Issuetrak Release Notes

AI Note Assistant

Note Assistant uses your existing AI provider to do change a note that you're editing. When this feature is enabled, and you're adding or editing a note, you'll get a choice of transformations to apply to your note from an "AI Assistant" dropdown:

• Fix grammar & spelling
• Make more professional
• Make friendlier
• Summarize
• Expand & clarify

You can tune the way these transformations work by adjusting the applicable prompts given to your AI provider. You can read more about how to do that here.

Note Attachments

Note attachments are files added to an individual note. Note attachments can be added by dragging a file to an issue note that is being created or edited, or clicking the paperclip button in the note area, then browsing to the file you want to attach.

If a user attaches a file to a note, and marks their note private, then the resulting attachment is marked as private on the issue. If the user (or anyone else) subsequently removes the Private status of the note, the attachment does not automatically become public. The attachment's public/private status will need to be changed from the Attachments area of the issue. 

Note Author

When adding notes, agents with appropriate permissions* can now select another user from a dropdown menu to write a note on their behalf.

Why might someone want to be able to do this? In the same way that the enterer of an issue is often different than the submitter of the issue, entering notes on behalf of the submitting user can have utility in a variety of scenarios. We expect this will be pretty useful to folks in the arena of IT support, where the enterer of an issue is very often a different person than the submitter of the issue.

• Submit Notes for Others: Permitted agents will now see a dropdown beneath their notes field that initially contains their name when adding notes, closing issues, or cloning records on both desktop and mobile. To keep everyday updates simple and expedient, the field automatically defaults to the logged-in user, and notes can be re-attributed later without overwriting who physically entered them. Clicking the dropdown enables you to filter, scroll, and select another user to associate the note with.
   
• Clear Attribution: When a note is submitted on behalf of another user, the issue view displays the author alongside an "entered by [User]" tag, giving everyone immediate visibility into who provided the information, versus who entered it.
   
• Protected SLA Clocks: Adding a note on behalf of an issue submitter will not satisfy or stop your first-response SLA clock, keeping customer response metrics accurate and reliable.
   
• Audit History / Report Writer:
  • All on-behalf submissions and author changes are tracked directly in the Issue Change Log under the acting user's account. Such actions are displayed as "Note Added on behalf of..."
  • In addition, we've added Note Entered By and Note Entered By UserID fields to Report Writer in the "Issues/Notes" and "Issues/Service Contracts" datasets, making it simple to report on note creators and entry agents separately.

* A note on permissions: We've expanded the verbiage of the Agent permission "Can submit issues on behalf of other users" so that it reads "Can submit Issues and Notes on behalf of other users" which reflects its increased scope to accommodate this feature. 

New Rich Text Editor

We've replaced the RTE, and really spruced up the "Add Note" experience with it! Editing and adding notes in an issue is really expedient now, because it no longer requires a page refresh to get into "Edit" mode or save your note. When you choose to add or edit a note, the RTE instantly appears, allowing you to immediately begin working on your note.

While workng on this, we took this opportunity to provide a much more rich experience beyond merely being the place where you add notes. The new RTE now also:

• Makes it VERY clear when a note has been made private
  • Styling is added to private notes that tinges their background a rosy hue
• Lets you record Labor hours and notes 
• Allows you to add and work on Labor Hours and Billing line items
• For Agents with "Can submit Issues and Notes on behalf of other users" permission, provides a filterable dropdown at the bottom which initially contains the current user's name, allowing a different user to be attributed to the note currently in progress.
• Note Assistant in a dropdown menu in the upper right

Accessibility? What for?

Going forward, with each major release we've committed to getting Issuetrak into a state where it is easier for disabled folks to use. To that end, we're going through a series of accessibility compliance audits to determine what needs to be fixed. Based on those audits, we'll be combing through the product and making changes wherever we can improve the experience, making it more friendly to the vision-impaired.

For reference, we're targeting compliance with WCAG 2.2 standards.

You can expect this "Accessibility" section to be present with every major release, describing items we've tweaked or changed, until we are satisfied that we've reached our goal of making Issuetrak generally accessible for our customers. 

Accessibility Work in This Release

In summary: Issuetrak is much more friendly to navigate using the keyboard, as well as with screen-readers. We've also made several user interface elements larger and/or higher in contrast, in order to allow users with visual impairments to more easily discern them from other elements on screen.

Feature / Work Item	Direct User Impact & Functional Scope	Overlapping WCAG Criteria	Projected WCAG 2.2 Compliance Level
Pointer-Only Elements (Buttons)	Converted 53 click-only controls (menus, print, memberships) to keyboard-operable buttons, enlarged touch targets to 24×24px, and added focus-return on Escape.	2.1.1, 2.4.3, 4.1.2, 2.5.8	A (2.1.1, 2.4.3, 4.1.2) AA (2.5.8)
Bookmark Popover Semantics	Converted bookmark triggers to dialog buttons, managed focus into and out of the popover on open and Escape, added a visible name label, and expanded name capacity to 100 characters.	2.4.3, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 4.1.2	A
New Window Warning	Added advance screen-reader announcements to popups, calendar pickers, and administrative dialogs without adding visual clutter.	3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.5, 4.1.2	A (3.2.1, 3.2.2, 4.1.2) AAA (3.2.5)
Filterable Dropdowns	Unified dropdown menus into an accessible keyboard-operable selector (arrow keys, Home/End, Escape) with spoken expansion and result counts.	1.3.1, 2.1.1, 4.1.2	A
LightBox Background Lock	Locked background pages when modal dialogs open, prevented duplicate window launches, preserved system alerts, and returned focus to the trigger on close.	2.1.2, 2.4.3, 4.1.2	A
Bookmark Popper Dismissal	Ensured exiting the bookmark editor returns focus to the initiating button, enabled Escape dismissal, and made the close icon keyboard-operable.	2.1.1, 2.4.3, 4.1.2	A
Note Editor Tab Key	Allowed the Tab key to advance past paragraph text to the next form control while preserving list indentation via Tab and Shift+Tab.	2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.4.3	A
Field Label Associations	Linked text labels directly to form fields, making labels clickable for mouse users and providing spoken names for assistive software.	2.4.6, 3.3.2, 4.1.2	A (3.3.2, 4.1.2) AA (2.4.6)
Editor Chrome Controls	Aligned formatting toolbars with sequential Tab-stop navigation, enabled Escape dismissal for flyouts, and added new window warnings to Quick Notes.	2.1.1, 4.1.2	A
Template Reload Focus	Kept keyboard and screen-reader focus on the Issue Template field after the automated reload following a template selection.	2.4.3, 3.2.2	A
Settings Menu Override Button	Converted settings dialog links to buttons so the Space bar and Enter key both activate the modal without dead navigation links.	2.1.1, 4.1.2	A
Invalid Anchors to Buttons	Replaced non-standard link tags with true buttons for actions and real destination links for popup windows to support middle-clicking.	2.1.1, 4.1.2	A
Note Editor Accessible Name	Provided spoken accessible names matching section headers when focusing the note and description composition areas.	3.3.2, 4.1.2	A
Side Panel Focus	Verified through testing that opening modal side panels already directs focus into the dialog and close button as expected.	2.4.3, 4.1.2	A
UDF Caret Buttons	Ensured dropdown caret buttons announce their associated field label rather than an unlabelled button.	4.1.2	A
Field Border Contrast	Darkened default form field and quick-search borders from light gray to medium gray to clear the 3:1 boundary contrast minimum.	1.4.11	AA
Shared Hidden Component	Standardized hidden descriptive text to prevent visual leakage, duplicate printing, or clipping errors across the interface.	1.3.1, 4.1.2	A
Remediation Planning	Organized the phased elimination of invalid interactive markup across navigation, menus, and ticket forms.	2.1.1, 2.4.3, 4.1.2	A

Table: Attachments

• New nullable INT column: NoteID
• New nullable DATETIME column: PendingUntil

Table: Notes

• New nullable INT column: EnteredByIid

Cross-Site Request Forgery

CSRF protection would cause a redirect to the homepage when the user attempted to add a restriction to an Issue Subtype.

Deployment Tools

When upgrading an existing site on a server without internet access, clicking "Create License Request" in the IDM would generate a file missing the oldVersion and token fields. The IDM would then (incorrectly) treat this as a new site deployment.

Enable Support Access

If the account that activated the support user was deleted, then an error would occur when an admin subsequently attempted to reactivate the support user.

Incoming Email

• IEM would strip Outlook email formatting, such as highlighting and numbered lists.
   
• IEM Exchange did not handle emails with digital signatures. 
   
• Exclude Text would not strip the HTML banner code injected by external mail security systems.
   
• Incoming Email's "Submit new Issue or add Note as this user" setting has had its verbiage changed to be more accurate, because it implied that the designated user would always be used. It now reads as "For unrecognized senders, submit the new Issue or add the Note as this user:".

Issue Hub

• Clearing an issue's substatus via Issue Hub would leave an issue in a broken state, causing a 500 error on Edit or Close.
   
• Adding a note via Issue Hub would not set the SLA first response time.
   
• The Issue Hub "Update Issues" panel's Class dropdown would display inactive Classes.
   
• The first 5 fields of the Custom Records Table were no longer being displayed as Issue Hub columns.
   
• Issue Hub would display "Couldn't load results" sporadically for sites with heavy usage, multiple active users, and many open issues.
   
• Issue Hub views that were filtered by Location would not auto-refresh until they were clicked.

Locations

Attempting to edit a user with an underlying LocationIid above 32767 would throw a 500 error. 

Magic Sign-In

• Users would sometimes be logged out of Issuetrak shortly after using Magic Sign-In. 
   
• Magic Link tokens were not invalidated after a successful login. 

Outgoing Email

Adding a note on the Close Issue screen would not trigger On Note notifications.

Reporting

• Summary Reports would fail and display a date conversion error when site date format was dd-mmm-yyyy.
   
• The Issues/Templates dataset name would not update when the Issues label was renamed.
   
• Issue links in manually exported Custom Report Excel files (formatted and unformatted) had no CSRF token. With CSRF protection on, clicking one of those links would result in landing on the user's Home Page instead of the issue.

Self-Registration

When Self Registration was enabled with a template user, new self-registered users would always be created with "Can Log In" permission enabled, even when the template user had "Can Log In" unchecked.

Site Performance

Encrypted connection strings would incur a high performance cost.

Surveys

Survey email validation would reject top-level domains longer than 3 characters.

User Interface

The "Edit List UDF" modal would display the Active toggles at incorrect size.