Laurel's promise to you is to capture as much of your digital day as possible for you to make billing decisions from. Our Windows Desktop Assistant does a lot of this heavy lifting for you by capturing your emails, documents and much more.
As soon as you finish an activity, Laurel will send it from our Assistant to our application so you can view it - but to do this, it needs an active internet connection. However, if you are working offline, or you are logged out - you don't need to worry! We will still capture your time as you work, and then once you restore an active internet connection - all your activities will be sent for you to view in our application.
How is this done:
During user onboarding, Laurel will lead users to launch the assistant and sign in once.
After a successful login, the assistant will collect enough information to identify the user.
Laurel will collect the following user-specific settings:
Token and save that in the Windows credential store, this is protected by Windows security and can only be accessed by the user when they are signed into Windows.
Configuration settings from the Laurel servers and save that in the user's personal, secured folder in a simple text database.
Feature flags from the Laurel servers and save them in the same database.
Once we have the above information in the database and the desktop assistant is running, logged in or not, internet or not, Laurel will capture your activities.
Laurel will always save activities to the local database
Once the internet connection is re-established Laurel will check if we have a valid token in the credentials vault,
If we have a valid token we will use it to post captured activities to our servers online.
If we don't have a valid token but a user has logged in once before we will save collected activities to the local database. In this case, users are required to click the login button to sign in and refresh our tokens, after a successful sign-in in we will start processing the stored data.
Technical notes:
The local noSQL, lite database is stored in the user's personal folder
Drive:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Laurel\Database
This is a lightweight text-based database, that does not use a lot of disk space.
All captured activities are saved in this database before posting to Laurel's servers.
Laurel does not use any cache or system memory to save activities, every update to the database is immediately flushed to disk.
Users can be offline for up to 34 days, Laurel will keep on capturing activities and add to the local database.
Once online and logged in Laurel will process the data in the database in the following way:
Activity capture age:
Today, every 20s
Day 1 - every 3 mins
Day 3-5 - every hour
Day 6-7 - every 3 hours
Day > 8 - once per day
Day > 35 - delete
Processed activities will be posted to the day they were captured.