Gerry

Alex, Yes I believe that CloudFlare puts these protections in place, it does a lot of things. I will need to have someone look into this but I believe once JavaScript is enabled this should work, but we may have to do something about this, thanks for pointing it out. Gerry

Martyn, Does not effect emails, all the back-end services, API end pointe, mail routing and everything remain unaffected, they all still and will continue to have fixed IP addresses. Gerry

I recently published a blog article describing our deployment of Cloudflare to accelerate performance of the Hornbill Platform and Applications. If this is of interest, you can read the article here. https://www.hornbill.com/blogpost/hornbill-network-expanding-global-reach/ Gerry

HI Martyn, The reason why we have made it a setting was to ensure we could soft rollback should there be any problems experienced, we are aiming to move all lengthy BPM operations to asynchronous behaviour. One of the things that has come out of looking at this is the need to have HUD notifications for display updates, this is done, or in the process of being done so this is a bit of a work in progress. If its causing any problems please switch it off or make your users aware that there may be background tasks/updates happening for a few seconds after the request is logged. Gerry

@RyanI would say the most appropriate solution here would be for the application (SM in this case) to provide an OOTB BPM flowcode node called createAndAssignTaskToRequestOwner or something along those lines - then within the BMP flow, instead of using the platform createHumanTask function you can use this more specialised node instead, that will keep the business process workflow focused on business process flow rather than cluttering it with functional logic. It seems like a very bad idea to have to call request details before each task assignment, would be inefficient and not exactly friendly to use for our customers.

Hi Lyonel, Thanks for the feedback, sorry you could not log into the web site, not sure why that is, I will ask someone to take a look. I generally use one of the social media logins, saves me typing and is much faster. I will expand on the SQL stuff for sure. In terms of reporting, MariaDB/MySQL are in them selves not reporting tools, or more accurately they are not bundled with a reporting tool suite in the same way as SQL Server is, so that only really leaves third party tools like Crystal reports. None the less we do not (yet) provide direct database access so for now you only really have the option of using our Reporting and Advanced Analytics tools built into the Admin tool. Gerry

Hi Lyonel, As promised, I hope this serves as a good explanation and answer to your question. https://www.hornbill.com/blogpost/techtalk-why-does-hornbill-use-mysql/ Gerry

Hi, If you go into the Admin tool, navigate to Home -> Service Manager -> Application Subscriptions and in there remove the user you have demoted to a Basic user should then be able to allocate the new user to that application Gerry

Gary, At a very high level, the bast way is to archive the existing user then create a new user as you suggest. All information from the archived user will remain in the system so you get to keep the knowledge even though the person is not at your organisation any more. Remember to assign requests/change document ownership etc for his account before archiving it, that makes things easier. Once the user account is archived you are free to create another account without running into subscription restrictions Gerry

Hi Lyonel, You are welcome, I am glad you found it useful and I am glad it compiled too I hope the quality of the code is acceptable, we do not really use .NET internally at all, we only have one (I guess now legacy) tool we developed in .NET which we are only maintaining. Its good to release these sorts of things under the HCL because it gives our customers the freedom to adapt and use as they need, this is a good working example of that in action. For anyone else reading this thread, the library and source code can be found here: - https://github.com/hornbill/dotNetApiLib Gerry

Hi Lyonel, Thats a great question, thank you for asking. I would love to answer this question for you and in fact I think it would make a great topic for a blog article. We are just in the final stages of deploying our own blogging platform so if its ok with you I will give you a detailed answer in the form of a blog post in the next few days, I will post an update here with a link. I really appreciate the feedback, I am glad you are loving the architecture and technology we have developed. We are super excited about what we have created too and how customers are adopting it so easily. If you ever get a chance please expand on what you like (and dislike too), its always good to hear. Gerry

Hi Martyn, No problem. I believe we are meeting on Monday, look forward to catching up Gerry

Martyn, Please not that the security log only currently includes logon events from the UserLocal source. The next server update will start to include all sources except System and all types except USerApiSessionCreate Gerry

Hi Martyn, I expect you will be asking what the following mean, I thought I would pre-empt the question h_type 0 = Logon 1 = Logoff 2 = UserApiSessionCreate 3 = SessionTimeout 4 = SessionKill h_source 0 = GuestLocal 1 = GuestSaml 2 = UserLocal 3 = UserSaml 4 = System 5 = BasicLocal 6 = BasicSaml Gerry

Hi Martyn, Sorry for the delay on this one. We tend to roll this suff out incrementally, and this is no exception. You will find there is now a table called h_sys_security_log which has been quietly logging security events for a couple of months now. Further work needs to be done to expose this and make it useful, and to document it but the basics of it are there and in place. I will have a look and see what happens next but if you want to pull a report out from that table then the information is there for you. Let me know if you think there is anything missing/amiss here. Gerry

Its the owner that gets notified that the document is up for review Gerry

Hy Lyonel, You are welcome. I did ask one of our senior developers if we could put the source code for this DLL into our Open Integration GitHub repo so you could maybe pull it and try to build on .NET 3.5. Problem is he was a little reluctant as the code inside is a bit messy and "Pride Hornbill" is kicking in. If we can get it cleaned up and respectable we will release the code under the Hornbill Community License and make it available in our community GitHub repo - would that help? Gerry

Hi Mark, Thanks for the info, ok it all makes sense now. It seems you are supporting external customers and are wanting to use the organisation records custom fields to hold key information about the support contract/parameters you have with each organisation. The problem with that approach IMHO is you will never quite have enough custom fields, things will change - I know this because this is how we first tried to use the Organisations in Hornbill and it just did not work. The Organisation entity is really only designed to hold information about an Organisation, if it goes beyond that you end up with a messy data model that will ultimately lead to a clunky sub-optimal workflow for your users. There are a couple of much better options that might help you out a lot here. One option is Customer Manager is an application we make that is designed to assist with external B2B customer support and falls more into the CRM category than the IT Support category. In its short term roadmap for Customer Manager we are looking to add two relevant concepts, which are Contracts and Supported Items. Contracts will allow you to store information about a specific contract, start date, end date, value, primary contact, supported contacts, contact roles and so on. And a Contract can contain one or more Supported Items. A Supported Item can contain things like make/model/serial number/product name/version etc... basically the goal will allow any item that one would support to be defined. Another option would be to use Service Manager Assets which I believe (but please don;t hold me to it because I am not 100% sure) there is a roadmap item to make it possible to associate Assets to a Contact. This really is geared towards outsourced IT support where the service provider is an outsourced IT function. I would say Option 1 is a more natural fit Perhaps someone from the SM product team will be able to put some clarification around Option 2 which may work for you. I will ask one of our developers to look at what are the practical restrictions on expanding the maximum number of custom fields and see what they can come up with. I can see more fields will help you here but I am not so sure its a good idea to try to manage your contracts data like this Gerry

Hi Martyn, The changes identified were in the service that handles mail, so a server release in old money. We are right in the middle of some performance released work which has involved some changes that require longer test/validation cycles so our release rate has slowed to a poultry 3 week window at the moment (its usually 72 hours from dev to live), so you can expect to see this in the next 2-3 weeks max. There *may* be other changes in the SM/other apps, this will be part of the verification process so if there are, these will get done also. FWIW, having investigated this problem it was as I suspected a hang-over from the Supportworks implementation, proof that Hornbill is actually just Supportworks evolved (some people do wonder if its just a brand new thing) Gerry

Hi Mark, There is no immediate plan to expand the number of custom fields in the organisation entity, primarily because we are not really aware of any use cases that would require so many fields against an organisation record. We alway aim to keep our data schema efficient to ensure that performance (which is directly linked to MariaDB memory availability), and the more columns in a table definition, the more memory is used when working with that table. Could you please expand on your requirements in a little more detail, I would like to understand exactly what you are trying to achieve so I can feed that back into our product development process, we are always happy to take ideas/requirements on board and accommodate them if they contribute to the greater good for our customers. Gerry

Hi, Please see the following post: This problem has been resolved and will be in production within the next couple of weeks assuming no issues are found. Gerry

Hi, Just to let you know, we found the offending code and have applied a fix so that attached mail messages that are RFC822/MIME encoded will now have a .eml file extension. This will make it into beta in the next week or so and will be out in live 1-2 weeks after that. Thanks again to everyone for the input. Gerry

Hi, Thanks for the information, we will look into this and find out why we are calling the files .msg - this is almost certainly a hang-over from Supportworks code base where we used the .msg file extension for internal message attachments. Having a quick scout around google it would seem that Outlook sees a .msg file as an OLE binary format file, while .eml it would see as an RFC822/MIME encoded text file. I will make sure we look at that and see what we can do. Thanks for pointing out the work-around Gerry

When processing email routing rules, auto responder routing rules and other areas where expressions are used we us an SQL-like expression language. A typical expression might be subject LIKE 'PR00%' which would do what you would expect. Our current implementation follows the SQL-92 recommendation to make the LIKE operator case insensitive so subject LIKE 'PR00%' and subject LIKE 'pr00%' would both match fine. However, our implementation only followed the case-insensitive rule for US-ASCII, that is [A-Z] [a-z] which presented challenges for our customers who work in other languages. We have now implemented case-insensitive LIKE matching for all Latin character sets including Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian as per UCS-2 Level 7.3. While this does not expand the case-insensitive matches for languages that require Case Folding or Semantic Normalising, this does expand the usefulness of LIKE expressions considerably beyond the previous implementation of US-ASCII only case insensitive matching.Here are some examples that will now properly match even though case is different 'Автоматический ответ' LIKE 'автома%' - Cyrillic/Russian 'À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ' LIKE 'à á â ã ä å æ%' - Expanded Latin (all characters, just the A's shown here 'Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ' LIKE 'α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ' - Greek alphabet (only half of it shown) These changes are currently in dev testing, they will be rolled out to beta by the end of this week and live the following week (subject to no issues being identified) Gerry

Hello Melissa, We have done this on purpose to keep the BPM diagram understandable. However, we did anticipate this need and you can solve your problem by cascading decision nodes, each decision node that is entered from a previous decision node inherits all of the possible outcomes from the prior non-decision node. The effect is you can branch on any number of outcomes, but the flow diagram is still readable and looks good on paper. Give it a try, I am sure you will find it makes sense. [edit] Just re-read and seen you already know this can be done. I am afraid we are not likely to change the number of exit points on a decision node, its a diamond shape with four points, one in and three out, any more lines would make the diagram look strange. Out of curiosity, how many different priorities do you have out of interest? Gerry