We've reached a new milestone today: Issuetrak 16.0. It sports brand new license validation, some supporting changes to our deployment tools, Report Writer and Knowledge Base refinements, new functionality for list-type User Defined Fields, and several bug fixes!
Let's discuss our new license validation. What's it do?
- It removes the need for license keys.
- Simplifies new installations, requiring only your Site ID, instead of a combination of license key and Site ID in order to install.
- When you update your license with our sales team, there's no need to copy and paste a license key into the product to get the update. You will just click on a button to apply the changes!
We'll get more into the license validation further down. What else has gone into 16.0?
Very briefly:
- It is now possible to inactivate values for list-type UDFs.
- Issue Hub's user interface and user experience has been further refined.
- Report Writer has received a bump in performance and additional new features.
- The Knowledge Base Categories List screen allows you to jump ahead to a specific page, as well as filter categories that don't match what you're looking for.
Let's get into the specifics in the What's New section!
License Validation
Issuetrak 16.0 introduces a new license validation method, which streamlines installation and the process for updating your license.
License Changes
We've done away with using license keys to install Issuetrak and define the features available to you. In their place, we've implemented a system of validation that is based on Site IDs.
What does this mean for those of you who are upgrading your on-premises instance? If you're upgrading from an old version of Issuetrak that didn't use Site IDs, then you'll be prompted to enter it while you're using the deployment tools.
But what happens if you contact our sales team and have your license adjusted for additional agents or to add a module? You'll simply click an "Update" button on your Issuetrak site to apply the license changes!
License Screen
We've made several changes to this screen:
- All mentions of 'key' have been removed from the License Key screen (including its title!)
- Added an "Update" button to facilitate updating your licensed features if you have recently made an adjustment.
- Added a "Manual Activation" button for situations in which it is not possible for your server to receive license changes automatically.
What if you want to install Issuetrak, or update your license, but your server can't reach our license validation service? Here's an article on our Help Center that will assist you with these scenarios.
FAQ
Have more questions about this new process? We've got a new FAQ article for this release to help explain things.
List User Defined Fields
List UDFs are database table-driven fields that you configure with options that users can then select from when they fill out an issue.
Like other UDFs, list UDFs are great for helping to gather critical information. But what happens when one or several values are no longer applicable? Until now, the only way to deal with that was to either rename the value or delete it. This is a problem for the data integrity of your previous issues that used the now-changed value in that UDF, since the value will no longer be accurate when you look at those issues and report on them with Report Writer.
What we've introduced with 16.0 is a toggle on the configuration side for each individual value in a List UDF. This allows you to inactivate values so they can no longer be seen or selected when creating an issue. It also ensures that issue reporting remains accurate, as inactivated list UDF values will still appear in Report Writer.
Issue Hub
Pagination Functionality
We've added paging buttons to the bottom of the Issue Hub view. Previously, it only had paging buttons at the top, which often required a lengthy scroll to the top of the page in order to choose another page.
UI Adjustment
We've compacted some of the content at the top of the Issue Hub screen so that three buttons all appear on the same row:
- Refresh in x Minutes
- Request Next Issue from Queue
- Issue Hub Settings
Report Writer
Performance Increase
You should see your data appear several seconds sooner when you're running large reports.
Default Sort
Report Writer has been refined so that the default behavior is to sort by the first selected field in ascending order. This default sort is overridden by any sort behavior that you have defined on your report.
Distinct Results
We've added a new toggle to reports: Show Only Distinct Results.
This toggle, which is enabled by default, changes the behavior of report results. When it is enabled, only unique rows in each column are returned as results. This is how Report Writer has always behaved before 16.0 - it just couldn't be toggled.
But what happens if you disable it?
Your report results will no longer incur the slight performance penalty of determining which results are unique, so you should see your report results return a little bit sooner than if you'd left it enabled. On the other hand, your results could contain duplicate rows when the data has a one-to-many relationship. For example, one issue might have many tasks, so a report that provides every task associated with each issue could have a lot of results if you utilize tasks.
Knowledge Base
Category Filtering
We've added a field to filter categories on the KB Quick Search screen. Categories that don't match your field input will disappear as you type.
Category Jump-Ahead
We've made it possible to jump to another page number from the Category List screen.
Billing Module
- The "Work Order" option was automatically available if the Billing Module was enabled. We've fixed this to only be available if the user has either "Can access and maintain Billing Module functions" or "Can enter Line Items from Billing Module in Issues" permissions.
Security Improvement
- Shortly after releasing 15.10, we found a problem with Active Directory Single Sign On relating to an anti-forgery token that we introduced with that release. We quickly released 15.10.1 to address the problem by reverting SSO behavior to the way it was before.
With 16.0, we have re-implemented the anti-forgery token and verified that it works with AD SSO.
Password Self-Service
- Clicking on the "Reset your password" link immediately after logging out of Issuetrak would not work if CSRF protection was enabled and present in the URL.
