Minou Manafi - 21 April, 2021 - 5 ’ read

Pick up to 10 time zones for your Call Analytics reports.

Call Analytics, News, R&D, Tech Specs, Updates

Hello Imagicle blog reader! Maybe you're enjoying your morning coffee while reading this, or maybe you're drinking chamomile, ready for bed, who knows… well, our Call Analytics is now able to get this info (about your local hour, not your beverage! ). That’s right: a whole new support to time zone preferences will offer you an even more tailored behavior.

I’m Minou from the Imagicle UC team and I’m here, once again, to tell you about the new Call Analytics functionality – I must admit, it’s one of my favorite apps in our UC Suite.

I’ll fly with you today over time zones all around the world to explain how this new, amazing functionality came to life.

You guys ready to take off? Let’s go!

Why did we develop a multi time zone support?

Until now, thanks to the previous multi-time zone support, external calls were reported within Call Analytics at the time of the gateway from which they entered/exited. Internal calls, on the other hand, were always reported in the UC suite server time.

Why did we feel the need to introduce an improvement to this mechanism?

Initially, the reason was to provide the user with a unified reading of external calls. Prior to this feature, the time of external calls could be confusing and misunderstood, especially in reports with calls referring to different time zones (due to different gateways). This new feature will make it easier to analyze and understand the reports you extract because they will be unified under one time zone: the one you select.

Secondly, we have thought of all customers having office locations across multiple time zones. The reading of internal calls was not optimal for all those users who were in a different time zone from the one of the server and therefore always viewed the calls in someone else’s time zone. If before it was necessary to mentally convert different time zones to yours to understand when a call was made, now you can find out at a glance regardless of your location or your colleagues’. It is particularly helpful nowadays, with home offices spread all around the globe.

And more in general, previously it wasn’t possible to customize the display of call times according to a preferred time zone or to use a filter on the date in relation to a certain time zone, and we felt like it was time to step up our game.

What’s new?

In short, the big news in the reports will be that all the dates in it will be consistent with a specific time zone. Which one? Well, the one chosen by the user among the different time zones present in the brand new selector within (almost) all the reports! Here it is:

The selector has been inserted in all the reports in which the date and time of the calls are reported, or in which talking about dates is in some way significant: it has not been included in the Phone Bill report, for instance, as it is not significant for that particular case.

Once you select a TZ, all the dates and all related fields in the report will be expressed using that time zone.

That means that moving from one time zone to another, you can immediately appreciate the time change that will bring the entire report to the time zone you have selected! Plus, if you decide to schedule the report, it will also be expressed in the time zone of your choice.

Same thing for filters: if you filter the report on a specific date, it will continue to be consistent with the TZ expressed in the selector.

Below you can see the effect of the time zone change on Grouped Time Dimension Chart. Isn’t it amazing?

How did we bring it to life?

The realization of this improvement was very challenging because we had to take into account all the many peculiarities of the topic at hand.

Did you know that the time zones are not 24 but many more? Actually, there are more than a hundred. A large part of them supports DST (Daylight Saving Time) but many have decided not to adopt it in the coming years. And did you know that some time zones have an offset that does not always differ by multiples of one hour with respect to the adjacent time zones but also by half an hour?

Performing this study on the time zones was really engaging and interesting. It led us, as it often happens, to cross-team collaboration, making us travel with our minds at different longitudes and making us discover many peculiarities that we didn’t know about.

When our feet got back on the ground (here at UTC + 1

) we had to face various difficulties with the optimal realization of such a complex scenario: on the one hand, we wanted to make the improvement to time zone support as good as possible; on the other hand, we wanted to limit the additional occupation of space on the database and maintain the current high performance of Call Analytics, achieved thanks to the developments of last year’s Spring release.

The right trade-off found in unanimity with all the teams was to give the administrator the possibility of choosing 10 time zones to be shown in the selector (with the possibility of modifying them), and each user can choose the one that fits them best among those 10.

In other words, the UC Suite administrator will have the possibility to configure up to 10 preferred time zones from a dedicated section in the administrative area (for example, the time zones in which the various company offices are located). Each user will then choose to extract the reports in their preferred time zone.

Conclusions.

With this improvement, we intend to help our customers to have an increasingly customizable Call Analytics user experience. Having the reports usable in your time zone (or in another TZ of interest) can make the difference in the usability and accessibility of the reports, offering search results that are increasingly targeted and functional to the various needs of companies that use our Call Analytics every day.

As our flight prepares for landing, I invite you to think about your next journey.

Get up to speed with all the news about Spring 2021 with our articles on:

Well, I hope the flight was comfortable, see you next time!