by Josh Tafoya, Technical Trainer & Caryn Morgan, Director of Training
Bold Group is very pleased to announce the release of the highly anticipated Manitou version 2.1! To help spread the word, we’ve been devoting the past few weeks on our Bold blog highlighting some of the exciting new features built into Manitou’s newest release. Some of the newly created features are long-time requests from several of our monitoring center partners. This week, we’re highlighting Linked Open/Close Schedules.
In our time here at Bold, we’ve been asked dozens of times how to create a schedule in one central place so it can be applied to many customers. And before Manitou 2.1, the typical answer was to copy a customer account containing the desired schedule. Of course, that means that there is no way to copy schedules for existing customers, nor is there a way to change a large group of them all at once. With Manitou 2.1’s new Linked Open/Close Schedules, now you can…
Consider this… you have a company group of stores that want to have all their schedules the same based on the region and company policies. Here is how you would manage this:
Let’s say your company owner has 100 stores in three states. Within each state, there are four quadrants. Within each quadrant, there are at least a dozen stores. It is now possible to set up a Master Dealer for the main company then sub-dealers for the quadrants that house the different groups of stores.
With the linked open/close schedules, the company is able to set what they expect to be the “global schedule” by creating an Open/Close dealer on their Dealer System Account (please note the quote marks around “global schedule” because it is only global within the context of the Master Dealer, Sub-Dealers, and customers. It is NOT truly global, like action patterns are).
We can see, then, on one of the customer’s accounts that this schedule is linked to the dealer because of the “truck” icon at the customer level:
Also, there is a checkbox that shows that this is clearly a linked schedule: 
However, the great thing is, if one of the dealer levels between the company, the sub-dealers, as well as the individual stores, decides to override the “global” O/C Schedule, when allowed, they are able to do so by creating schedules on their own dealer system accounts, or on the individual store accounts. Whichever schedule is “closest” to the customer will apply. This means that the priority order for the linked schedule is Customer > Sub-Dealer > Sub-Dealer [repeating as many levels as is necessary] > Master Dealer.
This is an addition that many customers requested over the years and those who need it will be empowered to set their schedules where they are most appropriate. Especially in the cases where there are a decent number of Dealer/Sub-Dealer relationships being used to manage corporate hierarchy. But this doesn’t need to be limited to the large third-party monitoring centers. This could even work for proprietary companies. Retail store chains, educational institutions, and governmental entities that all share a common structure. They, too, will be able to use linked O/C schedules, even if it is only one level of dealer hierarchy. They just need one top-level dealer over all of their accounts.
We’re sure you will find this useful in many ways. I hope you’ve enjoyed our blog series of new features available in Manitou 2.1! There are other cool new attributes to this new release. Contact our support team and plan your upgrade soon!