VanillaDesk - News

New Release - Improved API

2013-04-22 00:00:00 +0200

New VanillDesk release comes with the improved API and with the more readable API documentation. The new documentation is available here.

API Reference is produced by Swagger. It is a great API documentation system and we have only words of thanks to its creators.

Other Small but Handy Changes

Private Attachments

It is now possible to upload a private attachment. Private attachment is hidden from end users.

Reporting - Search by deadline

Ticket reports can be filtered by the date range in which a ticket deadline expires.

New VanillaDesk release - many improvements!

2013-03-22 00:00:00 +0100

In this VanillaDesk release we were focusing on improving usability in most common tasks, mainly in ticket management and customer portal. There are quick overview of these enhancements:

Simple editor with preview for full-text enabled fields

Editor (source text)

Editor preview

Ability to edit existing ticket comments

Edit comment dialog

Link (and close) call to existing ticket

Very useful feature when you receive many calls to the same incident.

Link call to already existing ticket

Linked call will be then closed

Customer portal enhancements

Ability to resolve and close ticket by end user
Disable own update notifications
public problem notifications

Other changes

UI polishing - dropdown list unification
API enhancements - will be described in future post
Page load performance improvements
Over 40 bug fixes

Update reminder for tickets

2012-11-22 00:00:00 +0100

In many cases, tickets should be regularly updated, so the affected party is informed of any progress made. This task, however, becomes more difficult with higher number of tickets assigned to an Operator.

We have introduced the Ticket update reminder. This feature will allow you to specify intervals, in which tickets need to be updated and the system dispatches emails, reminding Operators to update them.

This new feature is ready to be used out-of-the-box, with only minimal setup needed.

The only action required is:

either specify the next update time manually, when adding a public update to a ticket,
or setup the update frequency in the Service-level agreement (SLA).

The pre-configured parts are:

a default template of the email, that will be sent
a list of recipients who will ne notified once the reminder is triggered
the percent of time remaining until the update is due

All above-mentioned settings can be adjusted any time.

VanillaDesk service outage

2012-11-02 00:00:00 +0100

We experienced a series of short outages of our service on Wednesday October 31st, 2012 from 7:30pm UTC till approximately 10pm UTC.

We located a serious issue which caused infinite notification loops resulting in unacceptable application response times and even application outages. A workaround has been applied on Wednesday and final fixe has been delivered yesterday.

We thank you for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.

New VanillaDesk Youtube channel

2012-09-06 00:00:00 +0200

VanillaDesk now has a brand new Youtube channel - VanillaDeskSD.

We will be adding several basic "how to" videos that will help our new users to start using the application easilly.

Subscribe now to get the latest info.

VanillaDesk successfully migrated to recurly.com

2012-07-31 00:00:00 +0200

VanillaDesk billing has been migrated to recurly.com - a more secure and efficient billing platform.

We would like to thank to all our customers for their cooperation in this matter and hope the one month of free service was worth the effort :-)

Big thanks to all of you!

Ticket watching enhancements

2012-06-27 00:00:00 +0200

Informing people of updates in a VanillaDesk ticket has been made easier. Here are the new features we have introduced:

Transforming CCs in an email into ticket watchers
Have you ever sent an email to one of your customers/partners and put a lot of people in as CCs just to be aware of this communication? Now, you can create or update tickets in VanillaDesk in the same manner. If an email, that is imported into VanillaDesk contains any CCs, the respective users or emails will be marked as watchers of the particular ticket. This will ensure, that no one will be left out of the loop.

Making others watch important tickets
When resolving an important ticket, you may find yourself in need of informing other operators about any progress made. It is now possible to make other people watch the ticket, bringing them into the loop.

Send notifications in multiple languages

2012-06-13 00:00:00 +0200

If you supply your services to customers in multiple countries, it may not always be appropriate to use English for comunication.
Now, you can define notifications for each language your customers use and VanillaDesk will send the correct version to selected customers.

	You are able to define a list of languages in the Notification settings that you wish to use.
In a notification template, a tab will be created for each language. Simply define what the notification should look like in the particular language. We understand, that configuring templates to your liking will take some time, therefore each language within a template can be activated once you are finished with it.
	The language that is used for a customer is selected in his details. All End users of this customer will receive notifications in this language.
Additionally, each Operator can select which language he wants to receive notifications in.

Customers can be created directly from tickets

2012-05-18 00:00:00 +0200

When creating or editing ticket info, a new customer can be easilly created.

	To create a new customer, simply click the (+) button right next to the customer selector field. A modal window will open.
Specify the customers' name and select the services, that will be available to him. A service-level agreement (SLA) will automatically be created for each of the selected services, saving even more time configuring. Additionally, you are also able to create multiple locations for the customer (if there are more of them).

System notifications are now customizable

2012-04-12 00:00:00 +0200

Are our default notifications too complicated for your users or you want to adjust them for any other reason ? Now you can.

All system notifications – like password reset email and more – were made customizable.

To adjust these templates, simply go to Manage > Notifications and scroll down to System notifications.

To preview any of them, click on their title, to adjust, click Edit.

The system notifications are very similar to the standard notification template, so the environment is familiar (if you already adjusted them).

There are two new features available here:

you can always return to our predefined templates by clicking the Reset to default button (this feature has also been added to the standard notification templates)
we have highlighted the mandatory placeholders, that are necessary for the template to make sence. This will prevent any disfunctional notifications from being saved.