So just what does this plugin do, anyway? Basically it’s an ideas manager. Everyone company can do something better, and the best way to figure out which things to focus on improving is to ask your customers. The Feedback Plugin lets users submit ideas or suggestions and then vote on them. Then the more popular the idea is, the more your customers want it implemented. This kind of ranked input is very valuable information!

Check it out on our own helpdesk right here.

(Also by the way: We’re gonna be releasing 3.5.1 soon. Keep your eyes peeled!)

As touched on last post, we have some new features like User Notebooks, Mini-Ticket Reader and Workflow Paths.

One thing I wanted to talk about is how we’re discontinuing maintenance releases for older branches (v3.1.x, v3.2.x and v3.3.x). We added a little FAQ to the release announcement that sorta explains why. But the main reason is that if you could upgrade to v3.3.2 (or any other branch version) then you could just as easily upgrade to v3.4.0 with no added effort. So we thought “why spend the extra effort maintaining 5 branches when we only need to maintain one?”

There seems to be a stigma associated with point versions. People think that an upgrade from say 3.3.1 to 3.3.2 will be easier or safer than an upgrade 3.3.1 to 3.4. This is not true, though. Both upgrades are equally easy (our wizard does all the work), and neither are any “safer” (both are safe!). We introduce new features in point releases, but it’s up to you to use them. So if all you want is bug fixes, then that’s all you get — just don’t use the new features. (By the way, I blame Vista for the general publics fear of new versions).

Anyway, I should also mention that our new website is now live at DeskPRO.com. Tell us what you think. We think it’s a massive improvement over the old one. In my last post I explained some of the goals we tried to accomplish with the redesign.

And one last thing: If you’re interested, we’re looking for testimonials to publish on our website. You can email us or submit one from your Members Area (click on the link in the intro text of your main page).

Well, that’s it for today, folks.

– Christopher Nadeau

New Website

If you’re reading this post through your RSS reader, try loading up the page instead (I know you’re busy, but it’ll be worth it). Welcome to a small example of our new website design. What do you think? The actual website will probably “flow” a bit differently since a blog isn’t exactly what we spec’d the design around — but you get the point.

Anyone who has browsed our old (and at the time of this writing, current) website can tell how hideously 1998 it looks. The homepage has a flash header for goodness sakes! And trying to find information is not very intuitive.

The main goal for the new site was to make things easier to find. We’ve tried to cut down on the number of pages, preferring more concise descriptions to the overly verbose and fragmented pages of yestersite. We’ve got better navigation to help you find things and a site-search feature for those who don’t like to browse. The new homepage is perhaps the largest change. We’ve got a set of tabs that will allow new visitors to dive in and learn all about DeskPRO without even loading a new page.

The site isn’t live yet, but you can have a peek by visiting DeskPRO.net, where we’ve been staging things.

DeskPRO v3.4

Also in the pipeline is a new version of DeskPRO. This version will have the numerous bug fixes of course. But as with any point release, we’ve got a number of new features too. Here are a few:

• User Notebooks are notebooks attached to every user account. A user can create pages to store any sort of information they’d like. Techs also have access to these notebooks. Additionally, specific notebook pages can be linked to tickets — creating a relationship that is listed in the UI.

  The way we envision this feature being used most is in cases where users or techs need to share sensitive information like login details. Pasting sensitive info into a ticket isn’t always the best idea because messages are sent all around the world in the form of email notifications. Notebook pages however never leave the helpdesk. Just stick your helpdesk behind HTTPS and you’ve instantly got a secure way to pass information back and forth.

• The mini-ticket reader is a new widget we’ve added around DeskPRO. Click on an icon next to a ticket title (for example, in search results) and a little floating Javascript window appears. You’re able to read the entire ticket using this mini-reader. Very useful when you want to use the mass-ticket actions on search results!
• You can now change the user owner of a ticket. A very requested feature.
• You can set up predefined workflow paths. Basically this means that you as an admin can set up a route for workflows to go one after the other. For a tech, advancing the workflow is done with a single click.

It’s a modest release in comparison to some of our other point releases, but some interesting new stuff nevertheless.

Stay Tuned

That’s all I really have to say for today. Just stay tuned in the next couple of weeks. We’ll be making the new website live, release 3.4, and we’ll also have a few more blog posts that might catch your eye.

Until next time,

Christopher Nadeau

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

Well apart from getting the instant chat plugin stable the focus is going to be two fold, v3.3 and a billing plugin. There are going to be a number of key new features in v3.3; a focus on improving and uniting the various self help elements in DeskPRO, Spam filtering, Multiple users per ticket (a major change) as well as a new user interface style which will work more as a pop-up helpdesk as opposed to one you directly integrate into your site. There will of course be the usual hundreds of improvements and mini features, most of which have been suggested by DeskPRO customers, which will be enhance your daily use of the software.

The billing plugin may be released with v3.3 or possibly a little bit after. It is deigned to be a one stop shop for all your billing needs allowing for billing monthly services, support contracts or fixed amounts. It will integrate with the popular payment gateways and have extensive reporting. Of course the software will naturally tie into DeskPRO concepts such as user groups and companies allowing a range of options. We do welcome any suggestions you might have on the billing plugin; just create a ticket in our helpdesk to let us know or post a comment here.

 We have a range of other plans for DeskPRO over the next few months including a new website and rebrand and a well mapped out v3.4, v3.5 and about 5 other plugins. There is lots to keep us busy.

Chris Padfield

The new requirements can be found here: http://www.deskpro.com/deskpro/requirements/ essentially the major changes are requiring PHP 5.2 and mySQL 4.1.

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly PHP4 reaches it end of life in August when the PHP group will stop fixing any bugs. Any good host will be migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 before then. By focusing on PHP5 we can also remove a lot of old PHP4 code and use more excellent 3rd party components that are only written in PHP5.

 Chris Padfield

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

Yes! We are! After one beta and one release candidate, we’re just about to glue the “Gold” sticker onto DeskPRO 3.1.

If you don’t know what’s changed, I’ve put together a pretty nifty PDF release document that goes over some of the best additions; it includes screenshots and all that jazz.

This is the release to get, folks. If you’ve been using DeskPRO 3.0.x and think that’s good — then you’ll be amazed with some of the new features. If you’ve been eyeing DeskPRO for a while — then this is the perfect time to dive right in (by the way, the homepage says you’ll save $1500 on Enterprise:Unlimited if you order soon!).

We’ve gotta say a big thanks to everyone who downloaded and tested the pre-releases, we couldn’t have done this without you (well, perhaps we could have, it just would’ve taken a lot longer ). A few users were especially helpful, if for nothing else then putting up with all my questions and debug procedures.

When can I get it? I hear you asking. At the time of this writing, we’re just a few short hours away (just some random website stuff to do). By the time your RSS reader downloads this post, you’ll probably be able to head to your Members Area and download it.

Until next time, happy DeskPRO’ing!

– 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.

I’d love to go on and on about how we updated our internal build numbers from simple incremental digits like 11 to a nice long and seemingly complicated number like 3010003 (which, by the way, is the build number for 3.1.0 Gold). I know how you’d just love to hear more build numbers and why the change so important, but I thought a short post about the new admin/tech interface would be a tad more interesting.

So here we are: 

Not bad, eh? We think it’s a vast improvement over the old look. One of my colleagues said, “Finally we’re out of 2004!”

Most of the layout and widgets are the same, but that old bulky blue table header was re-done (rounded corners, how Web 2.0!), and the header and footer were spiced up.

In the admin interface (the screenshot on the right), you’ll notice a small facelift on the old droll ’you should investigate’ list’. You also might have noticed the new Notices table. From time to time we will add a message after an upgrade to explain something important. For example, when you upgrade to 3.1 from 3.0.x you’ll see that notice about gateways and permissions, and one about enabling secure user passwords.

Anyway, that’s that. Just wanted to upload a screenshot for those of you who aren’t running 3.1 yet.

’til next week!

– Christopher Nadeau