portatour® also supports Salesforce series of events for route planning. You can create a series of events by going to the event creation page in the Recurrence section, ticking the checkbox Create Recurring Series of Events and set the necessary recurrence settings:
The main series event on one hand and every recurrence of new event on the other hand, are created in your Salesforce calendar. You have several options for how the series of events should be considered in the schedule.
Activate series in the main series event
Open the Events page, select the sub-tab View Series:
and activate the whole series like a normal event (see section Create Appointment) in the call settings section. Through this, all recurrences of the series are scheduled automatically.
Changing the time for a recurrence of the series will have a direct impact on its schedule. Only event address and schedule type are the same for all recurrences.
Activate series within an Event of a series
You will get to the same result by clicking on Activate series for portatour® in the call settings section of an event in the series:
Through this, the main series appointment is activated for portatour®.
Activate an event of the series
It is also possible to activate only one appointment of the event series for portatour®. To do so, click Activate for portatour® in the call settings section of event in question. In this case, only this appointment will be considered in the next schedule update.
Edit series call settings
If you have activated the whole Appointment Series for portatour®, it is possible to set differing settings for one appointment. If you want to meet the customer at a different location than usual, or want to have a wider time frame for this appointment, because the customer has more time available to you, open the Event and click on Override Call Settings for this Appointment, which can be found in the call settings section:
From the next update of the schedule onwards, the edited call settings will be taken into account.
Restrictions
Appointment Series that are activated for portatour® have an important limitation when compared to normal appointments. It is not possible to mark one Appointment in the Series as called, because the whole series would be marked as 'called'. However, portatour® needs information whether an appointment has been called or not in order to include it in the schedule of the respective day. Therefore, only past appointments are seen as 'called' and are skipped by portatour®.
Avoid Appointment Series with vague times such as 'any time during the day', instead, use dates that are as exact as possible. Alternatively, you can chose to activate individual recurrences of the event and then individually highlight them as 'called' by clicking on Now throughout the course of the day.