New Improved Email View

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @Martyn Houghton,

As you can see, this is quite similar to how Outlook 365 works and also Google Inbox (the new Gmail version). I am not saying it will definitely stay as it is, we are still reviewing these kind of things and the more feedback we get the better it will look and work.

We will review your reuest.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[Martyn Houghton]

@Daniel Dekel

Thats fine, as everyone will have a different view on these sort of aesthetic look and feel issues.

A further ting we have noticed, is that when you are in the inbox and it is refreshing as well as the rotating hornbill symbol to indicate it is doing this all the current emails in the list and the preview are cleared then redisplayed with the updated emails. It does retain the one you have selected in both the list and the preview, but causing the display flash. Would be better for the hornbill rotating symbol to remain, but the list is replaced with the new updated list rather than clearing, waiting for refresh to complete and the display. We have quite a rapid polling interval for our mailboxes so this has quite an impact.

Also if you have selected an email and have it open in the preview pane, that email will remain even if the email in removed from the mailbox you are in by another user.

Cheers

Martyn

[Martyn Houghton]

@Daniel Dekel

In terms of the delete folder (in the folder list), Delete All (top right) and delete email icons, will these not be displayed if the analyst in question does not have the Can Delete Folder/Can Delete Messages permissions or will simply not function?

Also in terms of moving an email, either manually or via the Raise Request/Update request process, does this require Can Delete Message permission? As there does not appear to be a specific permission relating to moving an email. 

Cheers

Martyn

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @Martyn Houghton, thanks for your feedback. We are doing important changes in the server. These changes will give the client more information about what was the change. At the moment the information is only saying "there was a change in the mailbox" but there is no information about what. Once we have that we will be able to be much more precise about what we display and if we need to refresh or not the list of emails. You will see improvements in that area probably after the holidays.

One of the areas we need to also improve is to reflect the UI with the rights you assign to the user in the mailbox. So if the user does not have delete message permissions, you should not see the option of Delete. Still this is not a security risk because the server does handle this and it will give you an error. This was not available also in the old email client but will be in the new one.

To move an email you need the Can Edit Message right for that mailbox Role.

Cheers,

Daniel.

[Martyn Houghton]

@Daniel Dekel

Looking forward to to the new update view next year as thats sound like you will have a lot more control on the 'reaction' of the screen to the different events.

In terms of futher feedback from out team, one of the other limitiations that causes us some issues in both the original and new view, is that only one level of folders is supported compared to the multiple levels in Support Works.

Also the fact that the folder list is displayed in the order it was created rather than sorted alphabetically. This is the same in the drop down when moving as well.

Cheers

Martyn

[Daniel Dekel]

@Martyn Houghton, multi level folders is something we are trying to move away from. In our plans for next year, we want to start working on a smarter way of classifying emails. I can't give details yet but I think it will be very useful.

I'll make sure the folders list is ordered alphabetically.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[Martyn Houghton]

@Daniel Dekel

Thanks for the respone. Not sure classifying emails is going to be the answer for us due to the large volume of emails we deal with, hence why we use folders to segregate them.

However more than happy to test it out or give you some furhter testing scenario's based on our usage.

Cheers

Martyn

[Daniel Dekel]

@Martyn Houghton, I'll speak to our support guys, maybe they will be able to show me better your scenarios. It will be useful to understand how you work.

Cheers,

Daniel.

[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

[Martyn Houghton]

@Gerry

Agree the display of the selection of other selection and other icons it is more aesthetic and personal preference from my 1st Tier team. Trying to encourage them to use the new view as default, so we can provide as much feedback as possible whilst it is still in flux.

One thing that is improving is the triggering of refreshes of the mailboxes when changes are made by other users in the shared mailbox as well. Hopefully the more detailed events triggers that @Daniel Dekel has mentioned will allow a better UI experience when these updates take place.

Overall a definite step in the right direction for way we use the shared mailbox.

Cheers

Martyn

[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

 

[Ralf Peters]

Hi @Daniel Dekel ,

just some feedback :

when raising a ticket from an email , it moved the email into the delete folder once logged   , but  it does not clear the preview  of that email   ( using chrome ) and sometimes the folder counters do not reset . you have to reload the mailbox to  update it .

Thanks

Ralf Peters

[Daniel Dekel]

Thank you @Ralf Peters, we are aware of this issue and it will be resolved in our next release.

Daniel.

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @m.vandun,

Trying to replicate the scrolling issue you had. I was finally able to replicate it. It occurs when you are in a 110% browser zoom or 120%. If you use an odd zoom number like 125% it will work fine (weird). I'll have a look at this.

Can you please confirm this is the problem? If it is, for now you can use 100% zoom.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[m.vandun]

Hi @Daniel Dekel,

Thanks for your reply. I was at zoom 80%, changed it to 100% and the scrolling was working again.

Regards,

Mark

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @m.vandun,

The fix for the missing scrolling is now in Live. It now should work with 80% zoom or any other zoom.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[m.vandun]

@Daniel Dekel,

Thanks for the update. Just checked it and the scrolling is working properly.

Thanks for the help!

Regards,

Mark

[greggjf]

am finding the new email view completely unusable just now have to use the old version.  Time stamps are meaningless, raise ticket from email only brings over the customer name and nothing else. 

Delete all email button in both views is dangerous and has wiped out the mailbox 3 times already, the fall back being I still have exchange mailbox open, this needs to include an are you sure options before it goes ahead and wipes it out completely.

If you are going for an Outlook look then the functionality needs to work in the same way, at the moment the new version just looks pretty but isnt good to use.

[Gerry]

1 hour ago, greggjf said:

am finding the new email view completely unusable just now have to use the old version.  Time stamps are meaningless, raise ticket from email only brings over the customer name and nothing else. 

Delete all email button in both views is dangerous and has wiped out the mailbox 3 times already, the fall back being I still have exchange mailbox open, this needs to include an are you sure options before it goes ahead and wipes it out completely.

If you are going for an Outlook look then the functionality needs to work in the same way, at the moment the new version just looks pretty but isnt good to use.

 

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your comments/feedback, can I ask you to expand on a couple of things please. 

Time stamps are meaningless - Can you be more specific here, "The stamps" do you mean timestamps? In what way could they be more meaningful?

Raise ticket from email only brings over the customer name and nothing else.  - To the best of my knowledge this behaviour is a function within Service Manager and should not  be influenced by which mail view you are currently using. Is there any possibility of a screenshot or further explanation?

Delete all email button in both views is dangerous and has wiped out the mailbox 3 times already, - I think I can see what you are saying here.  In our defence, when you press the Delete All button it does prompt you with the message "This action will completely delete all the messages in the current folder. Are you sure?" telling you what its about to do but I think we can definitely improve on this and not just do a permanent delete by default. 

If you are going for an Outlook look then the functionality needs to work in the same way, at the moment the new version just looks pretty but isnt good to use. - yes I agree, we see Hornbill as a living breathing thing and always appreciate feedback and suggestions. 

Thanks,

Gerry

 

 

[greggjf]

4 hours ago, Gerry said:

Hi Gerry

Thanks for the reply

Time stamps on the email being the time it arrived the old view shows the delivery time like Outlook, the new view says things like seconds ago, 20 mins ago, when searching by delivery time is hard to use as delivery time stamps of 20 mins ago arent useful.

We've definitely had 3 instances of the whole mailbox being wiped out in the last two days without any double prompt of deletion so something could be wrong.  Raise a ticket from email should be able to pull the mail content into a description field in the ticket, raise ticket only pulling the sender isn't saving any time in the process and you have to have two sessions running to pull further information from the mail to paste into the ticket.

Hope that helps.

Greg

4 hours ago, Gerry said:

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your comments/feedback, can I ask you to expand on a couple of things please. 

Time stamps are meaningless - Can you be more specific here, "The stamps" do you mean timestamps? In what way could they be more meaningful?

Raise ticket from email only brings over the customer name and nothing else.  - To the best of my knowledge this behaviour is a function within Service Manager and should not  be influenced by which mail view you are currently using. Is there any possibility of a screenshot or further explanation?

Delete all email button in both views is dangerous and has wiped out the mailbox 3 times already, - I think I can see what you are saying here.  In our defence, when you press the Delete All button it does prompt you with the message "This action will completely delete all the messages in the current folder. Are you sure?" telling you what its about to do but I think we can definitely improve on this and not just do a permanent delete by default. 

If you are going for an Outlook look then the functionality needs to work in the same way, at the moment the new version just looks pretty but isnt good to use. - yes I agree, we see Hornbill as a living breathing thing and always appreciate feedback and suggestions. 

Thanks,

Gerry

 

 

 

[Victor]

@greggjf the requests raised from emil are missing the summary and description because they are not being captured during logging process. You would need to have either the "Request Details" standard form or have a custom form which maps the custom fields to summary and description fields. Below is a screenshot of the standard form:

 

[Gerry]

HI @greggjf

Quote

Time stamps on the email being the time it arrived the old view shows the delivery time like Outlook, the new view says things like seconds ago, 20 mins ago, when searching by delivery time is hard to use as delivery time stamps of 20 mins ago arent useful.

Yes this does come up from time to time. We present time in this way to help you at a glance, but did you know that if you float the mouse over the time and wait 500ms it will show you the absolute date/time in a tool-tip popup? Does that solve your problem?  In any case, we agree with you that some people prefer to have the absolute date/time displayed instead so we are going to add a user preference setting so you can choose one behaviour or the other, that should be deployed within the next week or so. 
 

Quote

We've definitely had 3 instances of the whole mailbox being wiped out in the last two days without any double prompt of deletion so something could be wrong.

I have had a play around with this myself and I cannot get it to do anything without it prompting.  A quick code review would suggest that its not possible for this to happen either so not sure whats going on there.... can you re-create the problem on our demo sandbox?  In any case, upon review of the "Delete All" button, we don't much like the current implementation ourselves so we are going to change it so you are forced to select "Delete" or "Delete Permanently", with a double conformation for the latter.   This change has been specified now and will be in  the works in the next day or two, will be rolled out by the end of next week the latest. 
 

Quote

Raise a ticket from email should be able to pull the mail content into a description field in the ticket, raise ticket only pulling the sender isn't saving any time in the process and you have to have two sessions running to pull further information from the mail to paste into the ticket.

This would appear to be a configuration issue, please see @Victor comments above. 

Thanks again for the feedback, its very much appreciated because we do genuinely love working with our customers to help improve our solution for our community. 

Gerry

 

[m.vandun]

Hi @Daniel Dekel

On 23-1-2017 at 3:40 PM, Daniel Dekel said:

Hi @m.vandun,

The fix for the missing scrolling is now in Live. It now should work with 80% zoom or any other zoom.

Thanks,

Daniel.

Has there been a change / update? I noticed this issue has come back. Also I noticed that this issue is also occurring with the My Activities" screen. Scrolling on 80% is not working but on 100% it works.

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @m.vandun, I've just checked it and you are right. It's weird. We've fixed this and with this fix hopefully we won't see any more the problem.

It should be in our next release.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[Dan Munns]

Hi all,

Is there a way of setting a default font when composing an email so that all service desk communications look the same from all analysts?

Also can we have the same fonts in the email templates added as well? All of our templates are set at Calibri 14 but this (and many other fonts) is missing when composing an email.

As Calibri is our go to font as a business when our own font is unavailable it would be nice to have the continuity across the whole email system from Hornbill.

Thanks 

Dan