Today's release contains a new tool to handle customer support tickets, and upgrades to Milestones, Wiki, and Tickets.
Support tool
The support tool is a front end for a classic customer support ticket system. A user can go to the Support tab and submit a ticket, and see the status of tickets that he or she previously submitted. These tickets appear in the related Tickets tool, where your core team can handle them. This type of customer interaction is a feature that many users asked for. We decided to implement it when we realized that we needed it for Assembla customer support, here.
You can add the tool to an existing space from the Admin/Tools list. Or, setup a new support workspace by grabbng our Customer Support configuration from the catalog. The support tool requires some configuration of permissions, to show and hide the correct tabs, and the usual customization of tickets. We will provide more complete configuration instructions on the template wiki over the next few days.
Milestones
During the last 3 weeks, Milestones have received a completely new look. We took out easy-to-miss sidebar controls and moved them into the main column. We also added a nice calendar.
Wiki
We finished upgrading the wiki to handle lots of pages using a hierarchial sidebar menu. You can use our ajax control to arrange your wiki pages, and then browse them in the sidebar with a javascript open/close outline.
Tickets
We have made a commitment to relentlessly improve tickets. It's the core of our development process here at Assembla, and a required ingredient of a distributed agile process. Here is a sampling of the work that we did this month.
Agile planner- We got great reviews from people who tried the first release of the Agile Planner to build and manage their lists of tickets. Try it now from the Tickets sub-tab bar. We fixed the little bugs from the first release two weeks ago. You can now reliably drop tickets into the Story/Feature header to move them to the Story/Feature level. And, we show the time estimates and total estimates for individual tickets, and for complete Milestones and complete Stories or Features.
Default field values- You can now set default values for fields, on the Tickets/Settings page. For example, you can assign new tickets to the "Backlog" milestone. This makes it a lot easier to get good tickets out of the simplified forms in the Support tool and the Agile Planner popups.
Numeric custom field type - You can now create custom fields with a numeric type.
Time on Tickets - If you track time, be sure to try the new Time Expenditure tab on tickets to quickly submit your time and estimates with an ajax form.
Primary and Secondary sorts for ticket Filters/lists - You can now create filters and lists with a primary sort (for example, Milestone) and a secondary sort (for example, priority). I hope this satisfies the user who wrote on our request board that the ticket tool was "not ready for serious use" without this sort. You guys are tough.
Attach files to a new ticket - You can now attach files at the bottom of a new ticket form. You were always able to attach files to an existing ticket, but we noticed that some people missed this and never came back to attach their files.
Take Screenshot - We have a handy java applet that will pop up, take a screenshot and attach it to the ticket. It's client-side java, so it depends on the client, but now it works most of the time, depending on your java installation. We did work through many of the twisted security issues related to deploying a signed applet and having it submit to an SSL protected URL.