Work states
Every back office has its own idea of what a status is. One sends OPEN, INPROC and COMPL, another sends Planned, Started and Finished, and a third has a dozen codes that only make sense to the people who invented them. A Kanban board cannot be drawn on that. It needs a short, fixed set of columns that mean the same thing to everybody who looks at them.
Work statesWork stateA lane on the task or project Kanban board, defined by an administrator. Statuses arriving from the back office are mapped onto work states so the board speaks your organization’s vocabulary. are those columns. You define the lanes once, in your organization's own words, and then tell Dime.Scheduler which status each back officeBack officeThe ERP or business system Dime.Scheduler plans for - most often Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It owns the master data and remains authoritative over what it receives. uses for each lane. That second step is a status mappingStatus mappingThe link between one back-office status and a work state, keyed on back office and record type. Records with that status show in the lane, and dropping a card in the lane writes that status back., and it works in both directions: a record carrying the status shows up in the lane, and dropping a card in the lane writes that status back onto the record.
The page appears under Settings once Work states is switched on in the preview features, and it needs the Settings module user actionUser actionA single protected capability, such as 'edit appointment', that a role can grant. The building block of role-based access control..
Two boards
The tabs at the top pick the board you are editing, and each shows how many lanes it has.
- Task board holds the lanes for tasksTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource.. They are the columns of the project Kanban and of the board on My Work.
- Project board holds the lanes for projects themselves, used by the Kanban on the projects page.
The two sets are independent. A lane belongs to one board and stays there, and the same status can sit in a lane on each board without the two interfering.
Each board can be read two ways, switched with the toggle on the right: By lane, which is the board itself, and Status resolution, which starts from the statuses your records actually carry.
By lane
The lanes are laid out left to right in the order the boards draw them. Drag a lane by its header to move it. Add lane at the end of the row creates a new one.
Inside each lane, every card is one status mapping: a back office, a record type and the status value it stands for, such as BC · JOB → INPROC. The + in the lane header, or Map a back office at the foot of the lane, opens New mapping, where you fill in the Back office, the Record type and the Status value. The first two suggest the values your connectors and existing mappings already use, so in practice you mostly pick rather than type. The pencil on a card opens Status mapping to change it or Remove it, and dragging a card to another lane moves the mapping there.
The ⋯ menu in a lane header holds Rename, the lane's Role, and Delete. Deleting a lane removes its mappings with it, and the confirmation tells you how many records currently sit in the lane: those fall off the board until their status is mapped again.
One value per lane and back office
A lane holds at most one status value for each combination of back office and record type. That is what makes a drop possible: when a planner drags a task into In progress, Dime.Scheduler has to know exactly which status to write to Business Central, and two candidates would leave it guessing. A mapping that would give a lane a second value for the same back office is refused, whether you add it, edit it or drag it there, and the message names the value the lane already holds.
The same value is used for reading. A back office with more statuses than you have lanes therefore leaves some of them unmapped, and the records carrying those collect in Unmapped on the boards. Either give them a lane of their own or accept that they sit outside the board; status resolution shows which ones they are. For each lane, pick the status your back office should receive when somebody moves a card there.
Status values are compared without regard to case or surrounding spaces, so inproc and INPROC are the same status, and so is a value with a trailing space.
Lane roles
Most lanes are just columns. Two roles give a lane meaning beyond its position, and you set them under Role in the lane menu:
| Role | What it does |
|---|---|
| None | A plain lane. |
| Done | Work in this lane counts as finished. It drives the completion figures on the project pages, and on My Work a task in a Done lane no longer counts as open. On the project board the lane is badged closes project: a project whose status maps to it is closed. |
| Blocked | Work in this lane counts as stuck, and feeds the blocked counts on the project pages. |
On this page, a lane with a role is drawn in its own color, green for Done and red for Blocked, so the roles stand out from the plain lanes.
The project board's Done role is the one with consequences outside the board. A closed project moves to the past projects on My Work, its appointmentsAppointmentA task scheduled to a resource for a specific period - the scheduled instance you see on the planning board. are locked, and its tasks no longer take new time. Edits on the project board take effect on the projects straight away. Giving a lane the Done role, removing it, deleting a Done lane or moving a mapping into or out of one closes or reopens the projects concerned: projects whose status now lands in a Done lane are closed, and projects whose status no longer does are opened again. Projects the edit does not touch keep their open or closed state. A connector that sends a project's open state explicitly still has the last word for that project the next time it sends it. Take that into account before you rearrange the Done lane on a busy tenant.
Status resolution
By lane shows what you have configured. Status resolution shows what is actually out there: every status your records carry, grouped per back office and per record type, with how many records carry it and the lane it lands in. On the task board those are task statuses, on the project board project statuses.
This is the view to open after connecting a new back office, or when somebody asks why their work is missing from a board. A status that no lane claims is marked Not on the board, and the count at the top says how many statuses and records that covers. Only unmapped hides everything that is already on the board, which turns the list into a to-do list.
Picking a lane in the dropdown next to a status creates the mapping there, exactly as New mapping would. If that lane already holds a value for the same back office and record type, you are asked whether to replace it, since a lane holds only one. Picking Not on the board removes the mapping again.
Records without a back office or record type cannot be mapped, because a mapping is keyed on both. If the list is empty, no connector has sent a record with a status yet.
Mapping from the boards
You do not have to come to this page for every status. Users with the Settings module user action can fix a missing mapping from the Kanban boards themselves:
- A card in the Unmapped column carries a button to Put this status on the board, which asks which column the status belongs in and saves the mapping for every record with that status, not only this one.
- Dropping a card in a lane that has no status for the card's back office opens Give [lane] a status, with a value suggested from the lane's name. Save and move stores the mapping and then completes the drop.
Both are settings changes, and the dialogs say so before you confirm. Users without the action get a message that nothing was saved, and the card stays where it was.
Related
- Project planning - the task and project Kanban boards these lanes draw.
- My Work - the board a resource uses to move their own work along.
- Preview features - where work states are switched on.