Gerry

Hi Ralf, Yeah I would suggest you would be better off crafting an appropriate DELETE statement to clear out data, rather than using the tool to delete row by row. I am not sure why the difference between the old Admin tool and the new one, I will have to defer to my college on that one. Gerry

Hi Gareth, I am sure this is a setting on the widget, I recall some time ago we had this problem and we decided to make it configurable because different browsers and different screen resolutions gave wildly different results in certain circumstances. We will find out and post back with something more concrete very soon Gerry

We received in-app feedback today in relation to a recent HH notice that went out regarding the updated Activity Stream component. The feedback gave us a very low rating (1/10) with the comment "can we have more specific time for comments rather than about an hr ago". First of all, thank you to the customer in question for providing the feedback, we love to hear from our users and are always looking for ways to improve our users experience when using our service. I have chosen to post to the forum and respond as this question has come up before and will no doubt come up again in the future. Firstly, did you know that if you float your mouse over the time area for half a second you will get a tooltip showing the exact date/time? We have found that while most customers like the abbreviated dates because it makes scanning a timeline faster and easier and comprehensible as people tend to think in terms of an hour ago, yesterday etc. However, we also recognise that everyone is different and its not unreasonable that if people want to see dates/time in the more traditional format then they should be able to, so we are going to add user settings to allow individuals to set their own preference on the display of dates /times in the activity stream views. This will be done within the next 90 days, possibly quite a lot sooner than that.

Yeah I am not sure I really understand what that means.... Its clear from what I can see on the docs that the Marketplace apps can be used by anyone, but the app is distinctly different from the SSO setup for an application If the application is not on the Microsoft Azure platform then I think you will find that constitutes a custom app and will require premium, regardless of if you set it up manually or set it up using an AD Authentication App in the AD Directory app marketplace. I think the AD Authentication App can be used by anyone, I set up a free account to take a look and I can use lots of them, but I am still not sure it will work - but we will be testing it to see what does and does not work. Even if it does not solve your "need for premium edition" problem, we will still most likely add an AD Authentication App as customer are using Azure more and more so this will at least help make configuration easy for them Gerry

Martyn, I know I am a bit late to the conversation but I would point out that Chaining decision nodes is not a work around we very intentionally designed it that way to force process designers to draw clear process diagrams that non-technical people can read. In classic flow diagrams its good practice to only have one line per corner of the decision node. Our implementation is smart enough to recognise when a decision node is chained to another decision node and does a good job at only giving the option to select the unused choices from the proceeding outcome. In the rare cases where it makes sense to have more than three outcomes the decision nodes are chained and should lend very well to making the process visually easy to understand. Gerry

Hi Martyn, It currently does not do this, although it probably should for security audit reasons. Can I ask what you use the gathered data for and how you browse/interact with the gathered data? Also, what information were you collecting (and why just curious to know as I will look into it. Of course in the world of Hornbill the concept of "logging in" is a little vague when using SSO. Under the hood we still do it so we can definitely log it but I am not sure how meaningful the information would be. Another example is mobile access - its always on and does not even have a concept of logging in (apart from the first time you register the device), its a secure trust relationship set up between a user account and a device. Interested in your thoughts Gerry

Hi Ralf, The direct SQL query tool is not designed to deal with large amounts of data because of load it could place on the database. Its purpose is really for problem diagnosis and problem resolution type tasks. Perhaps a question I could pose is what are you trying to achieve? Gerry

Hi Gareth, I think I understand what you are saying. So it is possible to add an app into the marketplace for SSO connectors but - in the context of Azure, Hornbill will still be considered a custom app so having the connection in the App Marketplace for Azure Directtory would nor really help as that does not appear to be anything more than a wrap-around to make configuration easier. If our software its self was running on the Azure platform then I think what you are saying would be correct, but we are never going to run our application on Azure as we already have built a world-class platform upon which we run our application on. We will do some testing and investigating and will almost certainly add our SSO App to the Azure marketplace because customers do use Azure and this will make it easier for them to set things up. However, I don't think this will circumvent the requirement that Microsoft has placed on you requiring Premium edition to act as an Idp for applications that are not running on their platform - that's a very typical Micro$oft approach to their market penetration strategy. I say all of this with very limited understanding of the Azure platform so I could be wrong, but that's how it looks to me with a cursory glance Gerry

Gareth, On your final point, I am not sure I understand why you would need premium. In Hornbill you can set up multiple SSO profiles for exactly this purpose. Each site/company you have where you want to use SSO access would simply need to add an application to their Directory service, and on Hornbill you would need to crate an SSO profile for each one of these. That should work without an issue although we will set some time aside over the coming weeks to verify this. Gerry

And a bit of further reading. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/active-directory-app-gallery-listing/

Hello Gareth, Thanks for the suggestion. At this point in time we have no idea what putting the SSO install into the Azure market, we do not have any Azure expertise so in order to evaluate your request we will need to look into this in more detail. The following document appears to spell out whats required: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/active-directory-integrating-applications/ although as usual the devil is always in the detail so its definitely not a 5 minute fix as you say I will see what we can find out and post back soon. Gerry

Some customers asked if it is possible to access our service on their own custom domain. We are looking into a service option that will make this possible but thats some months off. In the mean time we have made some minor changes to the way our traffic routing works in order to allow our service to properly handle custom domains, so it is possible if you want to to set up your own reverse proxy to route traffic to our service but present it to your users on your own domain. This is an unsupported configuration inasmuch as we cannot guarantee your proxy, your network or servers will work and will be available etc so this configuration would not be treated as part of our service, but if you want to do this its technically possible and works. We have created the following document as a guide for you. https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Custom_Domain_using_Reverse_Proxy Gerry

Martyn, Thats great, glad it works thanks for posting back with the links too Gerry

Hi Gwynne, Just to expand on what Alex said, the fields use a coding scheme to control case in the expanded output. * If the field is expressed in "ALL UPPER CASE" then the output for that fields data will be forced UPPER CASE, regardless of how its stored in the system * If the field is expressed in "all lower case" then the output for that fields data will be forced lower case, regardless of how its stored in the system * If the field is expressed in "MiXeD cAsE" then the output for that fields data will be left as is and output as its stored, case is not changed. Gerry

Martyn, The fields you are probably interested in are title content comment actorId actorName Gerry

Martyn, This requirement is behind another more fundamental requirement of getting report output into a format that can be stored. The problem with scheduling is you have to do something with the output, either save it or e-mail it or something like that. To do that we need to come up with a decent way of making the report output appropriate. HTML is not good enough, MHT format was the source of many complaints in the world of Supportworks so we don't want to go down that route. That really only leaves us with PDF format. This is a complex technical challenge because HTML does not render particularly well for print. We have some things in development around PDF generation which we have been working on this year. That however, has only shown us just how complicated it is to do well... The best I can offer you is its work in progress but we will not even consider scheduling until we have a way of getting our report output in to PDF, which is by far the biggest hurdle to overcome. Gerry

Hi Martyn, The original concept behind workspaces is they would be self-organising, inasmuch as a single person can only realistically participate in a finite number. Organising into a hierarchy like a folder structure feels to me like a bit of a step backwards. My observation is people are generally not very good at naming folders let alone hierarchical structures so enabling something like that would create the opportunity for people to create a mess. That being said we do need to do something, possibly with tagging or searching to make it easy for people to locate and even organise their workspaces. There are no immediate plans in the 90 day horizon but its something thats been bubbling up from time to time so its bound to get some attention soon. Gerry

Hi Steve, Ok that makes sense, I will post the question to our dev team and see what they come up with. Gerry

Steve, Its certainly something that could be implemented but its not on the current development schedule. There are complexities for locally caching requests because of our app-in-app architecture we use on the mobile. Its something that would need to be discussed internally to figure out how it could be done - its not straightforward though.. Looking forward to seeing you guys on service manager Gerry

Hi Tina, One of our developers will post here to confirm but i believe we are going to implement Cut/Copy/Paste on the nodes so you can select one or more nodes, copy (or cut), switch to the other stage and paste. Gerry

Hi James, Unfortunately we do not have the ability to configure our SAML requests to include a digital signature. This part of the standard is optional and many service providers (and Idps) do not support this. Of course the system remains secure as the response from your Idp will be signed and will be verified against a previously provided public certificate to verify the authority of the assertion from your Idp. Hope that helps. Gerry

Gareth, That is a nice looking provider I must give them a try. We might make the smsSend API using configurable providers so customer can decide which provider to use if they prefer. Gerry

Hi Alison, Just a heads up - This API is currently *experimental* so please use with caution. There are limitations placed on SMS usage globally, different countries have different rules so its impossible to provide a globally reliable SMS service. For this reason its experimental and not really considered production ready. In the future we may formally support this in the UK and some parts of Europe where SMS is more reasonably regulated. However, bear in mind that if we do formalise this API there will need to be charges applied to messages sent because we ourselves get charged. Not 100% sure how we will implement this, probably on a "buy credits" scheme of some form. For now though the API is available and can be used for free, we know it works in the UK, messages to devices in other countries are not guaranteed to work and we have no technical way of confirming message delivery. Gerry

Martyn, There are two problems with this... * Trying to do this dynamically against entity relationships presents a problem inasmuch as a one2many relationship could easily involve a large number of records, some of our bigger entities can have 10 or more relationships so things can get very big very quickly. * The syntax/markup in the template becomes unwieldy and difficult for people to use. In the case of PG questions, it might be better to have some way to consolidate the questions into a single field for the purpose of including in a mail template. I believe @Trevor has already raised this internally for discussion. Gerry

Hi Lee, As an alternative to using "Status" for this sort of thing, I would suggest you should consider using boards to organise your requests, this is a far more visual and intuitive approach. Gerry