Gerry

@Alex8000 Thanks for the info, as you say, a typical RESTful API. The problem here is the need to be able to map values to parameters in and out of the API calls without any programming expertise being required in the BPM. I understand the requirement, I will have a think about what we could do to help facilitate this, but think this means creating the layer that I mention above, and thats a non-trivial task to undertake. In fact most systems rely on third party tools to provide out-of the-box (or build yourself) integration between cloud applications. Boomi, SynQ, Muelsoft, Zapier and a bunch of other tools designed specifically to allow integration glue to be developed, packaged and run. So rather than build our own integration platform (and all the integration connectors for the 100's of apps out there) it might be better to build a connector for Hornbill on one or more of these integration platforms. Does that make sense? Gerry

@Martyn Houghton @Alex8000 WebHooks are a system for allowing the Hornbill platform to call out to other applications on certain application events, they are not designed or intended to be a general API definition that can be used from within BPM, so I would like to think that what you are wanting to do is not a limitation of WebHooks. If I understand what you are requiring is the ability of the Hornbill BPM to be able to orchestrate actions for other external tools/systems. The ideal solution to this requirement does not have anything to do with WebHooks, what would work is to have a node type in the BPM tool that allows you to make a web call to another external application and this is something we did consider. However, our design intention with the BPM was to keep it so "non-programmers" (aka business process analysts) could use it without any programming knowledge. and the problem with adding something like a generic API calling node is that there would be no escaping the need to have programming skills to map request params and possibly return results back from the called application into the BPM for onward processing. This I felt was taking the BPM too far towards a development environment getting us back to something that was non-upgradable like we had with Supportworks and VPME customisations. I believe as a business process orchestration tool we have found the right balance and and kept the BPM a process tool and prevented it from becoming a programming tool. Now I appreciate that for those users of Hornbill that are more technical this is not good news, and I understand that completely. To implement something that meets your requirement properly there needs to be a complete separation of the "programming" element from the use of the BPM, something that can be used to create (and program up as required) an integration into other tools and exposing that to the BPM in a BPM-user-friendly way. To implement this properly there is an approach to integration known as Run Book Automation. To better understand what that is I should describe FlowCode - which is what we have used to provide the pre-packaged integration to Jira which Alex mentions. FlowCode is a lot like VPME from Supportworks, in fact its VPME evolved and broadly based on the same concepts. FlowCode it the environment that our application dev teams use to create server-side functional logic, and its the FlowCode layer that makes it possible for application devs to expose application functions to the BPM and to the API endpoints. So to properly implement that what we need to provide is a Runbook Automation Layer/Application/Tool similar to FlowCode where customers can create their own micro services for their instance which can be exposed into scope of the BPM for use within process orchestration. This is something thats been in my minds eye in our platform roadmap since the inception of the BPM design for Hornbill but its not something we have gotten around to so far. Ideally customers should not have to "code" for any integration, integrations should be pre-build packages that you can just select and use - thats the design indentation of the Hornbill platform and the approach we took with the Jira integration which is why its available in the BPM, and no programming is required. Implementing these kinds of integrations is not-trivial, it can be as simple as a HTTP or HTTPS call, but more often than not its more than that, you need to handle request and response params, sometimes complex or large amounts of data, you need to handle security issues like authentication and network routing (for the case of cloud to internal apps) and you need to pay a lot of attention to error conditions and error handling for a myriad of transport, application and security error conditions, not only to run such things but to debug when problems arise. It is technically possible to provide a simple web call node in BPM but I am really not comfortable with that as a solution, its something that in theory is quite simple to add. but once we add it, customers will use it and then we can never remove it without breaking customers workflows, so the purity of the design intent for BPM being an non-programming environment will be broken forever. Perhaps we could get some more specifics around the integrations you are trying to get? Are these standard web applications? It might be possible for us to build the integrations like we have done already for Jira... Gerry

We have been working on improving the navigation of our UI. For those of you familiar with Hornbill you will know that every time you install an App from the Hornbill App Store you will most likely get one or more icons appear down the left-hand navigation bar. The number of applications we have here at Hornbill has already reached the point where the left nav bar is no longer tenable and would probably require a scroll bar - yuck! So in anticipation of this expansion and taking inspiration from other modern cloud based business applications we have implemented an alternative navigation system which we think is a lot better and far more expandable in the future. We also believe many of you should already be familiar and comfortable with the general approach. Like all parts of Hornbill the implementation is responsive so works on all screen sizes and devices, adapting to an optimal layout depending on the devices screen size. You will see that the essence of the change is the left nav is no longer present, you need to click the top-left 3x3 to pop up the nav icons. The one question I anticipate is "what about the counter notifications", you will see that each icon that has active counters appears in the top nav pane growing right to left as more icons get notifications. Once the notifications are cleared the icons disappear from the top nav. At some point very soon you will see the option to try out the new navigation scheme, and as always you have a time window to try out the new navigation and make suggestions and/or provide feedback here while we evolve the implementation, you can switch between the new and old navigation scheme as you see fit. Our dev teams love to have feedback and input from our community, it inspires them to do more and go the extra mile so please get involved, have a play and post comments and feedback here. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton Thanks for the feedback. We are in the process of expanding the events used for UI updates in the mail view as @Daniel Dekel has already mentioned, once implemented and plugged in this will really improve the workflow around shared mailboxes for teams. We will not be retro-fitting these event schemes to the old view so it will not be long before the old mail view is a very poor cousin of the new mail view. We have got some really exciting features lined up for email within Hornbill which will only be developed in the new view. To give you a flavour of the sort of things we are looking at.... * The Outbox folder will be renamed to Out for Delivery to better represent its purpose, all mail sits in the Outbox folder while its being delivered, this was part of the recipient delivery log implementation a few moths back, this change while simple better reflects how Hornbill focuses on reliable mail delivery * The Sent Items folder will be renamed to Archive -> Sent and will be auto categorised by year-month/customer/taga * The Deleted Items folder will be renamed to Archive -> Processed and will be auto categorised by year-month/organisation/tags * Some better way of handling either Junk mail or otherwise unprocessed mail, probably another folder Archive -> Unprocessed with some system setting to automatically purge content after 7(n) days. * Manual and automatic tagging of inbound mail messages * Automatic association of both Organisation and Contact of inbound messages with a mail view in Customer Manager to show email in/out history (more CRM type functionality). The idea here is to better support workflow and long-term history of email conversations as we see this is one of the main ways users of Hornbill interact with their external customers. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton The reason why the star and selection boxes appear is to minimize the use of display real estate used, the same space is used for other things (attachment and flagged indicators). As you would only ever want these other items to action mail messages it seems reasonable to have them only appear when you mouse over the message in the list. You will see similar behaviour in both office365 and gmail. [edit] actually just looking at this I was incorrect in stating that the space was used for other things, there are actually two areas that are dynamic, but the hover-over reason still stands, we want to keep the display uncluttered which is important where we have a high density of information. Gerry

Hi Mark, In order for someone to receive and action tasks (which is how our approvals work) the user(s) will need to be Paid Up Collaboration users, they do not however need to be Paid Up Service Manager users though. I am assuming you are aware that you can have collaboration users that are not Service Manager users. Gerry

Hi Gill, Basic users cannot be allocated rights to run dashboards so you have taken the correct approach, you can limit the full users rights to just the rights needed to run the dashboard which will close any potential security concerns. Also, if you are using more than one screen and logging in as the same user, please ensure that you have the following system option enabled: communications.multiLoginUser=allowed Gerry

Hi Gill, How often does this happen? Not sure whats happening from your description but thats not something we see normally. Also, are you using SSO or are you logging into the admin tool with a username/password? Gerry

HI Martyn, Yes i understand. Another option perhaps would be to hard-reject the message and bounce it back to the originator, that might help Gerry

@Prathmesh Patel The news feed its self does not contain any data at all, its simply a syndicated view of information from other sources (workspaces, requests, documents and many other sources), so to answer your question we would need to understand more specifically what data you are talking about. Hope that makes sense? Gerry

Hi @PSG Yes that makes sense, thank you for expanding. We are woking on the next round of changed to Activities where we are building out more functionality so I will ensure that this requirement is thrown into the mix and considered, so please watch this space. Gerry

We have created a new email view which has enhanced functionality to make working with emails within our shared mailboxes more flexible and a better user experience. A previously deployed preview of the mail view identified a number of issues pretty quickly that we have now worked through so the new improved view will be rolled out this week. However, this time each user will need to opt-in to try the new view and can switch between them as they wish. It's worth noting that this is the route we are taking with the email interface, the current view will no longer be developed and we will switch permanently to the new email view at some point in the future. The reason for this change is that we have some pretty nice email functionality that will be delivered over the coming months which we need to lay a foundation for. Our shared mailbox functionality has always been an admired feature of our solutions but we want to take it up a notch or two. Unlike a personal mailbox, a shared mailbox needs a good workflow in order to be an effective tool for a team, this is where we will be putting our focus. Please try the new view and let us have your feedback.

Hi Oscar, Yes we removed the credentials/asterisks completely, that makes more sense. There was some confusion about the need for diagnostics information which for the purpose of the delivery log was not correct. Thanks for confirming its resolved. Gerry

Hi Oscar, We have looked into the problem you have reported and I can confirm this is in fact was an issue. Our implementation was creating an obfuscation of the password for the purpose of logging but then not using it! so I am afraid we have to hold our hands up to this one, it was a defect of our own creating that had thus far slipped through the net. We have already taken the following actions.. 1. The defect has been identified and fixed. 2. A patch has been deployed into production. 3. We have applied data cleanups to all affected instances to remove the exposed credentials. So this problem should now be resolved. We have monitored the logs generated and confirmed this is no longer happening on your instance. We do take security issues very seriously, this one has been raised internally as a security event and we have prioritised and acted in accordance with our ISM policies to effect a speedy resolution. Thank you for reporting it and providing the additional information we needed to track this down and resolve it. Kind Regards, Gerry

Hi Oscar, As far as we are aware the log does not show an actual password, the mail transport stuff obfuscates the password so its not the actual password being used. However, we must investigate this, I agree wholeheartedly, if this is the case it needs to be fixed. Could you post a screenshot (with the password bit blanked out obviously) so we can see exactly what you are seeing, I would like someone here to investigate asap. Thanks, Gerry

Hi Shamaila, I am not sure I understand your question? You have two services, both of which will log an incident and presumably assign to your support team? Can you expand on this?

Hi Jamie, The way in which Activities work is different to the notion of calls and queues, so once an activity is assigned to an individual, it becomes a task for them to complete. Right now the visibility of the activities is done through the assignment of an activity to a user, group or role so once assigned to a user there is no association of a group or role to the assignment of that activity. We are trying to find a way of meeting the requirement without turning the activities into a ticket management system, the key requirement is a way to maintain management oversight of tasks that are assigned to individuals and the complexity of this becomes apparent when you gave tasks originating from Service Manager requests, because in Service Manager you also have boards and lists for maintaining oversight of activities. The problem we have is making it possible to view these other tasks while maintaining the integrity of the security model applied to the same - I doubt any customer would be happy if someone from IT could suddenly get sight of activities relating to HR just because they were a member of one of the HR groups. I am wondering if you can expand a little more on your actual use case(s) and we could possibly find an alternative way to achieve the same end goal. Are all of the activities you are looking to maintain oversight of originating from requests in Service Manager? Gerry

An update on this, we have since added an option in your user profile to control this. Gerry

Just to round this thread out. We have added a new system setting called 'mail.importer.forceUtf8FixHack' which enables a hack to force fix invalid UTF-8 encoded mime parts. We have called this a hack because we would rather the mail content be correctly encoded in the first place. None the less, there are rogue mail systems out there and this does happen. When enabled, this option will brute fix the content by replacing all invalid UTF-8 byte sequences with the '?' character. This should make it to live production environment early next week. Hope this is useful. Gerry

Hi @Martyn Houghton Did you make any further progress on this? Gerry

Hi All, Thanks for your feedback and comments, we will consolidate all of those points and resolve the issues. We have been running this view internally for some months now and obviously not encountered some of these problems so we need to look at this in more detail. We are developing a new view because we are moving towards a more optimised email workflow which requires a different approach rather than a simple tabular list of emails. The layout is very similar to a number of the very popular email systems including Outlook and gmail so we need to get to the bottom of what we have not quite got right here. We will post back with some more information once we have had a chance to consolidate feedback and document the differences identified. We have also not followed our normal "preview" process for new UI changes, this was my fault as our internal communications fell over a little on this one, I will rectify that for the next preview. Sorry for any confusion caused. Gerry

All, I would like to add at this point that we are planning to change the meaning of both the "Outbox" and "Deleted Items" folder. The Outbox folder will be renamed to "In Transit" as this is now the folder where messages currently being delivered are held, once delivered they are moved to the "Sent Items" folder. The "Deleted Items" folder will be renamed to "Archive" which is a better name for the folders intended purpose. It is envisaged that customers will want to keep sent mail items online and searchable/accessible so a deleted items folder does not really make sense anymore. Ideally messages that are "processed" (i.e. a request is raised, or a message is replied to etc) would automatically move them to the "Archived" folder, this is our plan it improve email workflow. We may also look at some means to structuring archived messages in the archived folder into Years/Months so they are easy to navigate. Thats not currently a WIP but that is our intention, and will all be built around the new mail view (which we had to introduce first) and more powerful push events for the new mail view to use Gerry

Adam, Also, someone here mentioned that there are potential changes to the DPA pending which means you will no longer be able to charge £10 so the complexity of trying to get that off the ground might not be worth it in the long run. Not sure if this applies or not, but worth pointing out. Gerry Can I charge a fee for dealing with a subject access request? You must provide a copy of the information free of charge. The removal of the £10 subject access fee is a significant change from the existing rules under the DPA. However, you can charge a ‘reasonable fee’ when a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive, particularly if it is repetitive. You may also charge a reasonable fee to comply with requests for further copies of the same information. This does not mean that you can charge for all subsequent access requests. The fee must be based on the administrative cost of providing the information.

Hi Adam, I am not sure there is a way to do this out of the box just now. What are your timescales? I ask because I think we might be able to meet these needs with something we have in the works at the moment but it does depend on your timescales. Gerry

@Dan Munns I dont think you need to do anything other than include the URL in the text description, the UI will recognise it and make it a clickable link, you dont need any special markup. Gerry