We're releasing Issuetrak 15.9 today, and its focus is on streamlining upgrades, clarifying some of Report Writer's new functionality, updates to the way organizations are populated into issues, and bug fixes.
To start with, we've updated our deployment tools: The IDU and the IDM. While they don't look terribly different, our development team has made great strides in reducing the time it takes to deploy an upgrade. Note that this reduced time applies to upgrades that occur after upgrading to 15.9. Another major change - one that is much more visible - is that we've also updated our deployment tools to make deploying a test site easy! Deploying a test site with 15.9 is just as easy as it is to deploy a production site. You can tell the tools to base your test site on a production database, or tell it to make a blank site that's ready to be configured from scratch. And if you're nervous about basing a test site on a production database, you should know that we've implemented safeguards to prevent notifications from firing by default, as well as preventing the test site from processing incoming email. We've put quite a bit of thought into this! We'll explain a bit more in the Deployment Tools section further down.
Back in 15.7, we streamlined the process of creating a report in Report Writer. You gave us some feedback on those changes, and we've listened. We've added a bit of polish to Report Writer by making it easier to differentiate between running a report with formatting and merely running a report to get the data results. More details about this are in the What's New section.
We've also reworked the Issue Forms options to include organization-related info. This means that all of the organization-related fields that you normally have to hunt for can be included on the issue screen (including UDFs) if you decide to configure it that way!
Lastly, we're including more than a dozen bug fixes in 15.9 to round out the release. Let's get into the details below!
Deployment Tools
Faster Upgrades After 15.9
When we first released our modern deployment tools with Issuetrak 11.0 (almost 5 years ago- wow!), we wanted to accomplish several things at once:
- Speed - Site deployments should be fast.
- Flexibility - Issuetrak should successfully deploy in any environment that meets our requirements- even if that environment is different from our own.
- Safety - Our tools shouldn't affect non-Issuetrak sites, and it should be possible to roll back a failed deployment.
- Support-friendly - Log everything that happens during deployment. If something goes wrong, there should be a log for IT staff to look at to get an idea of how to fix it.
We decided that these qualities could be taken to a higher level, and so we've laid the foundation for future upgrades to be much, much quicker. Upgrades from 15.9 to future versions should take a fair bit less time to complete versus our previous deployment tools, while still providing good flexibility for working in your environment.
Test Site Deployments
The IDM and IDU have both been updated to facilitate new test site deployments. Just like with production sites, you'll be prompted for a testing license key and site ID. You can contact support to get these. The site ID is validated against your license key to ensure it matches. You'll need to specify a database backup as a basis to create your test site - or, if you prefer, you can make a clean installation just like when you deploy a new production site. Your test site will be deployed in accordance with our best practices, ensuring that it doesn't immediately start behaving like your production site and sending notifications for issues when it becomes functional.
Have a look at this article for more information on how this works.
Report Writer
You might recall that we made some major updates to Report Writer with Issuetrak 15.7. You've given us feedback on the changes we made, and we've listened.
We wanted to clarify the difference between merely running a report to obtain data, and running a report with formatting. With Issuetrak 15.9, there are two buttons to run a report when you select a report on the Select Reports screen:
- Run - Fastest - all data, no formatting
- Run with formatting - includes any formatting that is selected for the report
Additionally, the options that appear when you click on the Export button have been updated so that it is clear which option will output results with formatting.
Organizations
Have you ever viewed an issue, and then slowly realized that you needed more information about the organization associated with the issue - information that you know is already stored in that organization's UDFs? It can be a bit annoying to click on the organization, then scroll in the little View Organization pop-up that appears to find what you're looking for, so we set about making a more positive experience for you. We've done a few things with organizations:
- The functionality that discovers open issues for organizations on issue-related screens has been optimized
- Issue Forms have been updated to make it possible for you to add basic organization fields (address, city, IEM domain, etc.) and organization UDFs so that they are automatically populated when you select an organization on an issue
All of the organization info you previously had to hunt for can now be automatically populated on the issue you're looking at once you've selected the organization. How cool is that?
Deployment Tools
- During an upgrade, active but invalid auto-assignment rules would have the "Modified date" and time updated as they are disabled, but would not change the "Modified By" user, resulting in confusion.
Incoming Email
- Incoming Office 365 messages would fail to process if it had a large attachment included.
- GCC High Office 365 tenants would receive an error attempting to connect to their mailbox.
- An invalid "Distributed Transaction Manager (MSDTC) has been disabled" error message would appear processing an incoming message if the sender was associated with an active Identity Management solution, but their user account was not created in Issuetrak.
- Incoming email would not ignore the incoming email box mail address if it was added to the CC line of an email.
- With the Exchange connection type, additional email addresses in the TO line would be ignored, even if "Subscribe additional TO users from the email to the Issue" was enabled.
- Resolved an issue that would prevent the set up of a new Incoming Email mailbox if the "Locations" feature was not enabled in the site.
Issue Submission
- Submitter and Organization fields were being reset if a Template was applied after entering a Submitter or Organization.
Knowledge Base
- An invalid "Something went wrong retrieving Restrictions" error message would appear when editing a Knowledge Base article when the user was not an Admin or Sys Admin.
Mobile View
- Downloading attachments on a mobile device would incorrectly rename the file to include .html.
- Type ahead search would incorrectly appear as a static drop-down when adding billing line items from a mobile device.
- The Attachments pop-up would appear far to the right on mobile devices.
Outgoing Email
- Users would receive an error that an attachment could not be found when performing an Email Issue and the server is not using the default attachment storage location.
Performance
- Added performance enhancements to improve load times for issues that have an assigned Organization with a large number of open issues.
Report Writer
- Scheduled reports would be cut off if a text type UDF contained a non-unicode character.
- Fixed underlying issue causing intermittent errors with Scheduled Reports.
