Latest upgrades to Gooroo Planner

Latest upgrades to Gooroo Planner

09/12/2013
by Rob Findlay

The biggest recent addition to Gooroo Planner is of course the Planner API, which lets you build the power of Gooroo Planner into your own business intelligence software. You can read more about the Planner API here, but in this post I want to tell you about some of the under-the-bonnet changes that we’ve made recently.

New server

Our whole website has migrated to a new server, with 8 physical processor cores (and 16 logical threads), 24GB of RAM, 10,000rpm hard drives, and a 100mps internet connection. That’s probably quite a lot more power than you have on your desktop. And we have the whole physical server all to ourselves. So even if lots of people are doing heavy work on Gooroo, this server should be able to handle it all.

In the NHS people are rightly concerned about security and keeping data within the UK, so our server is hosted in this secure data centre just north of London. Backups are kept off-site in a different secure data centre in Milton Keynes.

We’ve been pleased with the performance improvement, and response times (which we monitor every hour) are currently coming it at around 7ms (compared with around 40ms on our previous shared server).

Address book

In terms of software changes, the change you’re most likely to notice is the upgraded address book.

It is now easier to add and remove people, and this will be particularly helpful to those of you who use @nhs.net email addresses and currently have rather cluttered address books. Now you can tidy them up, and that should make collaboration much easier within Gooroo.

If you use an @org.nhs.uk email, you will find that colleagues with the same email suffix automatically appear in your address book when they register on the Gooroo website, even if they register after you did.

You can now also share reports with people who are still “pending” (i.e. they haven’t yet clicked the link in their confirmation email), which ends the need to wait before you can share a report with someone new.

Dataset handling

All the main code that handles datasets has been completely rewritten, replacing thousands of lines of baggy SQL with nice tight C# code. Most of you probably won’t notice anything different, but if you have had any trouble with these features in the past you should find that they all work better now (and if there are any gremlins then we can now fix them much more easily).

The differences you might notice are:

1) Uploading even a small dataset used to take around a minute and a half, and now it takes just a few seconds. Even a massive thousand-service dataset uploads in only around 13 seconds (and then takes only around 23 seconds to run through the calculations).

2) One or two of you had occasional problems with the powerful Update dataset function, and this should now be working fine so do keep using it.

3) There was an occasional problem with Subtotal dataset (it only arose when there was zero activity in the services being subtotalled) but this should now be working reliably too.

We have of course tested all the new code thoroughly, but there is nothing like real-life usage to really put code through its paces.

If you do come across any problems, please let us know right away so that we can fix it for you. The beauty of web-based software is that we can update it continuously without you having to do anything, and it is always nice (for us, as well as you) when we can fix something on the spot.

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