We’re getting closer to the release of DeskPRO 3.3 and I want to give a bit of a sneaky-peek.

Spam Filtering

Spam is really starting to get out of hand, eh? It really sucks having to enable email validation for potential customers wanting to contact your sales department — but what else can we do.

Well, with DeskPRO 3.3 we’ve implemented a Bayesian spam filter. This is the same kind of spam filter used with some email clients. It works quite well because it adapts as you use it. It takes a look at the words it’s seen before and computes a mathematical probability about a messages “spaminess”. If the probability is over a certain level (that you can define), then the message is automatically flagged.

So what exactly happens to spam tickets? We thought it was very important that there was a way for a user to get in contact with you, no matter what. So when the system thinks a message is spam, it asks the user to validate themselves. All the user has to do is click a link in their email and the message will be unspammed. So you get the best of both worlds: You can turn off email validation so only suspicious users need to go through the extra hoop.

Gateway KB Suggestions

We introduced automatic KB searches with version 3.1, but it only worked in the user interface. When someone was about to submit a ticket, they’d first see a list of articles that matched certain criteria in their message. Properly utilized, this could save your techs hours of re-answering questions!

Now we’ve expanded this feature to the gateway. Basically you can enable the option (per mail-rule) to send out suggestions to the users email address. If the user finds his answer, they (hopefully!) click on a special link and their ticket is automatically closed. There’s also an option to require the user to indicate if the suggestions helped.

Multiple Tech Participants

We’ve had a bunch of requests for this. Basically, people need a way for the ticket owner to add other techs to the ticket. Not strictly multiple assignments, but multiple techs who all get notifications and such.

So we went ahead and pushed this into DeskPRO 3.3. There’s a new tab on the view-ticket page where you can manage them. Click the button and a neat little popup appears where you can add/remove techs. Apply the changes (which happens in real-time with AJAX, by the way) and you’re good to go.

There’s also a new tab on the tech homepage for “Participated Tickets”, and new email notification settings for tickets you participate in.

Multiple User Participants

This has been one of the most requested features. Of course when so many of our customers actually agree on a single feature — we make it a priority.

So just like you can add tech participants, you can add user participants. This gives other users access to specific tickets. For example, if Joe opens up a ticket at his hosting company’s helpdesk he might want to invite his webmaster to join in the discussion.

So how’s this work? Well, users can add other users by clicking on a link on their ticket page. They just enter an email address and we take care of the rest. And of course techs can manage user participants, too, using a similar interface as that used by the tech participants feature.

If a user is not registered yet then DeskPRO sends out a special link to the email address given. The user clicks on the link to sign up and then gets access to the ticket.

We’re very careful about potential privacy issues. For a user to be added to a ticket, they must validate themselves first. We want to make darn sure the person reading the ticket actually owns the email address! So if they click on the special invite link or validate their email — they’ve got access.

User participants on a ticket get the same reply notifications as the ticket owner does. They can also reply to the notifications if you have the user gateway enabled. It truly is a multi-user ticket!

Company Custom Fields

We’ve got custom fields for just about everything — users, tickets, knowledgebase articles and even the calendar. So we thought we might as well and add custom company fields too.

These custom fields are applied to companies are are visible to techs in the new “company profile” page (which is just a simple list of users and company info), and also on ticket-view pages in a new tab:

What’s neat about these fields is that you can optionally allow end-users to edit them. So you can make them world-editable, or only users of certain company roles, or only tech editable.

Auto-Updating Ticket Replies

Have you ever typed up a big long reply and after posting it, you found the user replied first? With DeskPRO 3.3, this is no longer a problem!

Whenever you view a ticket, there’s a small AJAX script running in the background that continuously checks for new messages. When there are new messages, they are downloaded and displayed for you automatically.

Auto-Saved Ticket Drafts

How about this: You’ve spent 30 minutes writing an incredibly detailed set of instructions for a customer. You’re just about to hit “Reply” when the power goes out. Nooooo!, you’d scream.

With DeskPRO 3.3, the text you enter into the reply box is automatically saved every few seconds. Whether it’s your computer that crashes, your power goes out, or you simply browsed to another web page — your reply is saved. When you re-load the ticket, your reply is plugged back in and you can continue as if nothing happened.

Hide Custom Fields On Search Forms

Do you have a lot of custom fields? Do you find it annoying when the search pages have huge scrollbars because of all of those fields? Me too.

With DeskPRO 3.3 you can now choose to hide certain fields on the search pages (for both ticket and user fields). In addition to a default admin setting, each tech can customize his own display. Cool!

Other Tidbits

There are all sorts of other little things, including:

• Default Category/Priority. A smaller feature, but very requested. You can now set the default category and priority that will be pre-selected when a user goes to submit a question.
• Tech passwords are now hashed and salted. No more plain-text passwords in the database!
• There now exists the much-requested prune users and prune tickets tools. Using these tools you can easily mass-delete users or tickets based on search criteria.
• Ability to log failed logins (versus only logging successful ones)
• There’s an admin setting to disable tech/admin area redirect screens. When enabled, the redirection screens are immediate instead of delayed (will mean you can’t read the message, though!).
• Minimum username length is now configurable.
• The usual heap of bug-fixes.

Hope …

Hope you’re liking some of the new additions to DeskPRO! Now, I gotta run. It’s 2AM and I still have work to do!

– Christopher Nadeau

First thing’s first: DeskPRO 3.2.0 is almost ready. Most of the work that has gone into 3.2, you won’t even notice. The jump from 3.0 to 3.1 was huge, we had a bunch of new features to play around with. But with 3.2, most of the work is behind the scenes.

In reality, 3.2 is really all about the new plugins.

Desktop Notifier
The first plugin is a Windows application that is designed to alert your techs when there are new tickets that need their attention. The main window is a list, grouped by two criteria (Category and Workflow, by default) that just shows numbers of tickets that are awaiting tech.

The second feature of this cool little app is a little notification popup box by your taskbar that shows you an excerpt of any new tickets. If you’ve ever used MSN messenger or some other instant-messaging app, you’ll know what I mean. It looks just like the little box that comes up when one of your contacts IM’s you.

And of course you can enable a sound to play whenever something changes. This is the perfect tool to compliment your helpdesk setup.

Instant Help (Chat)
The second plugin is the infamous chat. I’ve been knee deep, no, neck deep in Javascript for the last few weeks writing this thing. I have been dreaming about Javascript, that’s how much of it I’ve been writing. (I mean that quite literally, by the way. I’ve never had a nightmare worse than the one about the Grid and the event listeners… *shiver*.)

So what does this baby do. Well, it lets you chat, obviously. We still have some more work to go before this thing is available, but I thought I’d give you a little peek at it while we’re here.

You might notice the “tracking” tab there. In DeskPRO 3.2 we’re introducing new tracking features that’ll track users around your site (even non-DeskPRO pages!). This is mostly useful for the chat app because you can send chat requests to users as they are actually on your website. Pre-sales, anyone?

“Eh! What happened to Adobe AIR?” I can hear you thinking. We ditched it — for now. We realized that all of the features really could be handled by current browser technology, so we decided not to use AIR. We were a bit worried about the lack of Linux support, and AIR was still in beta (figures, the stable 1.0.0 was released just a little while ago!). We’ll revisit AIR (and similar technologies) a bit later, but for now, just know that the tech interface won’t require any additional software beyond a modern browser.

So anyway, that’s about it for now. There’s even more stuff in the works (more plugins, more features) but let’s save those for another day. We’ll have more info about these plugins soon, and more info about future developments whenever I feel like posting again.

See yah later,
– Christopher Nadeau

We get enough feature requests to have a good idea of what to tackle next. But why not have your say as well? I’m officially commanding you to send in your deepest desires (as it pertains to the product of course!). The easiest way is to simply send us an email at support@deskpro.com. If the feature is not the kind of thing you’d typically see in helpdesk software — tell us anyway. We’re constructing a nice list of plugins we want to eventually investigate.