DeskPRO Blog

It’s been a good long while since the last post. That whole “every week a new post” promise from a few months ago just made me a liar, didn’t it? Well I have a good excuse: I’ve been so utterly busy, I haven’t had time to post. Today I thought I should take some time out of my oh-so-busy schedule to share some news with you.

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

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Features, Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.