Users will see a banner displaying the number of days they have to set it up when they try to log in.

Once the grace period expires, they will be redirected to the configuration page when they try to log in and will not be able to access anything in Amplify until it is set up.

Amplify does not support enabling SAML and two-factor authentication at the same time. If SAML is in use, Amplify will skip two-factor authentication. For more information, see How to Enforce Two-factor Authentication.

 

Opting Out

Administrators can opt-out of two-factor authentication enforcement if they do not want it at their site.

As a user, you can disable the two-factor authentication at any time if your administrator has not enforced it. If it has been mandated, it is possible to dismiss the banner that appears at the top of the page to bypass the authentication process during the grace period. However, once the grace period expires, you will be redirected to the configuration page and will not be able to access anything in Amplify until it is set up.

 

 

View Reporting Groups in Program Schedules

Reporting groups in the Program model help you organise and structure the programs at your site. You can use the reporting group options to determine the scope of each project within the program.

In this version, the Gantt will display projects in its reporting hierarchy.

The parent rows display the reporting structure, including all subgroups and projects within, while the child rows display tasks, milestones, impacts, costs, risks, goals and resources. The parent rows display valid progress, which will be the average of all items below.

You can drill up or down within the hierarchy.

If you want to see only certain areas of the schedule, you can choose to limit the information displayed using the filter buttons. In case you’re interested in displaying only certain groups, use the Reporting Groups filter button to filter out groups that you don't need to see. Use the Projects filter to display just the required projects. 

Please note that it is not possible to edit the attributes of a reporting group or move projects between groups.

 

Administrators can Lock Approver Roles

Amplify workflows are all about collaboration, but it also provides absolute power to regular users when they request approvals. If a user is a workflow initiator, they are free to add, modify or delete approvers, which is not always a good thing. We have come across situations where approvers were changed inadvertently (added/removed/replaced), and that resulted in confusion.

Luckily, this will no longer happen because Amplify now allows Administrators to have more control over workflow approver configuration. We have introduced a configuration setting that will allow administrators to lock approver roles. You can toggle off the Allow Approvers to be Modified button, and the users will stop seeing the option to add or remove approvers while submitting approval requests.

If this setting is disabled, it will hide the buttons to add/modify/remove approvers on the stage-gate widget on the Performance dashboard, the Pending Approvals widget in edit approver mode, the Benefit data entry screen while entering actuals, and the Benefit dashboard workflow tab.

When approver roles are locked, the pre-configured roles will determine which users can approve the workflow. However, if a workflow has no roles defined in its configuration, the requester will have the option to add approvers.

Please note that this setting is not available for Dependency workflows.

 

Enhanced Gantt Filtering

Previously, when you filter out items using the Features button, the system did not align the overall schedule duration with that of the items in the filter alone. Even items filtered out contributed to the duration of the summary tasks above.

This wasn't much help because when you have several projects and multiple items within each project, it fails to give an idea of what your project’s duration can be with regard to a specific item's time span.  

We have enhanced the filtering feature to change this behaviour. The project span will now reflect the options that you selected in the Features button.

For example, if you want to see how the project timeline reflects the span of impacts, select "Impacts" from the Features button and clear all the other options. The Gantt will hide all the other items and exclude their timelines from the overall timeline. The duration will change to reflect only the impact durations in addition to tasks and milestones.

 

Investment Dashboard Renamed

It will now be referred to as the “Financial” everywhere on the interface. You'll also notice that we've chopped off the word "dashboard" from the menu item labels. 

 

Issues Resolved 

 

Service Request #/ Internal Ticket ID	Description
SR # - 795	Tasks that are delayed were not displayed as threats on the Performance dashboard.
SR # - 808, 863	Ledger date columns appeared out of order.
SR #- 826	When the FTE unit in the admin section is deleted, the Properties dashboard's resource capacities link does not work.
SR # - 833	Enabling the Stage-gate process did not stick even after save. The setting reverted upon switching to another tab.
SR # - 834	Users having no write permissions to a reporting group are able to create projects for the group.
SR #- 905	The Resource Demand tab throws an error for some Initiatives because of missing data migration.
AMP - 1441	In the program model, only projects should move through stages in the program model, but the program itself went through stages.
AMP - 1460	URL in the stage-gate comments box did not wrap to the size of the box.