Managing site visits

All site visit tasks for begin with the Site Visits dialog, and depending on what you want to do, you may need to have set the context to a specific device or group. To open this dialog, set the context if necessary, and then locate the Site Visits section of the Action pane's Service panel and click Manage site visits.

Open the Site Visits dialog (see above). By default, the site visits that pertain to the selected group or device are listed. To view all of your site visits, regardless of the context, click My Site Visits.

To view details about a specific site visit, select it only the list. The Profile tab is refreshed with that site visit's details.

NOTE: When adding a site visit, you must set the context to the device or group for which the site visit is intended before you open the Site Visits dialog. (You won't need to do so in order to edit or delete site visits.)

You should regularly check the state (status) of the site visits you create to see that they are being downloaded and activated.

Open the Site Visit dialog, select the site visit whose history you want to check, and switch to the State History tab, where you can see the site visit's history from creation through reconciliation.

You may edit any site visit you created and whose state is ReadyForDownload (meaning it has not yet been downloaded by a field service technician). You can change its name, change its delivery-by date, and/or assign it to a different field service technician.

TIP: To quickly find a site visit, sort the list by the appropriate column. For example, click the State column to quickly find all site visits "ReadyForDownload," the only state that allows editing.

The Questra IDM Application Suite allows you to delete any site visit you created, regardless of its state, but it is important that you delete with care, else, in certain situations, data from devices may be lost. Before attempting to delete a site visit, refer to the guidelines in the Best Practice below.

Best Practice for
deleting site visits

Site visit state	Guidelines for deleting
ReadyForDownload	Because the site visit has not yet been downloaded by a field service technician, you may freely delete it from the Questra IDM Application Suite.
Downloaded	First contact the field service technician to which the site visit has been assigned and verify that the technician has not yet activated (delivered) it. Inform the technician that you need to delete the site visit and that it is imperative that he or she not activate it but instead should remove it (using the Advanced feature of the Questra Courier application). Only after having this discussion should you delete the site visit from the Questra IDM Application Suite. If the technician has already activated the site visit, do not delete it. See the next guideline.
Activated or Processing	Do not delete the site visit because the field service technician has not yet synchronized (reconciled) it with the Enterprise Server. There will be messages and content from the device(s) on the technician's laptop computer that still need to be reconciled with the Enterprise Server. Were you to delete the site visit from the Questra IDM Application Suite, the Questra Courier application would be unable to reconcile the device data with the Enterprise Server, and data will be lost.
Reconciled	You will never need to manually delete a site visit once it has been reconciled with the Enterprise Server. It will be automatically deleted.

To decide whether or not to delete the messages associated with the site visit, you must consider the situation:

A site visit has been downloaded but not yet activated by a field service technician, and the technician is unable to deliver it because his or her laptop is damaged or stolen. In this case, you should delete the site visit, but not its messages, and then create a new site visit to assign to a different technician. The new site visit will use those original messages.
If a mistake was made and an incorrect operation has been requested of a disconnected device, you may want to delete the messages associated with the site visit. This essentially is a "retraction" of the remote operations associated with the site visit.

NOTE: It is not necessary to set the context to the device or group whose site visit(s) you want to delete before opening the Site Visits dialog. However, if you intend immediately to create a new site visit for the same device or group, you should set the context to that device or group before opening the Site Visits dialog. This will save you the trouble of having to close the dialog, change the context, and then re-open the dialog.

TIP: To quickly find a site visit, sort the list by the appropriate column. For example, click the State column to quickly find all site visits "ReadyForDownload".