Gerry
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Posts posted by Gerry
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Just a quick note to let you know that the new administration UI that was demonstrated in the last roadmap update will be rolled out during the course of tomorrow, so you can expect to see this appear over the weekend and/or on Monday.
The existing admin tool will remain in place for now, so should there be any issues we have not spotted you will be able to use the existing admin tool. Will be great to have your feedback once you have had the opportunity to explore the new UI, the search feature and the Image Library.
Gerry-
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To the best of my knowledge we are, our mail system supports both SPF and DKIM which are the two things that DMARC requires from a functional standpoint. I do not believe you need anything else.
Gerry -
Thanks for sharing. I understand and yes there is a lot to do that will be improved in the coming months, FAQs/Knowledge generally is going to get a very big upgrade in lots of areas.
The dev team are looking at this sort order issue, we are looking to see if we can do something simple but helpful for now, knowing that we will be doing quite a lot more in the coming months.
Gerry
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Yes thats about the only option there is, but that also makes it much more complicated than just adding sorting. Now, its requiring multiple variations on sort that will require new setting(s), database changes, UI changes to underpin the configurability options, and of course portal changes which will also be needed. Not quite as simple as it sounds as a headline.
I am curious to know how you use these FAQ's, are they typically short question//answer type FAQs?
Gerry
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So it might be the case that this is already ordered by "number of likes/upvotes" which would make sense. The problem then is, if you want an option to order manually then that upvoting order will be not compatible, so now we are into the complication of having to add yet another configuration option to control which ordering scheme to use, and this leads to complications, like a customer then raising a support request saying "I can no longer sort my FAQ's" not realising that enabling the auto sort on most voted for, disables this. Its never as simple as it seems these things.
If even one of our customers are relying on the sort by likes behaviour, we simply cannot change that, and that makes doing this quite a lot more complicated and drawn out....
Gerry
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All,
Please forgive me newbie responses here, this is my first time seeing this post (or paying it any attention at least), it was an internal comment "its been almost 4 years" that caught my attention.
So coming at this cold, I have read through this stream, and I expect the reason why there has been no progress made here is its not exactly clear what is being asked for. The headline is, can we sort the items shown in the widget, the answer to that is, they are already sorted by the displayed title in alphabetical order, or if they are not (I did not look at the detail of the product yet) they probably ought to be, although its entirely possible, if not being sorted they are getting displayed in natural order, which is whatever order the database is returning them in!
So back to this requirement, the original question was quite a simple one, but as people have +1'd this, the scope has expected, and from what I can see, what is hidden in this thread is.
* Sorting alphabetically
* Sorting by drag and drop where we administer these
* Sorting by grouping/associating to Service Requests
* Sorting by other custom options, say be relevance or how popular these FAQ's are.
* Its not clear how any of these sorting schemes would help if the FAQ's are more than a page worthThe suggestion of grouping by service request really means, can we have FAQ's defined at the Service Request level, and I am willing to bet that we would not want that INSTEAD OF at the service level, but AS WELL AS... that is a sensible change, but probably not a simple one as we would potentially have to make underlying database structural changes, and FAQ's against service requests was never considered in the original design.
If we can say for now a simple sorting option (or small number of options) then we can do that in a matter of days and I given its 4 years in the making, I expect our own pride would mean we should prioritise this and get it done.What I would say though is this. For those of you that attended my recent roadmap webinar or watched the recording, I made a commitment that both the Service Portfolio, which includes FAQ's and knowledge is getting a serious overhaul and many of these questions I would hope will be answered, the timeframe for this though is "during the course of this year", the admin stuff will be out to you this week, the start of the service manager changes will be in the coming 2-3 months and employee/customer/technician experiences will all be improved significantly in this time.
So if I prioritise this change, and we make this change complicated, that is not only going to delay things, but may also restrict us from innovating perhaps better ways of delivering these call logging experiences, or indeed create something we cannot carry into the reimagined FAQ/knowledge solution.
So if we (community Hornbill) want to make progress here I think I need some clarification on what we would like to see here. Clearly if I said, we can order the FAQ's by the subject text alphabetically when displayed, I expect almost every customer will be no better off. So what is it we want here....?
Would it be good enough that you can simply manually order the FAQ's in the service, where you manage these FAQ's? If I have something that concrete to work with I can get that looked at.
Let's try to nail down whats being asked for, please comment and see if we can find a consensus.Gerry
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Hi,
Following on from yesterday's meeting, you both asked questions in relation to KnowledgeBase which I did not get to answer live, so I thought I would post here and mention you both. First of all, thank you for attending the session, I hope you found it of use.
- "Any news on a knowledge base?"
- "Within SM, is there going to be a dedicated knowledge base? that can be used instead of the current FAQ's? And if so, is there a way to seamlessly move what is currently set up as a FAQ into that knowledge base?"
Thank you for your questions. In terms of the KnowledgeBase, this is very much at the heart of what I referred to as the "call logging experience" and in particular, the way in which technicians and customers should be able to interact with knowledge. I would put is at a 3 out of 10 of what should be possible today and I believe we can get this to 9 or 10 out of 10, maybe even above and beyond that. The key here is, presentation, access to, and purpose of knowledge as well as desired outcomes, and how specifically these things fit into the process of raising requests, or indeed your customers self-servicing/self-resolution. This is very much on my agenda and I will go out on a limb to say there is good news because there is scope for a lot of improvement and innovation in this area, and I will be ensuring we deliver on that.
In response to: "will there be an easy migration path from FAQ's to whatever comes next", and the answer to that is yes, we will take care of that.
Please watch this space, and thank you for your feedback and interest.
Gerry
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Hello Martyn,
We have no firm plans at this point, we pretty much canned all physical events in 2020 and 2021, not only because of likely attendance, but also not wishing to create a need for our customers to get on public transport and stuff like that. We are keen to find more ways to make use of digital events so we can provide more regular interactions and content, but a physical event is certainly not off the cards by any means. Everything is under review this year again as we observe the effects of COVID and hopefully the decline of the pandemic into something less destructive is now a given. We are get getting back this year at looking at physical events so will update more about that soon as we know more.Gerry
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Thanks for your question, I thought I would respond as I wanted to clarify one point, which actually you have touched on yourself. There is a continuous stream of changes, tweaks and enhancements being rolled out on an almost daily basis, and I freely admit we do not see this as a source for "blow it up out of all proportions" marketing fodder, I have always favoured incremental improvements over big bang releases, but I understand the lack of fanfare can sometimes make it feel like nothing is changing. I would encourage you to look at many of the screens now in comparison to even just 18 months ago, so much as changed, side by side they can in some cases look like two different products entirely.
Of course, there is A LOT of depth to the functionality we offer, and there are still many areas that need attention. I am not going to allow us to use the Pandemic as an excuse here, because actually that really has had no impact with regards to the development work we have been doing, if anything its given us the room to think a little bigger. I have an ambitious and exciting roadmap for Hornbill, for Service Manager, for our ability to serve both mid-market and enterprise needs and for applications and capabilities that help customers who do things outside of the core IT world, of which more than half our customers now do. In fact, its probably fair to say that we are getting close to the point where our customers are doing more stuff outside of IT with Hornbill than what we would traditionally refer to as Core IT Service Management.
Much of last year was spent taking stock of where we are, and looking at our product offering through a different lens, and one of the things we have focused on is things "under the hood", clearing down some of the lesser used and deprecated older functions, working on performance, reliability and other housekeeping, all to pave the way for a wash of changes we have already made, are currently making, and will be making over the coming months and I am very excited to get an opportunity to share some of this with you in the upcoming webinar which is especially focused towards our customers.I just wanted to make it clear we have not quietened down, in fact quite the opposite, development activity has increased significantly over the last 18 months, new hires, new roles and new focus all have been brought into the mix, some of the output is already in the product, and there is much much more to come.
Thanks
Gerry
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Thats definitely a defect, we will investigate and resolve, thanks for the report. "Minor thing but a bit annoying.", its more than a little annoying, we need to fix that
Gerry
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I wanted to expand a little on @Victor comment "and there are no plans to introduce this at this time", that is not strictly true, or at least to say, we are intending to implement custom domains at some point, but not across the board. The obvious place this needs to be done is the "Customer Portal", where a company is supporting other companies they want to use their own domain, and that is certainly on the agenda. However, vanity domains on the rest of our application stack is more challenging, mainly because of the way we distribute our application through a CDN provider (CloudFlare in our case) and all of the complications that go with hosting SSL certificates etc... So our current strategy is, we are not considering vanity domain names on our service in the general sense, but we do have this on our roadmap for the Customer Manager portal specifically.
Can I ask what your use case is? why you need a custom domain and what part(s) of our application stack you would see this being needed?
Thanks
Gerry
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This is actually a very big topic.
In its most simple form, having the ability to define a contract as a "SaaS contract" so we can also define a number of specific SaaS properties like contract type, value, renewable and so on, against contracts. The n adding the notion of "bills", that is, each time the supplier of the service sends an invoice (or credit note for that matter) for the service, you could add that against the specific contract it relates, giving you a full record of invoices/credit notes with relevant date ranges. The bills would be stored with basic attributes such as date, description of change, who, when etc.. that is relatively trivial to do.
However, the next that would be then asked for I am sure is "financial reconciliation", that is some way of setting a contract budget/cost/value, a way of flagging the different types of invoice/credit notes (i.e. changes to the contract for more stuff, less stuff, price changes and so on), and then reconcile and report on those financials. That is a much bigger piece of work and would need considerable design and implementation effort behind it.
In terms of what you can do now, you can only really define annual contracts, implicit in that is the contract value does not change between renewals. There is quite a gap between what it can do now and what I have described above.
The issue with us developing this sort of stuff is, there is just not a lot of demand for it, companies tend to do this sort of stuff on their finance systems and not there IT systems, and IT teams tend to be reluctant to take on responsibility for financials (its easier and less risky to let finance do the finance kind of stuff).I think we could probably do the first part (having the ability to record invoices/credit notes against a contract) which would give you some degree of granularity, and I think for the effort, that would be really worthwhile addition. Beyond that, it becomes a much bigger effort and I am not sure we have enough demand to warrant that sort of development at this time.
Gerry
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Making this more granular would require quite a big change, not impossible at all, but in essence, we would need to introduce settings per mailbox, and then extend the folders to include settings per folder, which then would render the recently added global settings obsolete. We will have a look at what is involved, but its not something we can do quickly as there are various moving parts (mail service, admin tool and database changes all involved here). The basic requirement does make sense though...
Gerry -
Would you not just use browser bookmarks for these?
Gerry
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I think its the sys.c.manageBpm BPM manager right, and if you are not a system superuser you probably need to be the BPM Owner (that may or may not be true)
In terms of the dynamic variable content, that would need user context I think, not something you would have in the admin domain, not sure that is (or can be) catered for.Gerry
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This change in the admin tool was rolled out quite a few weeks ago now. If you are asking about doing this without being an administrator, that has not been looked at any further as of this time.
Gerry
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Yes this image sharing library will be a standard feature of the platform available to all, its not something we would see as a chargeable option at all.
Gerry
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"For your info we have a similar requirement, but more focused on external customer software file distribution" this change will not cater for this requirement, although we are looking into the possibility of creating an application on the Hornbill platform for managing a digital asset library, which would include access controls, sharing and distribution capabilities. One of the dependancies is our back-end storage which we are in the process of building a whole new and more capable storage layer in our software stack. I will keep you informed of progress and will hook you up with an early preview of this as we have something to look at.
Gerry-
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I am delighted to be able to (finally) tell you that we now have in motion an image hosting and image management function in our 90-day pipeline and under development. This is a platform-level function that will allow you to : -
Administration
* Upload and see a list of images in the image library.
* Do basic privilege level access control, essentially allowing images to be public (i.e. no session required), customer, basic or user, requiring an appropriate session
* Will automatically generate a thumbnail image for each image uploaded.
User
* As well as be able to use an external URL as you currently can, in the employee portal where you can change/add an image you will be able to upload an image into the library and use it, or browse/search the image library to choose a specific image to use.
* We will make this generic in all places where you can configure portals, services and other such stuff where images are required.
This will be made available within the next 90 days, likely before the end of the year. Thanks for all the feedback regarding this requirement.
Gerry-
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Understand the requirement, and its something we do want to introduce on our platform. I mention email because thats the other really common use case. There are lots of stand-alone image hosting services, many are free and simple to use and will give you what you need, perhaps one of those would be a short-term solution?
Something like this: https://postimages.org/ this maybe?Gerry
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Thanks for the suggestion. The problem is this (a bit technical sorry), Document Manager works with "protected" storage under the hood. That is to say, the content (documents) are stored in storage that is quite robustly protected for security reasons, in essence we treat that data as private, not only to individual instances, but based on user rights/roles. This means, amongst other things that there is no direct path from the internet to this storage, and access to it would have to go through a session/API's making it entirely unsuitable for managing embedded images in emails. which by definition would need to be accessible publicly by someone that does not have a session on your Hornbill instance.
So what looks like a simple change here is actually not that simple to achieve in practice. I continue to recognise the need for this, and I would love to find the time to have the team focus on a solution to this, but at the moment, its just not been a high agenda item. We would need to create a service behind the scenes to handle this public facing data, and it needs thinking about, and the right infrastructure needs to be put in place. A complete review of our distributed storage is currently underway and part of that is looking at publicly & efficiently accessible content serving, including images, video and documents/other resources are all being looked at. Wiith this in place we could then build some form of app for managing these types of resources, but for the reasons above this would not be based on Document Manager, it would look like it somewhat from a user perspective, but it would be a very different thing under the hood.
So at the moment this is not in our 90-day pipeline I am afraid
Gerry-
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Initially yes, it was an oversight to not provide a way to progress an external authorisation should you need to, which should be an administration function, and as a result have pushed that through the pipeline.
It is of course possible to make this a user-level function too, but that will require quire a lot more consideration to things like rights/permissions and so on, that is something that we will need to consider further before any implementation.
With this recent change though, at least you now have the ability to move those processes forward should you need to. If this is a common requirement that demands you have user-level functionality for this, I would possibly look at your process, maybe you need something different to authorisations?
Gerry
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Its in the works, currently I think in our Dev stream, should make it through the pipeline in the next week or so. Basically, if the BPM is suspended on an external auth node, and you press the resume button where you can manage running workflows, you will be presented with the following, and progress the authorisation.
Gerry
Global Search
in Announcements
Posted
I mentioned during the last product update meeting that we have been working on improving the global search capability. This is not an incremental improvement, this particular change is a complete ground-up reimplementation of our search infrastructure, everything from server clusters, application and search and security layers have all been completely re-worked. Our initial goal is to provide like-for-like function, which means as we roll out, you should not really notice any difference apart from: -
* Global searches will (should in most cases anyway) provide you more relevant results, the underlying technology stack we are using is much more advanced than what we had in place before.
* Global searches should be faster.
* Global searches will be much less error prone (we had a lot of failures behind the scenes which made the search experience not as good as it should have been)
We are currently in the rollout phase, some instances have already been rolled out, and we are doing more all of the time, this involves a lot of re-indexing of stuff, so it takes a while, another 4-6 weeks at least we predict when the whole customer estate will have been migrated.
This change is a much bigger deal than is apparent in use, specifically though, this paves the way for much better and more unified search capabilities, which of course will be continuously rolled out and deployed.
Gerry