Previous Release Notes

What's Zapier and Why is it Our Focus?

Zapier is a company that is known for its eponymously named web application that makes it easy to get web applications to talk to each other.

Zapier users create integrations called zaps between Zapier's procured list of web applications. Where applicable, users must link the account associated with their chosen web application before Zapier can read or write data associated with that application.

In their simplest form, zaps consist of a trigger and an action. When enabled, each zap will check the trigger side for work to be done. While some triggers are event-based and process nearly instantaneously, other triggers are schedule-based and will process every one to fifteen minutes, depending on the support tier your Zapier account is in.

Generally speaking, the list of actions and triggers are interchangeable for many apps. For example, let's say that we have a zap that is triggered by a new user being created, and the action adds a row to a spreadsheet. We could create a zap that does the opposite: When triggered by the addition of a row to a spreadsheet, the zap will create a new user.

Zap triggers can take many forms, but can include:

• The creation of a new organization or user in Issuetrak
   
• Receiving an email containing a specific word or phrase in the subject line or body
   
• Adding a new group membership to a user account
   
• Any of an ever-expanding list of triggers associated with new applications being added to Zapier all the time

Once a zap is triggered, its action counterpart will begin to execute. Actions can take the form of:

• Adding a row to a spreadsheet
   
• Sending a text message to a verified phone number determined by you
   
• Creating a new user in Issuetrak
   
• Any of an ever-expanding list of actions associated with new applications being added to Zapier all the time

Zapier Integration Page

We've added a page dedicated to Zapier to the product. It is accessible by opening the Settings lightbox and clicking Zapier beneath the Integrations heading.

The Zapier page contains:

• An introduction to Zapier
   
• An intuitive way to see what web apps can be integrated into Issuetrak
   
• A direct link to Zapier's site with an expansive reference for integrations between Issuetrak and thousands of other applications
   
• Feel free to explore the available applications on Zapier, as you are not limited to what is displayed on Issuetrak's Zapier page. You are free to be inventive here!

Integrating Issuetrak with Web Apps

We've put together some steps to make it even easier for you to get Issuetrak to talk with other web apps. And as you might guess, this process involves using Zapier!

• Learn how to create a basic integration between Issuetrak and the web app of your choice
   
• Choose from several examples, each with detailed instructions about what information you need and what steps are necessary to create each zap

The "?" Button

Until this release, Issuetrak's help button in the top right corner would take you to a Help Center article based on the context of the page you were viewing. With 15.1, we have changed and expanded the functionality of this button by turning it into a dropdown menu containing the following items:

• Help with this page - The contextualized help functionality was moved to this link.
   
• Issuetrak Help Center - Takes you to the landing page for our Help Center.
   
• Report a Problem* - Opens an Issuetrak Webform (available as an Add-On) that makes it easy to get help from Issuetrak Support with questions or problems.
   
• Contact Issuetrak* - Provides options to contact Support, get Remote Assistance, Sales, Professional Services, or Accounting teams with questions. This area also has links to:
  • Release notes
  • Previous Release Notee
  • Product Road Map
  • Product Feedback
     
• About Issuetrak* - Provides the running version of the current Issuetrak site, a way to contact Issuetrak Support, and a handful of useful links. Useful links lead to:
  • Product Feedback
  • System Requirements
  • Security
  • Blog

* Indicates this is restricted in visibility to Agent users.

The presence of the "?" button in the top menu of Issuetrak is still determined by the System Defaults setting that governs its visibility.

License Key Screen

• On-Premises customers can navigate to this page and check their site's running version of Issuetrak against the latest published version of Issuetrak to see if there is an update available.
   
• Another new item that bears mentioning is within the Running Version area. It is a currently-unpopulated field called Site Id. This will be a unique identifier that will be leveraged for differentiating between multiple different customer sites in future releases.
   
• Additionally, any add-ons that are included in your license will be listed on this page and linked to the relevant Help Center articles to learn more about them.

Deployment Tools

We've made some changes to our deployment tools:

• The Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM) will now allow you to select either a local certificate or to use a Central Certificate Store when you deploy a site with SSL.
   
• The deployment tools now add some disabled-by-default URL rewrite rules that ensure that Chat integration continues to work. You will need to enable these rules after upgrading if you use the Chat add-on.
   
• A new URL rewrite URL rewrite rule relating to the in-product Security page setting "Prevent browsers from caching page data." If you had this setting enabled prior to upgrading to 15.1, then the URL rewrite rule will be enabled. Otherwise, this rule will remain disabled unless you manually enable it.

FIPS, MD5, and Blocked Attachments

Here's the short version:

• We now support FIPS.
   
• Previously-blocked IEM attachments are no longer blocked.
   
• You will need to re-block IEM attachments that you had previously blocked.

Background

Issuetrak's Incoming Email (IEM) feature has included the ability to block attachments for a long time. The underlying mechanism for this involved generating an MD5 hash-based 'signature' for each attachment that was blocked. Future incoming emails are then checked for matching signatures, and the resulting matches would be prevented from being attached to the issue associated with the email in Issuetrak.

Enabling FIPS compliance on a web server that runs Issuetrak would result in a lot of errors in Issuetrak. This is because FIPS compliance requires MD5-based cryptography to be disabled. We now use the SHA256 algorithm to generate signature hashes. And just to make it clear: we only used the MD5 algorithm for IEM's attachment blocking feature.

What Changed?

• We no longer use the MD5 hashing algorithm in the product.
   
• We now support deploying Issuetrak on a web server that has FIPS enabled.
   
• MD5-based blocked attachment signatures are no longer valid, which means that the attachments they correspond to are no longer blocked. You will need to re-block undesired attachments after upgrading to 15.1.

System Requirements

• We have dropped support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012. The minimum supported version to run Issuetrak is now SQL Server 2014.
   
• We have also dropped support for Windows Server 2012 and 2012R2.  The minimum supported version is now Windows Server 2016.

Security

The "Prevent browsers from caching page data" checkbox option on the Security Settings page has been removed and replaced with a link to the Help Center's "Security" article, which provides steps for implementing cache prevention via IIS.

Email

• Workflow notifications used to have a blank message body if Rich Text was turned off
   
• Incoming Email Test Connection feature was giving an error when testing prior to saving the settings for Exchange type mailboxes
   

Surveys

• Attempting to email Individual Survey Responses would give an error if the recipient user had no email address in their account profile
   
• Using the PIPE button when designing surveys would give a 500 error
   
• Surveys with the Respondent Access Level set to "Single Response, Login Required (Not Updateable)" would allow a user to edit their responses. This permitted users to also respond to the survey multiple times
   
• Anonymous surveys will no longer prompt for credentials when the site is using Active Directory Single Sign-On

Working with Issues

• Saving an invalid location to an issue no longer resets the Priority to the site default
   
• Text entered into the Projects field on an issue was ignored when clicking the magnifying glass to search
   
• Issue subtype subscribers added via subtypes 2-4 were not able to access an issue that the issue subtype was selected on
   
• The attachments link in the right quick menu was missing if the issue was in a closed status
   
• Creating a new user through the Add User feature on the issues screen would not show an error if the UserID already existed.
   
• Responsible Department was not requiring the field to be completed if the field was marked as required on the Issue Form
   
• The "Location" field wasn't correctly populating locations from Member Organizations

Additional Fixes

• An asset management search with a set Output Option of "All Fields to Excel" would show an incorrect header format
   
• Active Directory groups starting with "#" would fail to import
   
• When editing Screen Text on an Issue Form, the pop-up would show an incorrect window size. This would make scrolling difficult and hide rich text editing buttons.
   
• Enabling FIPS encryption would make the site inaccessible
   
• Users with the permission "Can add, edit and delete Knowledge Base articles" would not be able to add Knowledge Base articles unless they were System Administrators and "Display Record Delete Options" was set to System Administrators only
   
• Performing a GET operation for "Retrieve an Issue by Issue Number" would return an error in Swagger if the Response Content Type was set to an XML option and contained a list type UDF
   
• Issue Hub refresh timer was not refreshing the Issue Hub when the timer expired
   
• Renamed query filters "Task Assigned By X" to "Task Assigner's X", and "Task Assigned to X" to "Task Assignee by X" to help clarify which user or group has been assigned a task, as well as who is performing the assignment

Secure Google Authentication

Google turned off the ability to perform basic authentication with Gmail accounts at the end of May 2022. This mandated the need to switch to using App Passwords for applications that don't support multifactor authentication.

With this release, we are introducing support for Google's API authorization framework for both incoming and outgoing email. Utilizing this framework will require you to gather some information from your Google account to allow Issuetrak to communicate with Gmail in this manner.

Site ID

The Site ID is a unique identifier for each Issuetrak installation, and it is specific to the site and license key that you are using. While Site ID was merely a footnote in our previous release, it will play an increasing role in on-premise Issuetrak deployments.

You will now be prompted to enter a numeric Site ID when you deploy a new instance of Issuetrak or upgrade an existing instance from a version that didn't require it. If you do not know your Site ID, then please contact Issuetrak Support so that we can provide it to you.

Workflows

Workflows have always been good for bringing automation, responsiveness, and visibility to issues during regular business hours. But until today's release, workflows could not be applied to issues outside of hours of operation, and required manual intervention.

With this release, workflows have been updated so that they work in conjunction with (and therefore outside of) the hours of operation that you have configured in your site. This allows you to have "Business Closed Auto-Response" workflows that will respond to new issues created outside of business hours, during holidays, emergencies, inclement weather, and any other situations in which your office is closed or your team is unable to respond normally.

API v1

We've increased the authorization 'grace time' from 20 seconds to 200 seconds. This is to take into account environments that are less-synchronized with time sources than we formerly allowed.

Incoming Email

The Add Mailbox and Edit Mailbox screens have been updated:

• The "Server Type" option has been changed from a set of radio buttons to a dropdown menu
   
• We've added the "Azure Cloud Type" dropdown menu so that you can specify which O365 environment your mailbox resides in:
  • Public
  • China
  • Germany
  • US Government

User Interface Enhancements

We have been incrementally updating the user interface of Issuetrak over the past couple of years to not only improve the user experience, but to standardize the general look-and-feel. Pop-up windows and the Surveys add-on are the latest 'victims' in our quest to maintain a consistent user experience.

General UI Changes
 

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center.
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist.
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently.
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators better differentiate between settings.
• Each option label has been made bold for greater emphasis.
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been 'bundled' with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule.

SQL Performance Improvements

We've made changes to the backend processing that should result in general improvements to SQL performance.

Incoming Email

We're fixing two bugs in the Incoming Email feature of our product.

Prefixes

The Incoming Email functionality did not accept double-byte characters that are commonly added to emails when they are being forwarded or replied to. Additionally, some email clients would improperly 'translate' these double-byte characters so that they appear as double question marks instead of their original characters. We have adjusted Issuetrak so that both the double question marks and the Chinese characters are processed appropriately.

The list of subject line prefixes that we have added is below:

Cascade Failure to Process Emails

If an O365 mailbox failed to connect or authenticate, then all subsequent mailboxes configured in IEM would not be processed.

Outgoing Email

Outgoing email functionality will now properly establish and terminate a connection for every email communicated to the configured outgoing email server.

Security

We've found and fixed two XSS (Cross Site Scripting) related bugs that could have allowed arbitrary JavaScript code to be executed on an Issuetrak site.

Mobile View

The mobile view of Issuetrak has long remained unchanged, but today's release addresses that. Not only have we refreshed the look of the mobile view, we've also made some subtle changes and additions to functionality.

Add to Home Screen (A2HS)

The mobile view login screen now has added functionality that makes it possible to add your Issuetrak site to your device's home screen. This requires a mobile browser and your site to use HTTPS in order to work.

Identity Management

The mobile view will now work with all forms of identity management, and not just Issuetrak authentication.

Switch to Desktop / Switch to Mobile

We've also included a link on the login screen that allows you to toggle between the desktop and mobile experience of your site.

Restrictions

Have you ever...

• Wanted to find every issue type restriction in your site in just a few clicks?
• Needed to see every task and task group restriction without going through every single one of them?
• Needed to run a report of every visibility restriction configured for your site?

Well, now you can easily do all of those things and more!

We've added a new All Restrictions feature, which provides the ability to display and jump to every visibility restriction in your Issuetrak site from one centralized location. We've even added a new Restrictions data set to the Report Writer.

You can get to the All Restrictions screen by navigating to the settings lightbox, then find and click on Restrictions under Tools.

It's never been easier to view the visibility restrictions in an Issuetrak site! Click here to learn more about this new functionality.

Custom Links

The Custom Links functionality has been improved with the ability to restrict visibility of Custom Links based on group and organization membership.

Custom Links have also been included on the new All Restrictions screen with all of the other visibility restrictions for ease of access and monitoring.

Report Writer

We're also including enhancements and new data sets for the Report Writer:

• Clear indication of who has shared access to queries and reports
• User Type is now a filterable field in the Users-related data sets
• NEW Survey Responses / Issues data set
• NEW Configuration / Tasks data set
• NEW Configuration / Task Groups data set

Incoming Email

If a Google IMAP mailbox failed to connect or authenticate, then all subsequent mailboxes configured in IEM would not be processed.

Outgoing Email

Resolved an issue where OEM would stop working if there was a SQL error processing a message.

Report Writer

• Issue links that were contained within scheduled reports would redirect to the user's issuetrak homepage rather than navigate directly to the issue.
   
• A report exported as a CSV file with "Group by" set to "Issue Next Actioned On" would appear blank.

Search Issues

Removed invalid export options for "Task Assigned to" issue searches.

Security

Resolved two XSS (Cross Site Scripting) related bugs that could have allowed arbitrary JavaScript code to be executed on an Issuetrak site.

Tasks

• Added "Time entered on Task" field to the "Issues/Tasks" and "Issues/Available Tasks" datasets in Report Writer.
   
• Removed VBScript code that caused extremely long page load times in issues with large task groups.

Users and Groups

When merging duplicate users, it was possible for the resulting user to have multiple copies of the same group if both original users were a member of the same group.

User Interface

A 500 error would appear when adding a new submitter on an issue and there were more than 32767 organizations.

Saved Search

An error will appear in the popup window when attempting to run a saved search.

Issuetrak 15.4.1 Patch Release

release date: 8.25.2022

Tasks

On the Submit Issue and Edit Issue screens, if a task was added to the issue as a part of a previous Yes/No/NA task completion, the "Update Substatus to" field would be blank.

Outbound Modern Authentication for Office 365

We added the ability to connect your Office 365 environment using modern authentication in outgoing email.

With this release, we are introducing support for Microsoft Graph API authorization framework for outgoing email. Utilizing this framework will require you to configure settings in your Azure environment to allow Issuetrak to communicate with Office 365. If you have already configured Office 365 to work with incoming email, these settings are already present and will be a selectable option when setting up your outgoing email.

Office 365 Application

To centralize the setup and connection to Office 365 for incoming and outgoing email, we have moved server setting fields from the incoming email setup to be under Settings > Office 365 Applications beneath the Integrations section.

Issue Search

Attempting to retrieve saved searches would result in an error.

TrakAsset

We are introducing a fresh new asset auditing application for PCs called TrakAsset. This application provides the same functionality that TrakPC (and ScanPC) do, but it has none of the baggage that the old codebase comes with, making it easier for us to maintain from each release to the next. Our intent is for you to eventually migrate to TrakAsset, but you can continue to use TrakPC for now, since its functionality is not diminished.

TrakAsset is designed to drop right in place of TrakPC and ScanPC, albeit in slightly different ways. With that in mind, it uses the same configuration switches, can be deployed in the exact same way, and maintains compatibility with the same hardware and software. It also provides expanded functionality in the form of remote PC auditing.

You can find TrakAsset by clicking ScanPC from the left menu in your Issuetrak site. Then under the TrakAsset header, click the For Windows button and click on TrakAsset and Utilities. This will download a zip file containing TrakAsset and a PowerShell script.

The TrakAsset application by itself can be used in the same way as either of the legacy applications, depending on how you run it. The PowerShell script, on the other hand, is designed to facilitate scanning PCs on your domain and import the resulting audits to your Issuetrak instance. We detail how to use both of these items in this article.

Audit Google Managed Devices

We're also providing you with the ability to import audits of devices managed by your Google Workspace. If you already use our Google integration for processing incoming or outgoing email, or for identity management, and your devices are registered with the same workspace, then it will be very easy for you to enable this!

You can select which Google Application to import from, as well as Mobile or ChromeOS devices. Additionally, there is an "Oldest Sync Date" field that will let you determine how far back you can import audits from. By default, this value goes back 6 months from today's date.

You can learn more about this feature in this article.

Incoming Email: Additional "To" Subscribers

Our IEM feature has traditionally ignored all but the first recipient listed in the "To" field when processing emails. With this release, we are including a new configuration option for your mailboxes to allow you to specify whether additional users should be created from the "To" field and subscribed to the issue that is created. This option requires the "Subscribe CC users from the email to the issue" to be selected.

This new option in IEM will appear as:

Enable TO users:     Subscribe additional TO users from the email to the Issue

Sunsetting TrakPC / ScanPC

This release marks the final update for TrakPC. We will no longer provide updates for this app. We therefore strongly recommend that all customers utilizing TrakPC migrate to TrakAsset, which will receive bug fixes and functionality updates as time goes on. By the way, the ScanPC you are familiar with uses the same codebase as TrakPC, so it is also getting sunsetted, too, just in a different way.

The ScanPC that we have had in place is being renamed to "ScanPC (Legacy)" in the product. Alongside ScanPC (Legacy), we are providing a new ScanPC application based on TrakAsset. You can learn how to interact with the new ScanPC application in this article.

In case it isn't clear above, we haven't removed the old TrakPC or ScanPC applications from the application, but you should know that the way to get them is a little different: You will click on Scan PC from the left menu in your Issuetrak site. From there, you will choose your operating system and whether you want ScanPC, ScanPC (Legacy), TrakAsset, or TrakMac.

TrakMac Options

You should be aware that TrakMac is now provided as an executable instead of a zip file, and its configuration options have been changed! Please see our asset auditing article for details.

Audit Management Screen

In previous versions, this was called the Audit Summary screen. It existed only to give you an overview of pending audits compared to overall audits that have been applied to your site. We have renamed the page to Audit Management, added the ability to import device audits from your Google Applications workspace, and merged the functionality of the now-removed Import a single TrakPC file and screen to it.

Updated 'ScanPC On Demand Audits' Screen

We've updated this page so that you can easily download any of the auditing applications we provide. You can obtain:

• ScanPC (Legacy)
• ScanPC (now based on TrakAsset)
• TrakAsset
• TrakMac
• TrakPC

Removed Import a single TrakPC file Screen

As noted earlier, we've removed this page, but merged its functionality into the Audit Management screen.

System Requirements

We've added an Asset Management section to our System Requirements article with the following content:

• Remote Asset Auditing
  • The machine TrakAsset is executed from must have WinRM installed
  • The machine TrakAsset is executed from must have Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell installed
  • The machine TrakAsset is executed from must allow ICMP in order for its connection test function
  • Both the local machine and the remote machine must be on the same domain
  • The account that executes TrakAsset must be a domain administrator and must not have a blank password
     
• TrakMac on Macs with M1 processor
  • The Mac must have Rosetta installed in order for the software to function

Asset Management

• Asset audits performed on a machine using a different time zone than the SQL server resulted in incorrect timestamps when they were applied to the database.
   
• TrakMac was not compatible with machines that utilize the M1 processor.

Incoming Email

• When the incoming email feature encountered an error with an Exchange mailbox, it would prevent subsequent mailboxes from processing.
   
• Some emails would fail to process due to a problem with converting certain characters.
   
• Selecting specific Office 365 Tenant options would have unpredictable results.

Identity Management

• Scheduled user imports for AD Federation Services would fail due to location mapping failure when a claim had null value for any user.
   
• The Test Connection and Test Mappings buttons would return a 404 error for Azure AD connections.

Issue Search

• Locations associated with organizations would not show up in the type-ahead search.
   
• Saved Searches were not saving the Output Option.

Security

• We addressed a security issue related to the My Notifications screen.
   
• We've also provided security improvements for attachment handling and extension handling.
   
• Issuetrak was using CMD to call PowerShell on the web server, which resulted in security software flagging this activity as suspicious.

User Interface

• Using the 'Tab' key to navigate between different fields on an issue form would often not result in the next field being selected for data entry.
   
• The functionality of the "Show Notes" button erroneously also worked for the entire width of the row it was placed on.
   
• The number of attachments was included in the label when a bookmark was created from an issue containing attachments.

Report Writer

The functionality of queries has been rolled into reports, and the whole process of creating a report has been streamlined.

In the past, report creation was effectively divided into two steps: creation of queries, and creation of reports.

Queries let you select the information you wanted through data sets, field selections and filtering. Reports built upon the query you created, and allowed you to group, sort, and filter that data. 15.7 does away with the separate systems, and makes it so that you can do all of the previous stuff on just two screens!

"Hey, what about my queries?" you might ask. Don't worry, we've saved them! When you upgrade your site, all queries get turned into reports so that they don't become orphaned.

And then, of course, there are other things outside of Report Writer that get affected by the removal of queries. Mass Updates, for example, now relies on reports to select the scope of data.

Exporting Reports

You know something else that's pretty great? We've added the ability to export reports straight from the Select Report screen. You don't even have to run the report and see the results first! Simply click Export and then select Excel or CSV output, and you'll download the results in the format you selected.

Filtering

In addition to the changes listed above, we're also adding new functionality to the Report Writer's filtering mechanism: When you select Days, Weeks, Months, or Years, you can select either "Within the Last" or "Within the Next" to perform past and future searches.

User Interface

We've continued our progress on making the user interface consistent across the product. With this release, we have focused on updating the Billing module.

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center.
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist.
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently.
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators better differentiate between settings.
• Each option label has been made bold for greater emphasis.
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been bundled with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule.

Outgoing Email

We've added extensive trace and error logging to Office 365 OEM functionality to make troubleshooting easier.

Report Writer

• The "Queries / Reports" data set has been changed to "Configuration / Reports."
   
• We've capped the "Number of records displayed per page" option on the Report Writer Settings screen at 500 records per page.
   
• Report Writer was not giving expected search results containing ProjectID fields in reports.

API v1

• Issues submitted via API v1 would trigger any configured "Unassigned Issue" notifications even though the issues were auto-assigned immediately after submission.
   
• Issue searches conducted via API v1 would time out if performed against 100+ issues with several notes present.

Asset Management

There was a difference in the software information gathered between ScanPC and ScanPC Legacy.

Dashboard

The error "No Token Found!" would appear when opening issues from the Dashboard on a site with CSRF tokens enabled.

Identity Management

• During LDAP user imports, departments were being removed from user accounts if there were no departments mapped to those users.
   
• An error would appear when trying to add a new AD Federation Services provider with FIPS enabled.

Incoming Email

• IEM tokens for Date UDFs were being mishandled when the date format was set to dd/mm/yyyy.
   
• When a keyword containing an apostrophe was added, IEM would still create an issue containing apostrophes from the source email into the site.
   
• The "Notify on Error" field wasn't saving text entered into it when the mailbox settings were saved.

Organizations

• Some organizations were not being found in the type-ahead search field on the Issue Submit screen.
   
• The functionality of drag-and-drop columns for organization memberships was behaving incorrectly at times when users had at least 201 organization memberships.

Permissions

• It was possible for a user account to be given conflicting permissions when added to different groups.
   
• Users created by IEM were not getting the permissions that they should have, which prevented them from being able to log in.

Report Writer

• Report Writer reports that included the Article Text field would display incorrectly.
   
• All fields would be removed from the "Selected Fields" column if a user clicked the Next button during the construction of a report.
   
• Scheduled reports that should have contained no results would instead show three strange and uninformative characters when the report was in CSV format.
   
• Creating any Report Writer report where the field "First Response Time (Minutes)" is used for grouping would cause a 500 error.

User Interface

• When a user's session timed out while trying to get to a page in Issuetrak, they would be redirected to their Issuetrak homepage instead of the page they were trying to get to when they logged back in.
   
• The Issue Template List would display single quotes twice when they shouldn't have.
   
• An error would appear when trying to add restrictions to an issue template in a site with many thousands of organizations.

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)

Today's release features Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) for Issuetrak-authenticated user accounts, making it easier to keep your Issuetrak instance and data secure.

What is MFA?

MFA makes it necessary for you to enter your usual password, as well as a secondary passcode to successfully authenticate to Issuetrak. MFA can take the form of either a constantly-rotating Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) 6-digit code or an email containing a randomly-generated one-time password that is sent to you whenever you enter your credentials into Issuetrak.

You're probably already using app-based TOTP for other services. Some examples of authentication apps that can be used with MFA include:

• Google Authenticator
• Authy
• Duo

Once you've registered your device, Issuetrak will generate a batch of one-time-use backup codes that you can use if you have lost or do not currently have access to your MFA device. Please take note of these codes when they are generated, as they won't be displayed again! If you lose these codes, you will need to remove your device as a registered authentication method in Issuetrak, then re-add it to have a new batch of codes generated.

Another method of MFA that we support is emailing one-time passcodes to users when they enter their Issuetrak credentials. This option is only available for:

• User accounts with a valid email address populated
• Sites with Outgoing Email enabled and properly configured

Note that you can only enable one MFA method for each user account. You can't use both!

Why is MFA important?

In a word: security. Traditionally, signing into Issuetrak has just required you to know your username and password. The introduction of MFA adds the requirement of also having a thing in your possession: A device that is registered with your Issuetrak instance, or the email address associated with your Issuetrak user account. You must use one of these methods in conjunction with your Issuetrak credentials in order to successfully authenticate. MFA makes it so that an attacker doesn't immediately gain access to Issuetrak if your password is compromised.

Yeah, but isn't this feature rendered moot if users don't enable it?

Yep! That's why we've made it possible for you (the administrator) to require MFA for all Issuetrak-authenticated user accounts from the Password Policy screen. Users will then need to go to the My Settings screen to configure MFA for their account.

If you choose to enable required MFA, then the email method will be required by default. Once this is configured, you can choose to switch to app-based TOTP.

Remember Me for 30 Days

During the process of authenticating to Issuetrak via MFA, you can check the box on the login screen to "Remember Me for 30 Days" to avoid having to enter an MFA code for 30 days.

Close User's Session

We've also added the ability to end user sessions, either for a specific user, or for all user accounts (including yours!) This effectively kicks user(s) out of the site and forces their browser to the login screen.

Why might you want to do this?

We can envision a variety of scenarios:

• Security breach
• Site maintenance
• Terminated user

Report Writer

• We've increased the ASP script timeout to 3600 seconds for sites that had trouble producing large numbers of exported results before the timeout was reached.
   
• Scheduled reports that are configured to send CSV results would instead not attach the CSV at all.

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.

Knowledge Base

Subscribe to Knowledge Base Articles

Users will now have the ability to subscribe to Knowledge Base articles in order to receive notifications from any updates to the subscribed article.

One-Click Archive

Users with the permissions Sys Admin or Can access and maintain Administration functions will now have a new option for "Archive" in the right quick menu. When viewing or editing a Knowledge Base article, clicking on this link will prompt for confirmation to archive the selected article.

If confirmed, the following changes will be made to the article:

• The prefix "ARCHIVE - " will be added to the article title.
• The article will be set to "Private".
• The article category will be changed to "Archive", "Archived", or "Archives" if any of these categories already exist in your site. If none of the above already exist, then a new "Archive" category will be created and the article will be set to this category.
• Any sub-categories on the article will be removed.

Pagination

The list of all KB articles is now paginated. This should vastly improve the performance for sites that have hundreds or even thousands of KB articles!

Card-based UI Layout

You'll notice that the Knowledge Base UI has largely been changed to a card-based layout, which makes it much easier to visually separate article content from article metadata on the same screen. We also think that this UI change is a bit more favorable than the old view when you look at the Categories List screen.

Quick Search

The Knowledge Base's quick search function is now a combined article number and text search box.

Issues

You might recall we have the ability to link a Knowledge Base article to an issue for easy referrence. Previously this link would only have the article number for the article in question. We have added the article title to the field so both the article number and the article title are visible from the issue.

Knowledge Base

KB article links that are generated in Issuetrak were formerly generated as "KB Article #" format.

Going forward, KB article links generated in Issuetrak will be displayed as: "Article #: Title", which will make it easier to refer back to the article in question.

Software Dependencies

We've updated some of the underlying software dependencies that help Issuetrak run:

• jQuery

Incoming Email

Issuetrak instances that used Office365 mailboxes for incoming email were processing the newest messages in the mailbox first, rather than the oldest.

Knowledge Base

Sites with a very large number of articles or categories would potentially experience performance delays when attempting to list all articles or categories from their associated List pages. We have added paging to the Article List and the Category List screens so that the product does not attempt to compile a complete list on a single page. 

Projects

Attempting to sort projects by the "Required By" date would sort incorrectly.

Scheduled Reports

Scheduled reports that were delivered in Excel format were including HTML in the cells as text.

Security

It was possible under certain circumstances for a bad actor to perform a reverse tabnapping on an Issuetrak site.

Issuetrak 15.10.1 Patch Release

release date: 4.18.2023

Active Directory (LDAP) SSO

Users attempting to log into Issuetrak using Active Directory (LDAP) SSO would get a 500 error.

Settings Lightbox

As an Administrator, you'll notice that clicking the gear icon in the upper right corner will bring up a new Settings Lightbox! This is a consolidated location for quickly navigating to the various configuration settings in Issuetrak. 
 

Intuitive Links

You might see that some of your links are italicized in the lightbox. This is because the feature is available but currently disabled for your site. Just click on the italicized link to get exactly to the place where you can activate it. Additionally, if you hover over the italicized links, you will find that there is an information icon that will explain that the feature is disabled and that you can click on it to find the place where you can enable it. 

Some features on this screen can appear both italicized and greyed out. These are features that are disabled and not included with your instance's current Issuetrak license key. Give your account manager a call if you would like to try out the feature you're currently missing out on!

Responsive

The lightbox is responsive to changes in your screen resolution and window size, and will automatically adjust to fit your browser's available screen real estate.

Search Settings

You'll also notice that there is a "Search Settings" field in the upper right of the lightbox. This allows you to find a feature by name much more quickly than if you are just visually scanning for it. 

Static Left Menu

If you've been using Issuetrak for any length of time, you know that it's always had a menu on the lefthand side, which provided different menu options depending on what page you're on within the product. As of Issuetrak 14, it has been completely replaced with a static menu that will always display the same links. The new menu is collapsible and responsive to changes in browser window size.

Bookmarks

We've also added the ability for you to bookmark pages in your site and have your bookmarks always appear on the left menu where you can always get to them with a single click! You can find the Bookmark flag next to the title header of just about every page in the product. Also note that the Bookmarks menu section is resizable and that you can re-arrange your bookmarks by clicking and dragging. 

Collapsible

This new menu is collapsible via a button at the bottom, allowing you to reallocate your valuable screen real estate to viewing the content of Issues and other items in Issuetrak. 

Custom Links

The Menu Options screen that you would have previously used to add any link to the left-hand menu has been renamed to Custom Links. 

Right Context Menu

We've added a right-hand context menu that is often visible along the right-hand side in Issuetrak. It contains links that apply to the current page you are on.

Related Links

The context menu contains a "Related Links" section (if applicable to the current page) that will contain links that are related to the area of the product that you're working in. 

Responsive

The whole menu can be collapsed or expanded using the toggle at the bottom of it and is responsive to changes in browser window size.

Logos

If you are upgrading to Issuetrak 14 and you have set your own logos on the Site Appearance screen, you should be aware of a few things:

Logo Script

If you are an on-premises customer, you must run a script included with the Issuetrak 14 distribution either before or after the upgrade in order for your logos to appear. The script will copy the logos you are currently using to the other places in the product where logos have been implemented. We've published a new Support KB article with more detail about this. 

Scaling / Transformation

Logo images in the product are locked to a certain size and aspect ratio as described below for proper display purposes.

Top Left Logo:  Maximum height of 20 pixels / No maximum width
Menu Logo:  Maximum height of 45 pixels / Width of 200 pixels

New Image Formats Supported

We now support SVG and WEBP image formats.

System Requirements

Your server environment (Web and SQL) must now have .NET Framework 4.7.2 or greater installed in order to run Issuetrak 14.

Site Title

It is no longer possible to use HTML to customize the site title. 

If you currently use HTML to customize your Site Title, then it will be necessary to remove the HTML after the upgrade to avoid having its code displayed alongside the normal site title text. 

Home

The "Home" menu along the top bar no longer exists. You can find its former links in the left menu.

Administration

The "Administration" menu along the top bar no longer exists. You can find its former links in the Settings Lightbox.

Modules

The "Modules" menu along the top bar no longer exists. You can find its former links in the Settings Lightbox.

Site Version

Previous versions of Issuetrak had a ribbon at the bottom of every page that would display the site's version. We have removed this in Issuetrak 14.

You can now find your site version by clicking on your username in the upper right corner. The version will appear at the bottom, and more detailed information will appear when you hover over it. 

Issue Hub

We've changed the name of the Issue Hub Administration screen to Issue Hub Settings.

TrakPC Audit

The Asset Management screen that used to be labeled as TrakPC Audit on the old left menu is now referred to as Asset Audits from the Settings Lightbox under Asset Management. 

Dashboard Settings

Dashboard Settings used to be an option on the old left menu. We have decided to move Dashboard Settings to the Dashboard screen itself as a link in the upper right area. 

My Settings

My Settings used to be an option on the old left menu. You can now access it from your username in the upper right of Issuetrak, next to the gear icon.

Change Password

Change Password, when Password Self Service was enabled, used to be an option on the old left menu. You can now access it from your username in the upper right of Issuetrak, next to the gear icon.

Log Out

Log Out used to be an option in the Home menu at the top left. You can now access it from your username in the upper right of Issuetrak, next to the gear icon.

Billing User Defined Fields (UDFs)

For those of you that use the Billing Module: "Billing UDFs" have been renamed to "Billing Optional Fields".

Email Notifications

There used to be an Email Notifications option in the former Administration menu. We've renamed it to Issue Notifications, and you can now find it in the Settings Lightbox. 

We've also removed the 'landing page' that you would first see when clicking on this setting in previous versions. 

Search Users

Users would see an error when trying to search users via Pop_IssueSearchUsers.asp.

New Caller

Adding a new caller through an issue submit screen would fail on any site that did not have Identity Management enabled.

Dark Mode

If you have a sensitivity to bright colors dominating your screen or you tend to use your devices in a dark room, then Dark Mode is for you.

You can enable Dark Mode after upgrading by logging in, clicking on your username in the upper right corner, and then choosing Enable Dark Mode.

Your eyes will thank you!

Office 365 Integration for Incoming Email

We've noticed increasing usage of Office 365 for processing Incoming Email in Issuetrak.  Although Office 365 has its own protocol for retrieving email, Issuetrak has only provided POP3, IMAP and Exchange protocols to use with IEM.

Beginning with 14.1, you now have an option for Office 365 so that you can use its native protocol with Issuetrak. This will allow you to convert your current IEM mailboxes to use Office 365 integration, which offers several strengths over the other available protocols.

Benefits include:

• Increased performance
• Increased security
• Improved flexibility
• Modern authentication

Click-to-Dial Links

We have added the ability to click phone numbers in our product, and have them start your PC's VoIP software of choice to initiate phone calls. This is a very convenient feature to have for anyone who regularly uses VoIP, as it eliminates the need to manually dial a number in most situations!

Last Login Attempt

The "Last Login Attempt" link that was on the Dashboard screen is now only visible on the My Settings screen.

Printing Issues

Only the first page was printed when attempting to print an issue that should have resulted in multiple pages.

Search Results

Search results would display in a "squashed" table under certain circumstances, resulting in a poor user experience with reading search results.

Custom Links

Custom links weren't being sorted alphabetically when they had the same display order.

Note Sprawl

It was possible for an issue containing a large amount of text in the description or notes to force a user to scroll to the right to view all of the notes.

Organizations

For Issuetrak's entire product history, organizations have been at the top of the visibility hierarchy for issues. Users were constrained to membership in a single organization, with optional 'Additional Organizations' that could be added to increase issue visibility. This is no longer the case. Going forward, users will now have membership in a primary organization, as well as additional membership in as many other organizations as the administrators desire. 

Let's go over areas of the product that are affected by the new organization functionality.

Active Directory

Active Directory will continue to create new users based on the organization they are mapped to. Updating users is a bit more complicated. 

Active Directory Federation Services

AD FS will continue to create new users based on the organization they are mapped to.  

API

The API has been updated with functionality that takes into account a user's current organization membership when their membership is being altered via the API. A given user's membership status prior to API calls being used will affect how the API call will be interpreted by the product.

Incoming Email

Incoming Email (IEM) processing will function as expected with the new functionality with regard to new user creation via templates: If a user template with multiple organization memberships is selected, then all users created via that template will have the same organization memberships.

Report Writer

We've added a new Report Writer dataset: Users / Organization Memberships.

User Administrator

• The permission has been changed from "Can access and maintain users in this user's organization and its Additional Organizations" to "Can access and maintain users in this user's organizations"
• User Administrators with membership in multiple organizations are able to administer Users that have primary membership in the same organizations.

User Account Merge

When merging user accounts, the secondary account's organization memberships will be added to the primary account.

User Interface

• The organization field now uses more intelligent filtering with the type-ahead feature:  Instead of listing matches that start with the letters that are typed in, the field will now list matches that contain the sequence of letters that are typed in. This should make it considerably quicker and easier to find organizations in many scenarios, such as when submitting and searching for issues. It is now possible to choose from multiple organizations for the same user on an issue. 
   
• It is possible to bulk add users to an organization.
   
• We've included an organization membership click-and-drag interface for selecting what organizations a user account should have membership in. This interface includes...
   
  • Three buttons: 
    • The "Star" button designates the primary organization for this user
    • The "People" button determines whether this user can list users associated with that organization when viewing user-related dropdowns
    • The "Pencil" button determines whether they can edit issues for this organization (subject to Can Edit Issues permission). 
       
  • The ability to bulk add membership of up to 100 organizations at a time to a user account, with no limit on the total number of organization memberships that can be added.
     
  • When attempting to delete an organization, the administrator is confronted with a screen demanding that they select the new primary organization for all users that would be orphaned by its deletion.
     
  • The organizations in this loghtbox can be filtered using the field at the top.

Visibility Control

• If a user's primary organization is designated as "Non-Internal", then they are able to view all issues depending on permissions and department visibility settings. This functionality is unchanged from previous releases.
   
• In addition to above, if a user's primary organization is set to "Internal", then they can view issues submitted for their organization memberships (subject to whether they have "Can view issues submitted by other users" permission).

Search Box

We've enlarged the search box and the text it contains in the upper righthand area to improve the user experience.

Permissions

We've changed the verbiage for the permission "Can access and maintain Users in this User's organization and its Additional organizations" to "Can access and maintain users in this user's organizations".

Next Action

The Next Action field's type-ahead functionality was taking a long time to find and display users.

Persistent Issue Buttons

The page title, issue number, and buttons at the top of the following screens will now stay in place when you scroll:

• Submit Issue
• Clone Issue
• View Issue
• Edit Issue/Edit Note
• Close issue

My Notifications

Users can now see notifications sent to them in the past 7 days by clicking on their profile in the upper right corner and then My Notifications.

Dashboard

Links on the Dashboard will now open a new browser tab.

Asset Management

We've added an "Asset Type" column to the Asset Management Module's Asset Availability screen.

Attachments

Issues containing attachments will now display who uploaded each attachment. 

Email Notifications

When Email to Initiator is active, the Issue Default Email Notification List screen will display the following message beneath the table: "Email to Initiator is active - any action taken on an issue will result in an email notification being sent to the action's initiator."

Export to Excel

• We've updated the Billing Module's Products / Services List screen so that an Active column is included when the displayed information is exported to Excel. 
   
• We've updated the Organizations List screen so that the IEM Email Domain is included when the displayed information is exported to Excel.

Miscellaneous

We've removed the product's dependency on fonts hosted by Google. This can speed up page loading and rendering times for Issuetrak in some environments.

Outgoing Email

We've added reply separation text to the "Email Issue" functionality to prevent private notes from appearing in users' replies to these emails under certain circumstances.

Report Writer

• The filename for exported Report Writer reports and queries will now be labeled according to the name of the originating report or query, rather than 'report.xlsx'.
   
• Scheduled Reports will trigger a more useful error notification if a problem is encountered with generating or sending a report. 
   
• We've added the following new fields to the Issues / Users dataset in Report Writer:
   
  • Assigned To Inactive
  • Closed By Inactive
  • Entered By Inactive
  • Last Activity By Inactive
  • Next Action Inactive
  • Reopened By Inactive
  • Submitted By Inactive

User Interface

• The First Call Resolution field is now available on the Edit Issue screen, rather than only on the Close Issue screen.
   
• We've added search buttons to the top of the Search Users screen, as it previously only had buttons at the bottom.
   
• We've added the time to the "Opened" and "Last Activity" columns in Issue Hub, as it previously only displayed the date.
   
• We've added the build number to the end of the Issuetrak version that is displayed on the About screen.

Accessibility

We've made certain dropdown buttons more friendly for screen reading software. 

Asset Management

Users with a single organization membership and permission to view and select assets were unable to select assets on an issue submit screen. 

Attachments
 

• Using the Submit and Close button in conjunction with "Include Attachments" would result in the user seeing a 500 error. 
   
• If the user clicked the paper clip icon and then tried to drag and drop an attachment to the "Drop files here to upload an attachment" area, the browser would try to open the file instead of attaching it.

Departments

Users in an internal-only department were able to see issues from other departments.

Issue Hub

It was not possible to save an Issue Hub view that was filtered by Responsible Department.

Issue Search

When a saved search included a list user-defined field as a filter, subsequent runs of the saved search would not be filtered by that UDF.

Locations

Issues that include the Location field would not populate the Location for callers that had a Location associated with their accounts. 

Miscellaneous

• When a saved search included a list user-defined field as a filter, subsequent runs of the saved search would not be filtered by that UDF.
   
• Sites with a great quantity (many tens of thousands) of users and dozens of non-internal organizations would experience long load times and sometimes 500 errors when trying to view issues. 

Next Action

Users would experience a 500 error when attempting to find eligible users to assign an issue's Next Action. 

Organizations

• Administrators (and User Administrators) would experience a 500 error when attempting to display the organization memberships of a user with a very high number (thousands) of memberships. 
   
• New issues would not populate the organization when the New Caller Default Template was set.

Outgoing Email

The "Email Article" functionality of the Knowledge Base was truncating article content without providing notification that it was doing so.

Projects

• It was possible for users without permission to see project information to see that information if they did a detailed export via an issue search.
   
• Reminders were not working for Target Date fields on projects.

Quick Picks

The Quick Pick List All screen would display certain special characters incorrectly.

Report Writer

• When a Report Writer query was filtered by a user-defined field (UDF) list, subsequent runs of the query would not be filtered by that UDF.
   

• Queries utilizing the Issues / Users dataset and any of the following fields would return a 500 error: 

  • Next Action Organization
  • Reopened By Organization
  • Submitted By Organization

Security

• CSRF tokens, when enabled, were not being added to issue notifications when HTML was turned off for outgoing email.
   
• CSRF tokens, when enabled, were not being included in Scheduled Reports when they were sent out in HTML format.

Special Function Table

The Special Function Table fields would accept invalid characters, resulting in errors when subsequently trying to view the contents of those fields.

Open Authorization (Oauth) and OpenID Connect (OIDC)

Open Authorization (Oauth) and OpenID Connect (OIDC) support has been added to the product. 

What does this mean?  This means that you can configure your Issuetrak instance to allow you to securely authenticate using credentials you may already be using elsewhere. If you've ever seen a site's login screen that uses "Sign In With Google" or "Sign In With Twitter", etc., then that is what we're talking about.

Is that safe for us to do?  Just like with Active Directory (with SSL), Active Directory Federation Services, and Azure AD, the credentials you use with these other providers are never stored in the Issuetrak database, nor are they communicated without your provider's SSL encryption. Listed below are a few authentication providers that you can configure with Issuetrak. You'll see some pretty familiar names!

• Google*
• OKTA*
• OneLogin*
• Amazon Incognito
• Apple
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Microsoft
• Twitter
• Yahoo
• And more!

* Configuration template included in Issuetrak

Organizations

We have added filtering to the Membership Organizations box, as well as paging to both "Available" and "Membership" Organization lists.

Report Writer

We've added the "User Defined Fields" data set to the Report Writer.

Removal of ASPSmartUpload.dll

This DLL is a 32-bit dependency that has long been associated with all of the areas of our product that deal with attachments. Its removal is significant, as Issuetrak is no longer required to have 32-bit components. It has given us room to adjust and improve the rest of the product to do things we couldn't before. The immediate changes we're making with this release have to do with the Deployment Tools and Asset Management:

The Deployment Tools will...

• ...no longer stop application pools during upgrades.
   
• ...no longer deploy a 32-bit "Issuetrak Classic" application pool upon new installation of the product.
   
• ...redirect users to a "Your site is currently being upgraded" page during upgrade downtime (subject to the installation of the HTTP Redirection module for IIS). 
   
• ...now deploy a single 64-bit "Issuetrak Main" application pool for both the MVC and Classic applications to reside in.

Asset Management

• The product behavior has been changed so that manually-imported TrakPC XML files are deleted after processing. This is a change of behavior, wherein we previously retained XML files on the web server.
  • This will happen regardless of whether the audit import succeeded. 
  • TrakPC XML files that were residing in the Issuetrak web folder prior to upgrade will remain untouched.

User Interface

Issues opened from a Dashboard Issue list will now open in a new tab instead of the existing window. 

Add New Caller

• The "Can Log In" checkbox was still checked on the Add New Caller pop-up when "Can Log In" was unchecked for new users on the System Defaults page. 
   
• Incorrect results were displaying for the Add New Caller popup after selecting an Organization on the Submit Issue screen. 
   
• The Time Zone field was not pre-populating on the Add New Caller pop-up for the Submit Issue Screen.
   
• The following fields were not pre-populating on the Add New Caller pop-up for the Submit Issue Screen when the fields already had a value entered:
   
  • Last Name
  • Display Name
  • Organization

Locations

The "Location" field wasn't correctly filtering the type-ahead results when the user performing the action was in an internal organization and a Location in the same organization. 

Organizations

Customers hosting Issuetrak with a version of SQL Server prior to 2016 were unable to update any user's organization from the Edit User Profile screen, as no organizations would be listed. 

Tasks

When completing a task, the user would experience a refresh of the current issue's screen that did not take them back to the Task Manager section.

Feature Renaming

In addition to the table displayed above, we've made some other related changes:

• We've made it possible to set a custom label for Organizations via the System Defaults screen.
   
• We've made it possible to set a custom label for the Submitter issue role via the System Defaults screen.
   
• The "Workflows" section of every page displaying User Permissions has been renamed to "Tasks".
   
• The "Recurring Issues" scheduled task on the Web server now gets deployed with the label "Scheduled Issues".

Add New Caller

• Information wasn't populating correctly on the Add New Caller screen.
   
• Users added via the Add New Caller screen weren't being added to groups specified for the user template.

Calendar

The "Out of Office" type-ahead wasn't functioning.

Incoming Email

Attachments originating from Incoming Email mailboxes that used the Office365 connection type were not getting an EML extension applied. 

Knowledge Base

Users without any permissions were able to add attachments to any KB article in a site.  Going forward, users will be required to have the "Can add edit and delete Knowledge Base Articles" permission to do this. 

Projects

• Issue templates would pre-populate a dash in the Projects field when no value was specified, forcing users to clear the pre-populated value before searching.
   
• No results would display when entering text into the Projects field and clicking Next from the Submit Issue screen. 

Report Writer

• Queries containing a comma in the title would be saved without a file extension when being exported to Excel.
   
• It wasn't possible to create a new scheduled report with a monthly frequency.

ScanPC

The ScanPC executable included in the distribution wasn't signed, resulting in false positives from antivirus software.

Scheduled Reports

Non-Sys Admins would receive an error when attempting to access the list of Scheduled Reports.

Surveys

Users without the ability to log into Issuetrak would receive survey invitations with an issue link. 

Integrated Security

We've added support for Integrated Security because it allows additional flexibility to deploy the product in diverse and complicated environments that are heavily dependent on domain authentication. Additionally, the use of Integrated Security conforms to best practices for Windows domain authentication and integration.

Integrated Security allows for an Issuetrak site to be deployed and run under the authority of a specific Windows user (specified during the deployment of the site).

Upgrading a site to implement Integrated Security will impact the following areas: 

• The site will be placed in an IIS application pool that is running under the authority of the Integrated Security user.
   
• Connection strings for MVC, API, and Classic sites only reference a specific Windows account instead of SQL credentials.
   
• Windows Scheduled Tasks and Services are deployed under the authority of the specified Integrated Security user.
   
• Web folder permissions are set to the Integrated Security user.

Identity Management

Identity Management is a critical component of our product because so many people rely on it to access their Issuetrak sites. We are always trying to find new ways to improve this functionality, and today's release incorporates our latest efforts.

• Identity Management now checks to see if an account that has just authenticated via a third-party (AD Federation Services, Azure AD, OIDC / OpenID Connect) provider matches an existing Issuetrak-authenticated user account, rather than creating a duplicate account.
   
• Identity Management now pulls user SID information from Azure and AD Federation Services.
   
• The claims matching process is no longer case-sensitive.
   
• Identity Management now includes "Authentication Source" and "Authentication User Id" fields for third-party authenticated accounts.

Rich Text Editor

We've made minor improvements to the software underlying the Rich Text Editor functionality.

TrakPC and ScanPC

We've updated TrakPC and ScanPC so that they work with the other changes we've made in the product.

Permissions

It is now possible to remove the "Projects" menu option for users and groups that already had it.

TrakPC

TrakPC audits now contain the correct User ID when the signed-in user was authenticated to Issuetrak via Azure AD.

User Permissions

We've substantially improved the underlying code for user permissions, but its functionality remains exactly the same.

We've completely removed the existing schema for UserAttributes from the database, which relied on a lookup table to determine user permissions. This was slow and inefficient. In its place we have implemented some bitwise wizardry in a new table called UserPermissions so that user permissions are instead calculated using inexpensive server-side processing based upon the new simplified method of storing bitwise permissions for each user.

The end result is snappier loading times all over the product. What's not to like about that?

Report Writer

We've added a new dataset for "Survey Responses" in the Report Writer. 

User Interface Enhancements

The look and feel of Issuetrak's Asset Management module has been standardized and vastly improved. This provides a better overall experience for administrators when it is necessary to change important settings in the product, or for new customers setting up Issuetrak for the first time. 

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center.
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist.
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently.
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators to better differentiate between settings.
• Each option label has been made bold for better emphasis.
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been "bundled" with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule.

Additionally, care has been taken to ensure that these changes render correctly in all of the supported browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Edge

Accessibility

We have changed the name of the menu along the righthand side of Issuetrak from "Context Menu" to "Quick Menu."  

This was originally going to go into the "What's Fixed" section, but it is significant enough that we are putting it here instead.

When we created and named the "Context Menu" for Issuetrak 14.0, we had not taken into account that this is also the name that screen reading software looks for and parses to assist users with visual impairments with navigating websites.

Additionally, we have added hotkeys to assist visually impaired users with quickly navigating Issuetrak:  

• ALT+M will jump to the "New Issue" button at the top of the left menu.
• ALT+C will take you to the first option at the top of the Quick Menu.

Our documentation referring to the menu name in the Help Center will be adjusted to reflect this change in Q1 2022. 

Software Dependencies

We've updated some of the underlying software dependencies that help Issuetrak run:

• jQuery
• RequireJS
• LoDash

Asset Management

• It was not possible to select assets to merge if they were inactive.
   
• The "Modified By" field for an asset would display as "Unknown" after user accounts relating to the asset were merged and the secondary account had shown in that asset's "Modified By" field. 

Groups

Groups containing an ampersand (&) were failing to appear in the type-ahead lookup when trying to find the group in the "Assigned To" field.

Incoming Email

The Incoming Email processor wasn't processing HTML tables correctly, which resulted in HTML tables not getting added to the issue notes corresponding to each email. 

Issue Search

Creating a group or user with the name of any of the initial email distribution/subscription lists created in the product would give that user (or any user that is in that group) full visibility of all issues in a site as though they had that given role on the issue.

Outgoing Email

• Users that lacked the proper permission to request a self-service password reset would receive an email informing them of their lack of permission when they requested a self-service password reset. This was correct behavior, but the email contained a grammatical error that we have corrected in this release.
   
• Email notifications were not being sent to subscribers on submit events.

Printing

Printing from Firefox would result in excessive amounts of page breaks, which caused a lot of blank space (and wasted paper).

Solutions

The browser would not automatically jump to the "Solution" section when it was present on the Issue Close screen. 

User Defined Fields

It was not possible to add or edit a user-type UDF if Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) was enabled.

Issuetrak 14.7.1 Patch Release

release date: 1.25.2022

Auto Assignment Rules

• When upgrading to 14.7,  currently active Auto Assignments were being disabled.
   
• Auto Assignment rules were not assigning issues when the Submitter field was left blank.

Identity Management

Active Directory (LDAP) users would receive errors on login if they were mapped to more than one set of user attributes.

Report Writer

• When editing Report Writer queries using the Survey Responses dataset, the Available and Selected columns were missing all the data.
   
• Scheduled report data would show no results if certain Sys Admin accounts in a site were inactive.
   
• Queries and reports exported to .CSV returned no data.

Security

We've made several changes to how the web server portion of Issuetrak is deployed to improve security:

• The "Feature-Policy" HTTP header has been removed from the web server configuration settings and replaced with "Permissions-Policy", but the functionality of the new HTTP header is the same as the old one. That is, it will continue to be used to explicitly define which browser functions the Issuetrak site uses (and which features it does not).
   
• The "Expect-CT" HTTP header has been added to the web server configuration, which instructs browsers to perform some additional certificate verification on Issuetrak sites to create an added layer of security.
   
• The "Content-Security-Policy" HTTP header has been updated to include the string object-src 'none'
   
• We have removed most instances of eval() from our JavaScript code.

User Interface

• We've added placeholder text to date fields on various screens to give users an expectation of what information should be entered in.
   
• The Search Issues screen has been updated so that there is placeholder text "results by" that accompanies the Organization, Department, and Location fields, with the purpose of allowing the user to select how the search results will be sorted.
   
• The "Article Number" text for knowledge base articles has been hyperlinked so that you can more easily navigate to the articles they represent.

Issue Hub

We've reworked some of the underlying code for Issue Hub to improve performance. Prior to this release, Issue Hub would re-request the data for all views whenever you clicked on a different view. This was slow and inefficient.

Issue Hub will no longer refresh the data for all views when you click on a view, and will instead refresh just the data within the view you clicked on.

User Interface

Wait...didn't we just discuss changes to the User Interface in the section above?

Yes. Yes, we did. But we have also removed some things from the UI, and it makes sense to call them out separately from the new stuff that's gone into this release. Of note:

• We've removed all appearances of "* Required" screen text from the product wherever fields were editable, as it wasn't very helpful.
   
• We've removed text from Group-related screens that erroneously told the user that the "Email" and "Mobile/SMS Email" fields are not used for notification functionality.
   
• We've changed the "Preview" hyperlink into a button on the Edit Issue Forms screen.

Active Directory

Users with a "State" value longer than 20 characters in AD were unable to sign into Issuetrak.

API

It wasn't possible to next action users even if they had "Next Action" permission on a site with a Next Action grandfathered license key via the API.

Global Issues

Notes that were added to a Global Issue when a linked issue was submitted were including HTML tags.

Notifications

Users were not being sent notifications when an issue was escalated and they were members of a group that was in the Subscribers list for the location the issue was submitted for.

Organizations

Users were unable to change the organization from their primary organization on a scheduled issue if they did not have permission to submit on behalf of other users.

Outgoing Email

Tasks that were being added via an Issue Template that had an assignee would cause problems for the application when it attempted to generate emails.

Search Issues

Users were unable to find all issues submitted by them under a specific organization.

User Interface

The "Add Issue Form Text" pop-up for the Add/Edit Issue Forms screens was rendering incorrectly, resulting in the "Add" button rendering outside of the accessible portion of the pop-up.

API v2 - Overview

We can imagine a lot of questions about our new API:

"Why did you make a new API? What's noteworthy about API v2? What makes it different from the old API? How do I install API v2?"

Let's dig in and get some answers!

We made API v2 because we want to give you even greater value in the product that already makes your job easier. With API v2, you and your developers will have an enhanced capability to interact with the data in your Issuetrak site and integrate it with your own custom applications.

API v2 has a bunch of advantages over the old API, including but not limited to:

• User-bound token authentication - Provides simple authentication while still observing the boundaries of user permissions for each API call.
   
• Better logging capabilities - Every API response contains a Trace ID, which enables you to check the server logs for this unique identifier if you encounter unexpected problems with your code.
   
• Built-in rate limiting facilities - Protects your site from attacks, overly-ambitious API requests, and malfunctioning applications.

Installing API v2 is a similar process to installing the previous API: You will simply select it when you're installing or upgrading your Issuetrak site with the IDM, or add the relevant JSON parameters before deploying with the IDU.

You should know that you can find detailed information about development-level interactions with API v2 by going to https://api.issuetrak.com.

And for those of you that are wondering about the "old" API: The previous API currently remains supported, functional, and unchanged.

API v2 - Deployment

You'll need to make sure that your web server has Microsoft's .NET 6.0 Hosting Bundle installed (which requires a reboot) prior to deploying and using API v2.

API v2 is deployed independently of the previous API, and uses its own application pool in IIS.

Additionally, some minor changes have been made to the IDM so that customers can install API v2, but these changes do not diverge significantly from installing the previous iteration of the API.

Please see the following articles for assistance with deploying via the IDM:

• How to Install Issuetrak Using the Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM)
• How to Perform an Upgrade Using the Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM)

Once deployed, enabling API v2 is as simple as activating any other feature in the Issuetrak interface:

1. With a sys admin account, open the Settings lightbox by clicking the gear icon in the upper right corner.
2. Under Integrations, click API v2.
3. Check the box next to "Enable API v2".
4. Click Update.

You can now navigate to the Swagger interface for API v2 by opening the Settings lightbox again and clicking API v2 under Integrations.

API v2 - Authentication

API v2 relies upon tokens to provide authentication. Tokens are issued through the Issuetrak user interface.

Tokens rely upon the user's Issuetrak credentials to authenticate to API v2, and the API v2 operations they can perform are constrained by their user permissions just the same as when they are interacting with non-API parts of the site.

Have a look here for more information about authenticating with API v2.

API v2 - Logging

Error logging is enabled by default, and all logs are accessible on the web server, and the level of logging can be adjusted by editing the appropriate configuration file. If you run into errors with your code when interacting with API v2, you will find that Trace IDs have been included in the API responses. You can search the server logs for the corresponding Trace ID to get detailed information about what went wrong.

Have a look here for more information about logs in API v2.

API v2 - Rate Limiting

API v2 uses rate limiting to protect the server against malicious or buggy clients. When requests exceed the configured rate limit, API v2 will return a "429 - Too Many Requests" response to the application attempting to access it.

We have some default rate limits set, but they may be changed by making adjustments to the appropriate configuration file.

Have a look here for more information about rate limiting for API v2.

Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS)

The focus of this release is AD FS integration. What are the benefits?

• One-click single sign-on
   
• Multifactor Authentication (MFA) - If your AD FS instance implements MFA, then it will work seamlessly with Issuetrak.
   
• Improved security
  • An Active Directory service account isn't necessary.
  • It's not possible for the product to pull more information from AD FS than what is scoped to a successfully-authenticated user.
  • Issuetrak doesn't store any passwords in any form in the database.

User Accounts

• We've added an "Authentication Type" field to the User Search screen. 
   
• There are now three possible Authentication Types for a user account:
  • Issuetrak
  • Active Directory
  • AD Federation Services
     
• We've added "Active Directory User SID" and "Domain" fields to the View User Details screen.

Modernized Login Screen

Issuetrak's login screen has been updated both to be more visually appealing and to add any AD FS identity providers that you subsequently configure. This design allows users to utilize one-click single sign-on with the identity provider that works best for them.

Customers that have custom screen text added to the login screen will want to pay special attention to the way it displays post-upgrade. It may be necessary to adjust your custom login screen text.

Additionally, we've increased the maximum character limit for the login screen text to 10,000 characters to allow for greater flexibility in customization.

Active Directory Menu Location

The Active Directory Administration menu item has been removed and replaced with Identity Management, which is where both Active Directory and Active Directory Federation Services settings are now located.

Open Issues Indicator on Issues

The View Issue, Edit Issue, and Submit Issue screens have been updated to display the selected organization's number of open issues.

Issue Submission Method

We've made it possible to easily determine how an issue was submitted by adding a Submission Method field. This field is visible on theView Issuescreen (if enabled on the corresponding Custom Screen). This field is also displayed when selecting Detail Output on issue searches and when choosing Detailed Output on an issue Search Results screen. Additionally, this field can be queried via the Report Writer.

Here is a list of possible Submission Method values:

• Submit Issue Screen
• Copied / Cloned
• Submit Issue Screen With Quick Pick
• Recurring Issue
• Incoming Email
• Incoming Email with Quick Pick
• Global Issue Bulk Submit
• API

Unassigned Issues

We've updated the Unassigned Issues queue and My Issues > Unassigned tab to include the "Issue Type" column.

Service Contracts

The Labor Hours field can now be made a required field when adding a note to an issue that was submitted under an organization with a Service Contract.

Users Search Improvements

We've added the ability to filter users by their method of authentication. The Authentication filter is visible on the following screens:

• User Summary
• List All
• Search Users

Asset Management

• Under certain circumstances, SQL performance could degrade when loading asset audits to apply.
• ScanPC and TrakPC were being blocked by antivirus / security software.

Organizations

• Users would receive an error when trying to set an organization's IEM Email Domain to a domain containing more than two parts. (eg. subdomain.organization.com)
• It was not possible to set the site colors for an organization.

Report Writer

• Report Writer queries would fail to execute successfully when an Issue Type containing an apostrophe was used as a query filter.
• Exported reports containing special characters in large text UDFs would sometimes incorrectly display the characters due to how Microsoft Excel would interpret the character encoding.
• HTML scheduled reports based on saved searches were being delivered without data.

User Accounts

Sites with a very large number of End User accounts would experience a timeout when attempting to list all of the End User accounts on the User Summary List page. We have added paging to the User Summary List page so that the product does not attempt to compile a complete list of user accounts on a single page.

Issuetrak 12.1.1 Patch Release

release date: 7.10.2020

Service Contracts

Users without the Can enter Labor Hours when entering Notes/completing Tasks permission would receive an error when attempting to close an issue that required labor hours to be entered when adding a note.

Issuetrak 12.1.2 Patch Release

release date: 7.15.2020

Asset Management

Users would encounter a 500 error when attempting to view the Software Licenses "List All" page.

Issue Management

It was not possible to save changes to an issue after editing it with Internet Explorer.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

The "Open Issues" link for Organizations was not working when CSRF protection was enabled.

AD Federation Services

• We now support SSO without the need to perform an initial sign-in on your site.
• Each of the AD FS configuration screens have been updated to include the ability to Test User Mappings.
• We've also updated the AD FS configuration screens to allow you to customize the look of each identity provider's login button.

Dashboard

Sys Admins now have the ability to set the default Dashboard layout for all other users (including Agents).

Mobile View

We have added the ability to toggle the Mobile view of the site from the Features screen.

Features Screen

To make our user interface more consistent, we've replaced the Active Directory heading with Identity Management. You will find both Active Directory and AD Federation Services controls under the Identity Management menu option.

Asset Management

The Asset Management module contained several dropdown fields that would cause certain pages to load slowly. These fields have been re-implemented as type-ahead fields to solve the loading problem, making the fields easier to search while also improving the user interface.

Core Site Verbose Error Messages

We've removed verbose error message transmission to the browser for the Core site. This measure prevents a scenario where an attacker could take advantage of the information provided.

Core Web.config

New site deployments and upgrades will have the "Debug" parameter set to False in the core web.config.

Improved Page Load Time

The Favicon.ico file was never cached, which was resulting in longer load times for nearly every page in the product due to it having to be reloaded. This image is now cached and should result in faster page load times.

JQuery

We've updated JQuery from 3.4.1 to 3.5.1 not only to stay current, but to address a potential cross-site scripting attack vector present in versions prior to 3.5. What's JQuery?

Path-Relative Stylesheet Import (PRSSI)

Every stylesheet reference in the product has been updated to use absolute URLs instead of relative URLs to prevent a Path-Relative Stylesheet Import (PRSSI) vulnerability.

Secure Cookies

Sites that communicate over SSL will now add the "__Secure-" prefix to cookies sent to the browser. This instructs the browser to treat the cookies in a more secure manner. See this page for information on cookie prefixes.

Security Scan False Positives

We've moved the "meta" tag from to in multiple pages within the product to prevent false positives from security scanners.

Server Response Headers

We've removed "Issuetrak" from the Server Response Headers in IIS. This applies to both new site deployments and upgrades.

Sub-Resource Integrity (SRI)

Sub-Resource Integrity (SRI) is now implemented in the product.

Dashboard

The Dashboard would get stuck in an infinite reloading loop on certain sites as a result of the JSON Web Token configuration.

Issuetrak 12.3.1 Patch Release

release date: 9.3.2020

Asset Management

• Audits with 3 or fewer matching criteria were not getting applied to their matching asset.
   
• The Software Purchases List All screen used confusing labels to describe how many licenses were available versus how many existed in total. We have adjusted the column header labels to clarify their meaning.
   
• TrakPC audits were sometimes reporting the Operating System version as "64-bit Build: SP".

Custom Screens

A 404 error was displayed when attempting to preview custom screens with a very large number of fields.

Email Notifications

A new security setting was added to the OEM settings page that will prevent the "From Address" from being changed/altered when emailing issues or knowledge base articles.

Quick Picks

It was not possible to change issue subtypes when editing a Quick Pick.

Recurring Issues

A 500 error would result when attempting to edit a recurring issue containing a decimal UDF with a value of 7 digits or greater.

Saved Search

Attempting to run a saved search with any date criteria would result in the search not executing at all.

Special Function Table

The "History" link was not present for the Special Function Table on the View Issue screen.

Summary Reports

Summary reports with contract time would contain incomplete data.

Tasks

It was not possible to add new tasks to an issue for an organization with an expired Service Contract.

Issue Hub

• We've revamped the My Issues page and renamed it to Issue Hub.
• A new tab has been added, called Open Issues.
  • The new Open Issues tab can be filtered by any column.
  • You can sort any tab by a column of your choice. You'll notice that the column headers have an improved appearance with indicators as to whether they're sorted and / or filtered.
  • We've dramatically improved performance for this screen in general, resulting in reduced load times.
• We've removed the Legend at the bottom of the screen, as well as the refresh countdown timer at the top.

Issue Hub Administration

• Sys Admin accounts can configure the Issue Hub's appearance globally for all users.
• You will have granular control over the tabs that are displayed in the Issue Hub.

Text User Defined Fields (UDFs)

• UDF text fields are now accompanied by an 'Exact Match' toggle on the Search Issues screen.

Attachments

Improvements to attachment handling for issues.

Dates

All two-digit year formats have been converted to 4-digit years.

Show / Hide Notes

The Show / Hide Notes link has been made more noticeable by making it into a button.

Report Writer

Certain reports and / or queries would display a 500 error when executed.

Attachments

Password-protected ZIP and executable files exceeding 100MB were becoming corrupted after being attached to issues and KB articles.

Issuetrak 12.4.1 Patch Release

release date: 10.29.2020

Dashboard

• You will see a dramatic improvement to the speed with which the Dashboard loads and displays data.
   
• Monthly and Quarterly Performance dashboard modules no longer take the current user's issue visibility into account. This is to improve accuracy of the data provided.

Cloned Issues

When an issue containing a project was cloned, the resulting issue would contain the project even if it was removed prior to submission.

Incoming Email

The Incoming Email processor did not support a complete variety of standard international reply prefixes in email subject lines.

Out of Office

Users with an "Out of Office" status set could not have tasks assigned to them.

Report Writer

No results would be displayed for Report Writer queries that contained an apostrophe in the Issue Subtype field.

Service Contracts

Running any report related to service contracts, or trying to view service contract information, would result displaying a 500 error.

User Defined Fields

Errors would sometimes be displayed when trying to view issues with UDFs when SQL 2019 was part of the hosting environment.

User Session

When a user would get logged out due to their session expiring, they would receive the message "Your session was dropped either from inactivity or because the account logged in from another location" when attempting to log back in after getting sent back to the login page.

User Summary

Counts are currently incorrect for the following areas of the User Summary page:

• Can assign issues
• Can be assigned issues
• Can submit issues on behalf of other users

Issuetrak 12.4.2 Patch Release

release date: 11.03.2020

About Screen

We've updated the product's internal About screen to reflect our new product feedback page and link to our Support site via SSL.

You can find the About screen in your Issuetrak site by clicking on Administration from the top navigation bar, then choosing About at the bottom of the lefthand menu.

Users

Users that are not permitted to log in are now included on the User Summary screen for each count related to licensed permissions.

Groups

A 500 error would appear...

• When trying to remove a user from a group
• When trying to edit a group
• When attempting to delete a group with a large number of users

Saved Search

Users would receive an error when trying to run saved searches containing different sets of User Defined Fields in hosting environments that utilized SQL 2019.

Users

Users were available to assign issues to even though they did not have permission to do so as a result of inactive group membership. This also caused inaccurate counts to be displayed on the User Summary screen for "Can assign issues" and "Can be assigned issues".

User Interface Enhancements

The look-and-feel of a large portion of Issuetrak has been standardized and vastly improved.  This provides a better overall experience for administrators and users alike as they navigate the product.

The following areas have been updated:

• Calendar
• Issue Hub
• Knowledge Base
• My Settings
• Projects
• Report Writer
• Saved Search

General UI Changes

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center.
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist.
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently.
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators better differentiate between settings.
• Each option label has been made bold for greater emphasis.
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been 'bundled' with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule.

Report Writer UI Changes

Both the Select Query and Select Report screens in Report Writer have been changed so that the following buttons are now at the bottom instead of the top:

• Edit
• Clone
• Delete
• Run

Custom Issue Hub Tabs

You're no longer limited to just the tabs that ship with the product: Now you can create your own!

Custom tabs approach the same granularity of data as a Report Writer query while displaying the instant results you would expect to see from the Dashboard.

Custom tabs allow you to:

• Name them as you see fit
• Filter by any column
• Include almost any field you want as a column
• Have as many columns as you like
• Fill out your Issue Hub with as many as 20 active tabs

The ability to filter a tab by multiple columns allows you to achieve a high degree of specificity in the issues that are displayed.

All Issue Hub tabs are global- that is, anyone with Issue Hub access can see them. But visibility controls and permissions still apply, which means no one can see or do what they shouldn't.

Setting up a new custom tab is quick and easy. Once you've learned the basics, you can have an informative and useful new tab created in seconds! Have a look at our updated Issue Hub documentation to find out more.

Mass Issue Updates

But you're not limited to just looking at your issues in Issue Hub anymore. Now you can do stuff with them!

Now you can:

• Select as many issues as you like from the current screen and update the following fields (if enabled):
  • Next Action
  • Required By Date
  • Issue Class
  • Assignee
  • Target Date
     
• Select as many issues as you like from the current screen and close them (Sys Admins only)

More Issue Hub Enhancements and Behavioral Details

Various changes throughout the Issue Hub interface have improved the overall experience:

• Since we've made it possible to add as many columns as you like, it also made sense for us to add the ability to scroll laterally when you have too many columns to fit on the screen at one time.
   
• We've added the "Issue Hub Settings" gear button to almost every tab in the Issue Hub. This simplifies navigation to the Issue Hub Settings screen, allowing you to get to it more quickly.
   
• Escalation rules and substatus rules remain in effect while using Mass Issue Updates.
   
• Use Issue Hub in conjunction with Round Robin to quickly and thoroughly distribute issues across a team.
   
• It is now also possible to perform mass issue unassignments.

Administering Quick Picks

We've made it easier to take care of business in the Quick Picks area of the Administration menu:

Searching - We've added search functionality to the Quick Picks List All screen, allowing you to quickly find the exact Quick Pick you're looking for.

Display Order - Much like other areas of the product, we've now provided the option to set the display order for each Quick Pick. This will allow you to determine the order in which they are displayed in the Quick Picks dropdown for users when submitting an issue.

Associated Quick Picks

We've expanded upon the addition of Associated Quick Picks that we delivered earlier this year:

Reporting - We've made it possible to find issues submitted via Quick Picks more easily via Report Writer, with the addition of Associated Quick Picks to the Issues dataset.

Issue Search - The Issue Search screen now includes a Quick Pick field, making it easy to find issues submitted via any particular Quick Pick. By extension, this means you can also create Saved Searches that include this field.

Admin Auditing

Admin Auditing has also seen substantial additions. The following areas of the Administration menu are now included in Admin Auditing:

• Auto Assignments
• Custom Screens
• Email Notifications (and associated customizations)
• Escalation Rules
• Quick Picks, including:
  • Quick Pick Attachments
  • Quick Pick Email Notifications
  • Quick Pick Notes
  • Quick Pick Tasks
• Recurring Issue Attachments (attachments associated with recurring issues)

Incoming Email Tokens

We've added a new Incoming Email token corresponding to Location IDs. 

Accessibility

Screen reading software was unable to read the Locations field in many areas of the product.  We now utilize a filterable dropdown for the Location-related fields instead of the magnifying glass that we previously used.

API

It was not possible to create a new user via the API without specifying a password for the new account.

Issuetrak 12.7.1 Patch Release

release date: 12.29.2020

Incoming Email

The Incoming Email processor would fail to process certain messages with CC'd recipients, resulting in a "Cannot insert the value NULL" error being displayed in the IEM log.

Quick Picks

• We've changed Quick Picks' default value for Display Order from zero to 100. Upgrading to 12.7.1 and higher will apply this new display order value to all Quick Picks that didn't already have the Display Order set.
   
• The Quick Pick field has been moved so that it is above the Issue Type field on the Issue Search screen.

Saved Search

Saved searches were not returning correct results.

Azure AD Support

The focus of this release is Azure AD integration. What are the benefits?

• One-click single sign-on (SSO)
• An Active Directory service account isn't necessary
• Issuetrak doesn't store any passwords in any form in the database
• Continued support for Multifactor Authentication (MFA)
• Improved mapping customization options
• Granularity of control over entity mappings
• User Property mapping control

Multiple Azure Cloud Types

We support different Azure cloud types to comply with the requirements of different jurisdictions, to include:

• China
• Europe
• US Government
• Public

User Profile Notifications

We've added the ability to trigger email notifications that will be sent when user account changes are made. Notifications will be sent to the account that was changed if a valid email address is present in the account.

Cloning Issues

The value for the Organization field would sometimes change when using the Clone / Copy functionality on an issue.

Dependencies

We've updated an internal library dependency that we use for displaying filterable dropdown lists. 

Knowledge Base

Users would sometimes receive an error when trying to view a KB article on a site in which anonymous KB access is enabled. 

SQL Code

Some of the SQL code we use for upgrades wasn't handling NULL values, which would sometimes result in failed upgrades.

Substatus Field

it was possible for the Substatus field dropdown to obscure an alert notification that the current substatus value will pause the clock.

User Search

It wasn't possible to complete a user search when using the Location field without an error being displayed. 

User Summary List

The User Summary List screen would sometimes attempt to display more information than could be held on screen at one time. Functionality has been added to allow scrolling laterally to see the rest of the information. 

Self-Service Password Reset

Users in sites without Identity Management enabled may not be able to use the Self-Service Password Reset feature.

Standard Pre-filled Configuration

New customers using our product are often faced with a dizzying array of features and terms that they don't yet have a context for. We now provide customers with the choice of deploying Issuetrak with either a 'Clean' site (containing no customizations) or our 'Standard' configuration which contains tons of helpful hints to make the learning process easier!

Here are a few things you can expect to see in a site with our Standard configuration:

• The Login screen displays tips on what you can customize, and where
• The Issue Submit screen contains an extensive amount of hints for each area
• The Home screen points out areas that can be changed and customized
• The Knowledge Base is pre-filled with sample articles that you might want to customize and include in your own site

We believe that even our experienced customers may benefit from seeing what the Standard configuration has to offer. Give us a call if you would like assistance with deploying a test site to try it out! Contact our Support Team at 757-213-1351, support@issuetrak.com or https://support.issuetrak.com.

Updated Issues and Issue Search Screens

The Issues and Issue Search screens has been given a similar treatment to other areas of the UI:

• Field categorizations have been added:
  • Overview
  • Responsibility
  • Notes
• Use of space has seen an overall improvement
• All field labels have been aligned in their own column, and so have the fields themselves
• Tool tips on these screens have been updated

Azure AD

Our previous release introduced support for Azure AD authentication. We wanted to make it even better in our followup release. Here's what we've done with it:

• Azure AD now has its own place under the Identity Management menu
   
• All of its Add / Edit / View / Migrate pages are now distinguished from the same pages for AD Federation Services
   
• Added a new Authentication Type that covers both AD Federation Services and Azure, labeled as "ADFS / Azure"

AD Federation Services

We've made it possible for you to import users for AD Federation Services!

Calendar

The Out of Office search-ahead feature wasn't working like it had for previous versions.

Issue Hub

Issue Hub now contains screen text that explains how its refresh works:

• If the user has set their dashboard reload setting to zero, then Issuetrak's system dashboard reload value will be used instead.
   
• If the system dashboard reload value is set to zero, then pages dependent on the reload value will not automatically refresh at all.

Mass Updates

An error message would appear when performing certain mass updates or mass deletes.

Permissions

It was not possible to modify the "Can change own password" permission when Identity Management was turned off.

Saved Search

When saved searches were delivered as scheduled reports in Excel format, they would be blank except for containing the message, "NO issue(s) matched the search criteria!"

Issue Hub

We've been working on improvements to Issue Hub based on your feedback and our own ideas of what it should do. Here are some things you can look forward to after upgrading:

Visibility Restrictions

• Issue Hub tabs can now have their visibility restricted based on Organization and Group membership.

Better Data Organization

Sys Admins can...

• Set the display order for Issue Hub tabs.
• Specify how columns should be sorted by default on tabs. Users can override this with their own sorting preferences, but it will not persist.
• Specify dynamic filter statements for your data. Click here for more information on filtering.

More Ways to Interact with Your Data

• We've increased the tab limit in the Issue Hub to 50 tabs!
• It is now possible for Sys Admins to clone custom tabs, making it even easier to create new tabs.
• A default Issue Hub tab can now be set by Sys Admins and users. If neither is set, Issuetrak will default to displaying the system default, or as a final fallback, the "As Submitter" tab.

Change Substatus and Trigger Substatus Rules

• You now have the ability to change the substatus of issues from the Issue Hub.
  • Substatus rules will therefore apply to all issues that have had their substatus updated via Issue Hub.

New "Default Issue Hub Tab" Setting

• The My Settings, as well as Add User and Edit User screens now have a distinct "Default Issue Hub Tab" dropdown list.

Issue Auditing

The Search Issue Audits screen did not allow selecting "Modified User".

Issue Hub

If a user's time zone was at least 1 hour behind the server's time zone, then the Required By date displayed in Issue Hub would be incorrect.

Rich Text Editor

Text entered using the Rich Text Editor with <pre> tags was not being displayed consistently between 'edit' and 'view' modes.

User Permissions

User permission "Can close issues" was incorrectly being applied based on userID case.

Issuetrak Deployment Utility (IDU)

The Issuetrak Deployment Utility (IDU) is a versatile command line utility for deploying Issuetrak. The IDU gives you granular control over the deployment process, and provides verbose output to a console window so that you know exactly what's happening during deployment. The IDU is recommended for the system administrator that needs a high degree of control over how Issuetrak is deployed in their environment.

The IDU requires proficiency with PowerShell or the Command Prompt on Windows Server. If a more familiar graphical installation or upgrade experience is desired, then please consider using the Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM).

Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM)

The Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM) is the graphical front-end for the IDU that provides a friendly step-by-step “wizard” for installing or upgrading Issuetrak, while still retaining flexibility and a fair degree of control over the deployment. We recommend the IDM for deployment in most On-Premises environments.

API Installation

Previous releases of Issuetrak require manual installation of the API. Manual installation of the API for 11.0 and above is no longer required or supported. Both of the new deployment tools outlined above can now be used to deploy the API. The IDU can be used to deploy the API during an upgrade or installation of Issuetrak, while the IDM currently provides the option to deploy the API only during the installation of Issuetrak. If the API is already present in your site prior to upgrading, then it will automatically be upgraded along with the rest of the site.

Improved Security

Access to the SQL server's filesystem from the Web server is no longer required during deployment.

SQL Agent Jobs

SQL agent jobs are no longer used. They have been replaced with scheduled tasks.

Asset Management

Sites with Asset Management enabled would redirect to either a 404 error or a login page when attempting to edit a Software Purchase.

Auto-Assignment

Auto-assignments were not processing for agents in qualifying organizations when the Submitter's Organization field was left blank.

Custom Screens

When text UDFs were configured as required fields in custom screens, the presence of double quotes would prevent issues from being submitted successfully.

Export to Excel

• Text UDFs and Large Text UDFs containing emdashes or endashes were not appearing properly in exported Excel reports.
   
• Line breaks in the Issue Description field were not being carried over when exported to Excel.
   
• Special Function fields were not showing in Detail Output to Excel when they were supposed to be present.

Global Issues

Global Issues were updating values for linked issues when they shouldn't have.

Issue Auditing

Changes to data within Large Text UDFs were not being recorded properly in the Issue Change Log, when enabled.

Issue Search

• Issue searches containing question marks were causing an error, preventing search results from being returned.
   
• The “Search All” field present on the Search Issues and Search Articles screens was renamed to either “Search All Three” or “Search Both”, depending on whether the Solutions field is enabled.

Notifications

End users were unable to see the Closed By field in notifications when it was supposed to be present.

Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks will now process multiple sites at once.

Users

New user accounts were not being created when leaving the UserID field blank on the New Caller screen.

Outgoing Email

Sites attempting to utilize TLS authentication with Outgoing Email will be unable to do so, and will see RC code 13 in the outbound email log.

Unassigned Issues

Quick picks that are configured to assign issues to the issue submitter are leaving issues unassigned when the submitter is not an agent.

Launching the IDM

The IDM may freeze up on “Checking .NET Framework version”. It is necessary to unblock the file “GetDotNetBuildNumber.ps1” in the distribution folder called Issuetrak.Deployment.Manager to prevent this.

Issuetrak 11.0.1 Patch Release

release date: 7.16.2018

Active Directory

The Mobile/SMS Email value (if populated) in user records was being cleared when users were imported or updated from Active Directory.

Business Rules

• Escalation rules would no longer fire after the Required By date was changed to a new value.
   
• The Windows scheduled task for Issue Escalation was not running at 15-minute intervals until 12:00AM on the day following an upgrade to Issuetrak 11.0.

Deployment Tools

• It was possible for a deployment of Issuetrak to report that it had completed successfully without having started the site in IIS.
   
• The Issuetrak distribution was being blocked in some On-Premise environments, preventing full functionality of the deployment tools.
   
• The presence of an FTP site in IIS prevented the IDU from functioning properly.

Email

• Outbound email utilizing TLS encryption was failing to authenticate with any designated SMTP server.
   
• Calendar deadline reminders were not sending when particular settings were selected.

Issues

• It was possible for the entire Notes area of several issues to be hidden due to collapsing the Notes section in a single issue.
   
• The Email Issue feature allowed users to view issues that they did not normally have the ability to access.
   
• When an issue was submitted via Quick Pick, and a matching Auto Assign was found, the Quick Pick's Assigned To field was overriding the Auto Assignment rule.
   
• It was possible for users to submit issues with invalid or restricted issue types.
   
• Private Large Text UDF fields were being truncated when they contained a quote and their associated issue was updated by a user without permission to see private UDFs.
   
• Recurring Issues that had been copied were not retaining the class of the original Recurring Issue.
   
• It was possible for users to download attachments associated with issues that the user did not have access to.
   
• If the Priority field was being used in issues, it would be blanked out after a user added a note.

Issue Search

It was unclear how search criteria should be entered to search Text UDFs, so a hover tooltip to help users with determining search criteria has been added to the Issue Search page.

Outbound Email

It was not possible to use outbound email authentication and TLS in conjunction with the following features:

• Email Issue
• Email KB Article
• Survey Invitations
• Scheduled Reports

Projects

When a ProjectID containing a hyphen and space was selected from the type-ahead search, a pop-up reading “No matching records found.” would display.

Quick Picks

When searching for Quick Picks, the type-ahead feature was only displaying results matching the first word in Quick Pick titles.

Reporting

• The fields “Billing Line Item Adjusted Rate” and “Billing Line Item Comment” were missing from the Issues / Service Contracts data set.
   
• Audited assets were reporting the Specified Model instead of the Audited Model.
   
• Scheduled reports based on a saved search containing references to “Ever Assigned To” were not taking the “Ever Assigned To” selection into consideration.
   
• Exported reports containing the Submitted Time field were displaying incorrect information in that field compared with the actual Submitted Time as it was displayed in the Issue View.

Tasks

• The auto-suggest feature was failing to appear under certain conditions when editing tasks in the Task Manager.
   
• Large numbers of tasks in an issue could degrade browser performance when viewing the issue.

User Interface

• Internet Explorer 11 would not render Issuetrak correctly unless Compatibility View was turned off.
   
• An error would display when a user clicked “Expanded List” in the Issue Types administration menu.
   
• The time was omitted from several issue lists throughout the product.

Visibility Controls

• It was possible for a user to view private KB articles without having the permission to do so.
   
• It was possible for users to view Substatus information about issues that they should not have had access to.
   
• It was possible for users to view information about Organizations that they should not have had access to.
   
• The Copy/Clone Issue feature allowed users to view issues that they did not normally have the ability to access.

Web Forms

A new system user called IssuetrakWebFormsProcessingService has been added to Issuetrak to allow Issuetrak to interoperate with the Web Forms Processing Service.

Admin Auditing

Admin Auditing gives you the ability to see changes made to critical Administrative settings within Issuetrak. Audit records are kept from the moment Admin Auditing is enabled, can be searched and exported as a spreadsheet, and cannot be deleted from the Issuetrak web interface. The audit log tracks:  

• What setting was changed
• Approximately where the setting can be found
• Who changed the setting
• What the old value was
• What the new value is
• When it happened

But we haven't stopped with Admin Auditing! We've expanded and improved upon several existing features, too. 

Pre-Submit Screen

A Pre-Submit screen has been added to the options available on the Features screen. If you enable this, you can decide whether to include the Quick Pick selection field or the Issue Type selection field (or both!) on a Pre-Submit screen that will determine which Custom Screen will be displayed to end users.  

Special Function Search

The Special Functions List All screen can now be sorted and searched for specific values.

Self-Service Password Reset

It is now possible for an Issuetrak administrator to set the number of hours that a password reset email will be viable. 

Active Directory

Department names containing an ampersand or apostrophe were not getting mapped during the AD import process or updated appropriately upon user login.  

API

The API could not be used to create issues to next action users with grandfathered Can Be Assigned Next Action permission. The Inactive property has been removed from the Locations table because Locations cannot be inactivated. If the API is used to retrieve the Locations DTO, the value for "IsActive" will now always be returned as True. 

Custom Screens

Issues could be submitted without a Project being selected, even if the custom screen for the issue type was set to require a Project to be selected.  

Incoming Email

Errors were encountered when the Incoming Email service attempted to process certain messages coming from an Office 365 mailbox.  

Issue Notes

End users were being logged out when they tried to add a note to an issue that they had access to as a result of being on the issue's email distribution.

Locations

Location Names and Location IDs that start with the same letters would improperly cause an Auto Complete pop-up window to appear when searching for Locations.

Quick Picks

The Unassigned Issues count would be reported incorrectly when issues were submitted via Quick Picks that assign the issue to the submitter. 

Report Writer

Queries that had filters set to use specific dates with a less-than-or-equal-to value were including the day after the date value provided in the search results.

Special Function Table

Records containing null values would not be displayed if a search was made on the Special Function Table.

User Interface

Multiple columns would get stuck displaying "Loading" in the Summary tab of the My Issues screen when attempting to sort by column. 

UserID Maintenance

Customers that were on a Productivity License key and also at their user license limit were unable to perform a UserID change due to an error indicating that there are no user licenses available.

Visibility Controls

Agents without administrative permissions that were also not in an internal organization were unable to view the Organization Details screen. 

User Administrator

User Administrator is a new permission that can be found under the "Administration" set of user permissions, labeled as Can access and maintain users in this user's Organization and its "Allowed Organizations". User Administrator is mutually exclusive with the other limited administrator permissions, and an error will be displayed if either of the following permissions are selected when attempting to update a user account:

• Allowed Read Only access to Administration information
• Can access and maintain Administration functions

Legacy Upgrade Considerations

Issuetrak versions 8.0 - 9.9.6 contained the Organization Administrator feature, which allowed non-Agent users to have the limited ability to administer users within their organization. This feature was removed in Issuetrak 10.0. Customers running Issuetrak 9.9.x and using the Organization Administrator feature can, with the use of a SQL script, export their existing Organization Administrator users prior to upgrading. The export script generates a list of users with the Organization Administrator functionality and saves this list in the Issuetrak database. The 11.2 deployment tools will look for this list, parse through it, and grant User Administrator permissions to the accounts listed. If you wish to upgrade from Issuetrak 9.9.6 or older, please contact Issuetrak Support for assistance.  

Security Improvements

Communication between the Web and SQL servers can now be secured with TLS 1.2. This was made possible by engineering the product to use Microsoft's new MSOLEDBSQL provider.  

New System Requirements

New installations and upgrades to 11.2 require that the Microsoft OLE DB Driver 18 for SQL Server is installed on the Web server whether or not the SQL server co-exists on the same machine. The Issuetrak deployment tools will not install this software on the Web server.

Additionally, Windows Server 2008R2 is no longer a supported operating system on either server due to the requirements of the OLE DB driver mentioned above. Thus, the supported operating systems are now Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2, 2016 (32/64-bit; Standard, Datacenter). See the System Requirements article for more details.

Custom Error Pages

Custom error pages have been added into the product. Upgrades and new installations will have the new custom error pages integrated into the product, but if custom pages are already configured in IIS, they won't be changed. These custom pages will only be displayed if Detailed Errors are enabled for the site in IIS.  

User Interface

The fonts and styling of various pages have been standardized to promote consistency of user experience.  

Performance Enhancement

Customers with a large number of issues recorded in their site should see improvements in loading times for issue-related screens.

Deployment Tools

The functionality of the GenerateDeploymentConfiguration IDU verb has been updated. See the IDU Verb Documentation article to learn how this verb functions.

Active Directory

• Organizational Units containing a ~tilde~ were failing to import during the AD import process and would display an "Invalid length" error.
   
• AD users were failing to log into Issuetrak if their AD username matched the pre-2k username for another user, or vice versa.
   
• Placing the text 'Inactive for Issuetrak' description in an AD user account was not preventing the account from being imported into Issuetrak.
   
• Existing AD scheduled imports that were configured for 12:xx AM would change to 1:xx AM if they were clicked and updated.

API

When retrieving an issue via the API that had a UDF Decimal value filled in, the value would be rounded up to the nearest whole number.

Asset Management

The 'Open Issues by Asset' Dashboard panel was not available to users with the permission "Can access and maintain Asset Management Module functions".

Attachments

Some customers employing a reverse proxy were encountering a small pop-up window on Issuetrak pages specifically dealing with attachments.

Custom Screens

Section headers within custom screens would throw an error if they contained a sequence consisting of a comma and a space.

Deployment Tools

Informational messages from the IDU were being tagged incorrectly in log files.

Email Settings

Administrators were encountering a 404 error when attempting to save email settings with an email server containing more than 50 characters.

Knowledge Base

End users that were using the Knowledge Base feature on sites allowing concurrent end user logins were experiencing errors when a new login utilizing the same credentials occurred. When users were attempting to navigate directly to the 'KB Quick Search' URL, the login page would load despite having 'Allow anonymous search without requiring login (public items only)' enabled.

Projects

Projects were being removed from issues after end users lacking project permissions added notes to the issues.  

Quick Picks

Quick Picks that contained one or more equals signs in the Subject were removing any text after the equals sign.  

Rich Text Editor

The rich text editor was sometimes not responding to attempts to interact using the mouse after clicking the 'Reset' button in an issue.  

UDF Date Field

User Defined Date fields were not allowing users to enter past dates when using the Chrome browser. Please note that the product will no longer demand confirmation from users when entering past dates!

Visibility Controls

Users with the correct permissions in an internal-only organization were unable to view assets in their own organization.

Users

When editing a user from an Issue screen, it was found that the 'Suppress All Email' option was checked and disabled, but it was neither checked nor disabled when viewing the user from the 'Edit User' screen. Editing a user via their display name hyperlink in an issue would clear that user's permissions.  

Security Enhancements

Below are some highlights of security features we have improved in 11.3. For additional detail on these changes, as well as general information on the security of our product, please see our Security in Issuetrak article. 

Forced SSL

If SSL is properly implemented for an Issuetrak site, the deployment tools will deploy a redirect for HTTP traffic to automatically go to the HTTPS binding for a site if no URL rewrite rule to do so is already present. To this end, we now require that the URL Rewrite module for IIS be installed on your Web server.

Strict Transport Security

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) will now be enabled for sites that have SSL implemented. 

Miscellaneous Security Improvements

We've implemented HTTP response headers and limitations to HTTP requests. Here are some highlights:  

• HTTP request verbs are now limited to POST and GET, while allowing these as well as PUT under API sites.
   
• HTTP request strings containing less-than (<) or greater-than (>) signs are now denied.
   
• HTTP requests containing Content-type headers are limited to 100 bytes, while headers matching any of the following are limited to zero bytes: Translate, If, Lock-Token, and Transfer-Encoding.  
   
• A Feature-Policy HTTP response header has been added to deny client-side access to unused browser features.  
   
• Additional HTTP response header examples include Referrer-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies, and X-XSS-Protection headers. 

Improved Search

We have listened to your feedback, and this release contains enhancements to the search functionality in the product.

• The "Lookup Issue#" field in the upper right corner of Issuetrak now allows you to search by subject in addition to issue number.  Additionally, administrators can now configure any issue User Defined Field to be permanently visible on the Search Issues screen. A new field called "Notes Entered By" has also been added to the Search Issues screen, which allows a user to narrow search results to notes entered by a specific user.
   
• The Lookup Issue # screen listed in the left menu has been removed. Users are encouraged to use the search field in the upper right corner of the product.

Tasks

• Users will now need to have the "Can select substatus when submitting and maintaining issues" permission in order to change the Update Substatus To dropdowns within issue-related tasks. This change bolsters security by ensuring only authorized users can change the substatus on issues with tasks. Without this permission, the Update Substatus To dropdown will be grayed out.
• We've also streamlined the way tasks are ordered and displayed within the Task Manager. The Task Manager interface has been modernized and made easier to understand. Additionally, the default Task display order has been globally set to begin at '1'. This change will be applied to all new and existing tasks during deployment.  

System Requirements

In order to support the new security features we're implementing with 11.3, the URL Rewrite module for IIS is now a system requirement. If it is not installed, then the deployment tools will display an error and provide an official Microsoft URL to download it from.

Deployment Tools

• It is now possible to add the API to an Issuetrak site during an upgrade. By default, the API will be added during upgrades.
   
• We've also improved logic to prevent the Services context from re-running against sites matching the version of the deployment tools. 

Issue Search

• Caller names containing apostrophes were not being found when attempting to search by name.
   
• It is no longer possible to use the Issue Search field to conduct wildcarded searches.  

Report Writer

The "Description" field was missing from the "Configuration / Recurring Issues" data set in Report Writer.  

Tasks

The Task Time pop-up was rendering the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons below the borders of the window, making them unreadable.  

User Defined Fields

The menu item called "User Defined" that was located within "System Settings" has been renamed "User Defined Fields".  

Issue Visibility

Users with the permission "Allowed Read Only access to Administration information" were able to view and promote Global Issues without having permission to do so.  

AD Imports

Scheduled AD imports weren't completing if there was a problem mapping a single end user to a template.  

Browser Plugins

Security enhancements made to the product may impact behavior of plugins or extensions (such as Evernote and Grammarly). A common example includes font-related errors pertaining to loading page content. These errors are harmless and can be ignored. 

Issuetrak 11.3.1 Patch Release

release date: 5.20.2019

User Interface

• The permission "Can view and enter content in Private Optional Fields" has been changed to read "Can view and enter content in Private User Defined Fields".
   
• The 'Reset' button on the Task Manager screen was next to the 'Save' button and could cause end user confusion, resulting in clearing changes to tasks instead of saving them. The 'Reset' button has been adjusted to appear further to the right to make it harder to confuse with the 'Save' button. 

Active Directory

AD imports would fail if an AD user account's "State" field contained greater than 20 characters. 

Asset Management

• Agents with administrative access (but without Sys Admin) permissions were unable to see Assets that were assigned to internal-only organizations.
   
• An error would appear when attempting to search for assets that had an asset registry ID (in the database) of greater than 32767. 

Business Rules

Auto assignment rules with "Submitted Between" set were working for every minute of duration specified in the rule except for the last minute. 

Deployment Tools

The IDU/IDM was damaging connection strings when parsing databases containing spaces. 

Exporting to Excel

The error "Invalid SQL Parameters for generating Excel worksheet" appeared in Excel when attempting to export data to Excel using Internet Explorer. 

Groups

• It was not possible to discern the difference between active and inactive groups on the Groups screen. By default, only active groups will now appear on the Groups screen. A "Show/Hide Inactive Groups" option has been added above the column on the far right.
   
• Group display names could be created with spaces on either side of the group name, causing problems when searching for the group.  

Issues

A line was struck through the "Notes" header when viewing issues that had that header present in their custom screens.  

Issue Search

Agents with "User Admin" permission that attempted to search for organizations on the Issue Search screen were getting no results displayed. 

Notifications

Notifications weren't being fired to all of the special functions users (if present) when notes were added. 

Outgoing Email

• Apostrophes were being doubled in recipient email addresses when emailing issues, KB articles, and surveys.
   
• When using Internet Explorer, users encountered several problems with configuring Outgoing Email: The Test Mail Server button didn't respond, Username/Password fields were displayed despite authentication being disabled, and it was not possible to turn Outgoing Email off. 

Report Writer

• The Report Writer was allowing users to run reports on UDFs they otherwise would not be able to see, which can potentially contain Personally Identifiable Information.
   
• Different results would display for a query depending on whether it was displayed in the product or exported to Excel.

Security

The product was allowing unauthenticated users to read dashboard chart data from the site.

Service Level Agreements

When Service Level Agreements were enabled, the "First Response Time" field was not being updated when the first response occurred via incoming email.

Tasks

• AD authenticated users were receiving the error "Invalid password entered" when attempting to complete secure tasks.
   
• When users signed into Issuetrak using a differently-cased userid than stored in the database, they were prevented from reverting the status of tasks.
   
• Tasks that were completed with "N/A" were changing to "Yes" once the task was edited.
   
• It was possible to create tasks with the same name in the product. 

User Defined Fields

Issues were losing values in Yes / No UDFs when the issue type was changed to one that used a different custom screen.

Users

• Group memberships were showing duplicated on a user's profile after their user ID had been merged with another. 
   
• It was not possible to discern the difference between a user template and an end user account when the Users List was viewed.
   
• The default user template wasn't being used when choosing the "New Caller" option.

Issuetrak 11.3.2 Patch Release

release date: 6.14.2019

Database Schema

The InsertedBySqlUser column has been removed from the AuditSqlUser table.

System Settings

New installations will have the Rich Text Editor and HTML-formatted email enabled by default.

Active Directory

When AD was enabled, the "New Caller" popup window wasn't taking all of the default caller template into account when creating new users. 

Permissions

Users that were not Sys Admins were able to view the Installation/Upgrade history for their site.

User Interface

• The My Issues screen contained a blank white column in the Legend, causing discontinuity of the Legend header.
   
• It was not possible to scroll through all UDFs if more than 33 of them existed when editing table-driven UDFs from the System Settings.

User Interface Enhancements

The look-and-feel of Issuetrak's System Settings menu has been standardized and vastly improved. This provides a better overall experience for administrators when it is necessary to change important settings in the product, or for new customers setting up Issuetrak for the first time. 

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators to better differentiate between settings
• Each option label has been made bold for better emphasis
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been 'bundled' with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule

Additionally, care has been taken to ensure that these changes render correctly in all of the supported browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Edge
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 11

User Interface Enhancements

Sometimes it's easier to see the changes for yourself. In order to facilitate that, we've provided before-and-after screencaps of several menus within Issuetrak below so that you can get a good idea of what visual changes to expect after you upgrade. You can click on any of the images below to see them full-size. 

Here's are two examples that will give you an idea of how the layout will appear for each menu in the System Settings area:

System Defaults - Before / After:

Features - Before / After:

Special Function Table

The Special Function Table has been updated to allow each field to contain 150 characters, rather than the 50-character limit that previously existed.

Issuetrak 11.4.1 Patch Release

release date: 8.14.2019

Logging

We've made it easier to enable logging for the API.

Dashboard

• The Dashboard's panel titles were sometimes colliding with dashboard panel buttons instead of being truncated.
   
• The Dashboard's "Issues by Compliance Status" panel was not displaying the correct issues or compliance levels when opening its issue list.
   
• Individual bar graph labels on the Dashboard were sometimes being omitted from the graph display, resulting in some graphs not having labels displayed.

Report Writer

Report Writer queries were sometimes being filtered by IIS's request filter, resulting in 404 errors.

User Interface

• We've added 20-character limits to the following areas of the product:
  • The Knowledge Base-specific user add/edit permission labels
  • The Report Writer's Knowledge Base query dataset name
  • The "Home" dropdown menu label for the Knowledge Base
  • Lefthand menu label for Knowledge Base in all areas of Issuetrak
     
• Issuetrak sites that had customized "Subject" labels were not seeing the Quick Search bar in the upper right updated with the custom label.
   
• HTML tags in Knowledge Base articles were not being properly escaped, sometimes resulting in HTML being rendered when it should have been displayed as inline HTML code.

User Interface Enhancements

The look-and-feel of Issuetrak's entities menus have been standardized and vastly improved.  This provides a better overall experience for administrators when it is necessary to change important settings in the product, or for new customers setting up Issuetrak for the first time. 

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators to better differentiate between settings
• Each option label has been made bold for better emphasis
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been 'bundled' with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule

Additionally, care has been taken to ensure that these changes render correctly in all of the supported browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Edge
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 11

Issuetrak 11.5.1 Patch Release

release date: 10.2.2019

Dashboard

We addressed issues related to users periodically receiving login prompts and .NET errors in the Event Viewer when the Dashboard data attempted to automatically refresh.

User Permissions

It was possible to add an end user to an Agent-only Group without the appropriate permissions.

Quick Search

It was not possible to find issues with number-based subjects when searching via the top search bar. If an issue number isn't found, you will be redirected to an Issue Search results screen containing the relevant search results for Issues containing the number in their subjects.

Special Function Table

Email notifications to recipients on the Special Function Table email field had their recipient field truncated at 100 characters rather than 150, resulting in some intended recipients not receiving email notifications.

Tasks

Tasks that were completed on the Issue Edit screen were all getting the same timestamp when the issue was updated. 

Locations

Locations containing a plus (+) symbol in the name were not populating correctly when selected from a lookup window.

Mobile Pages

The "Available Tasks by Assignee" view wasn't loading properly in the mobile pages. This view should not have been available, and has been removed.

Significant Site Disruption After Applying Windows Updates

Late September 2019 updates for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 have caused various errors when navigating Issuetrak sites. Issuetrak has patched this problem in 11.5.1, but previous versions of Issuetrak will encounter the errors until action is taken to remediate them. Possible remediation steps can be found here. The specific Microsoft updates that we are aware of are for:

• Windows Server 2016 - KB4516061
• Windows Server 2019 - KB4516077
• Windows Server version 1903 - KB4517211

New Configuration Options

• New configuration options have been added to the Edit Mailbox screen to govern how IEM processes emails containing recipients in the CC field.
   
• IEM will add AD users to issue distribution lists if they are CC'd as recipients on emails processed by Issuetrak.

Formatting Improvements

• We've resolved problems related to extra spacing that appeared in certain issues processed via IEM.
   
• Plaintext messages composed from Outlook or OWA will now be processed into issues containing the proper line breaks. 

Email Domain Matching

A new field called "IEM Email Domain" has been added to Organization records. This field is used by IEM to determine the organization that an email sender should be assigned to (if the mailbox is configured to derive domain from sender address).

• Additionally, the new field has been added to all datasets containing Organization data in the Report Writer, allowing this information to easily be queried. 
   
• The "WWW Address" Organization field will remain, but has been renamed to "Web Address" and is no longer taken into account when IEM processes email. The contents of this field will not be copied over to the new "IEM Email Domain" field.

Enhanced Loop Protection

• IEM now requires "Delete after processing" for POP email accounts. This setting cannot be unchecked. 
   
  • If you did not have this selected prior to upgrading to 11.6, then previous messages will be deleted. 
     
  • If you wish to keep a copy of your existing emails, you will need to configure your environment to do so prior to upgrading. Please do not use your Inbox as your email archive. 
     
• Issuetrak will avoid processing emails that had been processed prior to upgrading or changing a mailbox to POP. 

Improved Logging

• The IEM View Log within the application has been improved to provide much more detail when an error is encountered.
   
• The log retention period has been extended from 3 to 7 days.
   
• Upgrading to 11.6 will clear the existing in-application IEM View Log. 

More Informative Error Notifications

• IEM's "Notify on Error" capability has been bolstered with the addition of new and full error messages to assist in troubleshooting problems with processing incoming email. 
   
  • Active mailboxes in a damaged state will send a Notify on Error message every time IEM attempts to process the mailbox.  

Better Token Access Control

IEM now processes email tokens in a more predictable way:

• When IEM processes an email containing tokens directed at a Global Issue, it will now ensure that the issue does not have "Override default field update settings for linked Issues" selected prior to executing the tokens against the issue.
   
• Tokens are now applied to the issue under the originating message sender's userid, rather than under the GlobalIssue userid as before.
   
• Close Issue tokens are validated against the submitting userid's visibility and close permissions before being executed.

Updated User Interface

We've been steadily updating the UI throughout the Administrative areas of the product, and the screens relating to Incoming Email are the latest to receive the UI updates.

Smarter User Account Matching

Prior to 11.6, if an email was sent from an email address that is shared in common with multiple users, then the first matching user was added to the issue the email was for.  Starting with 11.6, the first matching user that has visibility on the issue will be selected for this scenario. 

Rich Text Editor

• We've upgraded the underlying software for our Rich Text Editor to enhance the user experience:
   
  • The default size of RTE fields was increased.
     
  • Every RTE field will now auto-resize to allow a much larger view of the editable content.  This is most evident in KB articles, Issue Note and Description fields. 
     
  • The 'Insert Table' functionality has been improved so that new tables are recognizable and edited more easily.

We have dropped support for Exchange 2010 and earlier

Microsoft has marked Exchange 2010 as end-of-life, and we are following suit. If you are still processing email that is hosted from Exchange 2010, we would recommend that you ensure Issuetrak can connect to the mailbox(es) via IMAP to avoid any downtime. 

IEM no longer runs as a Windows Service, but as a Scheduled Task*

The IEM scheduled task doesn't rely on EmailConfiguration.xml to provide connection strings, and instead gets its connection strings from the Core site's web.config. 

* This change only affects On-Premises customers.

Permissions

IEM was not taking into account:

• Whether a user had permission to view or edit issues prior to adding notes.
   
• Whether a user with "Can close issues" permission also had the permission "Limit to Issues submitted by this user" when closing issues.
   
• Whether a user had access to an issue prior to executing a "Close Issue" email token.  Users issuing a "Close Issue" token are now inspected by IEM to determine whether they have the ability to access the issue prior to executing the "Close Issue" email token. 
   
• Whether a user had permission to edit issues prior to executing any email token allowing priority, substatus, or UDFs to be changed on an issue.  Users issuing any tokens for the aforementioned fields are now inspected by IEM to determine whether they have the "Can edit issues" permission prior to executing the email token. 
   
• Whether a user had "Can view issues Submitted by other users" prior to executing any email token allowing Next Action, Assigned To, priority, substatus, or UDFs to be changed on an issue. Users issuing any tokens for the aforementioned fields are now inspected by IEM to determine whether they have access to the issue they are submitting a token for prior to executing the email token. 

Special Characters

• IEM was failing to look up user accounts when their email address contained a single quote.
   
• Emails from sender addresses containing dashes were not being processed correctly by IEM, resulting in incorrect email addresses and userids being recorded when IEM was configured to create new users.
   
• Issues submitted via IEM and containing less-than (<) and greater-than (>) characters in the original email subject had those same characters removed in the resulting Issue's subject.
   
• Issues submitted via IEM and containing the less-than (<) character in the original email body had that character and all subsequent text removed within the Issue's Description field.
   
• CC'd recipients on emails in IEM containing dashes were not being processed correctly by IEM, resulting in incorrect email addresses and userids being recorded when IEM was configured to create new users.
   
• IEM would fail to process emails when it was configured to use a Quick Pick containing a slash in its name.

Incorrect or Missing Information

• Emails containing nested MimeParts were not processed correctly by IEM, resulting in issues being created that contained blank Description fields.
   
• When IEM was configured to use a Quick Pick with an assigned task, it was found that the email notifications to the task assignee did not contain all of the information normally associated with the @IssueDetails token.
   
• When IEM was set to only accept email from existing Issuetrak or AD users and  "Notify on Error" was configured properly, it was found that messages from non-Issuetrak/AD users would trigger the error notification, but the application's IEM logging wouldn't contain any error associated with the message.
   
• When multiple UDF email tokens were specified and processed by IEM, it was found that the value for the second token would appear in the first token.  Upon editing the issue, the values would be corrected by the system.

Attachments

• IEM would process emails generated by ancilliary services (such as phone or monitoring systems) containing attachments, but the resulting issues did not contain the attachments.
   
• Non-deliverable messages containing attachments were being processed by IEM into issues without the attachments.

Auto-Assignments

IEM auto-assignments weren't occurring when the user to be auto-assigned was a Sysadmin.

Inactive Mailboxes

IEM was connecting to mailboxes marked as Inactive in Issuetrak.  The new IEM scheduled task will ignore inactive IEM mailboxes.

Rich Text Editor

• When the Rich Text was enabled and the font size set to anything other than 12, the first line of any note or Description field in an issue was size 12, while the rest of the text was in the size set for Rich Text in System Defaults. 
   
• The Rich Text Editor's table functionality was very difficult to use due to the way tables were rendered. 
   
• The Rich Text Editor would lose its left border at 75% zoom in Chrome, Edge and IE. 

Issuetrak 11.6.1 Patch Release

release date: 10.18.2019

Incoming Email

IEM would fail to process email when certain Parameters were deleted from the site.

Issuetrak 11.6.2 Patch Release

release date: 10.21.2019

Organizations

Administrators would receive an error when attempting to add an organization containing a date UDF to Issuetrak. 

Issuetrak 11.6.3 Patch Release

release date: 10.28.2019

Significant Site Disruption After Applying Windows Updates

Microsoft has fixed the patch that had previously broken functionality in Issuetrak. The workaround that we integrated into Issuetrak is no longer necessary, so we have removed it.

Dashboard

Users were presented with a pop-up authentication window if they stayed on the Dashboard page for a long time.

Email Issue

When the "Email Issue" functionality was used with attachments, the outgoing message was always flagged with high importance. 

Incoming Email

IEM was not processing emails with MIME-types of message/rfc822 when the emails were retrieved via Gmail.

Incorrect or Missing Information

Some issues submitted by End Users would have the Submitted Date and Submitter Phone Number appear on the View Issue screen but not on the Edit Issue screen.

Tasks

Task names that contained an ampersand (&) were appearing instead as "&" when viewed from the My Issues screen. 

Issuetrak 11.6.4 Patch Release

release date: 11.5.2019

Incoming Email

We've included an option to toggle issue visibility requirement when adding notes via IEM.

Incoming Email

• We've added the ability to retry processing of messages previously retrieved by IEM from the IEM View Log screen.
   
• The IEM View Log now has search, filter and sort functionality.
   
• IEM will now parse sender display names and use them to intelligently fill in the First Name and Last Name fields for users created as a result of processing incoming email (if enabled).

Rich Text Editor

We've standardized the available font sizes in the Rich Text Editor. The following sizes can now be selected within the Font Size dropdown:  8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 24, 36, 48

Active Directory

We've added logging capability for the Active Directory "Test Connection" button so that it is possible to get further detail if the connection test fails. 

Scheduled Reports

• Scheduled reports can now be set to run at one-hour intervals.
  • In order to support this new ability, the Scheduled Reports Windows Scheduled Task has been changed to run on an hourly basis.
  • The new hourly scheduled reports can be set to run during specific hours each day.
     
• Daily and weekly scheduled reports can now be set to run at a specific time.

Export to CSV

It is now possible to get information in CSV format from:

• Issue Search:
  • Brief Output to CSV
  • Detailed Output to CSV
  • Export search results to CSV
     
• Saved Searches:
  • Brief Output to CSV
  • Detailed Output to CSV
  • Export search results to CSV
     
• Report Writer:
  • Queries
    • Query Results page
  • Reports
    • Report Results page
       
• Scheduled Reports

Filtering by Relative Date Conditions

You can select rolling and relative date conditions in the Report Writer and Scheduled Reports for specified:

• Days
• Weeks
• Months
• Years

Longer Filter Statements

The Report Writer's filter statement field will now automatically adjust to the size of content.

Dataset Enhancements

• We've added "Task Completed / Total Ratio" to the Issues / Tasks dataset in the Report Writer.
   
• We've added the field "Location Created On" to every dataset in the Report Writer where Location information can be found.

• We've created a new dataset (visible only to users with Administrator permissions) for Restrictions in the Report Writer. A query on Restrictions can display the items that are currently restricted in Issuetrak along with other relevant information.

Asset Management

When Asset Management was enabled, it was not possible to sort Assets by serial number. 

Locations

Locations with a backslash \ in their name were causing 404 errors when issues were submitted that contained that location.

Summary Reports

Users were receiving 404 errors when clicking the Total number links displayed in Summary Report results.

Surveys

When attempting to use "Email Survey" to email an individual survey result, the email was not being sent.

User Interface Enhancements

The look-and-feel of a large portion of Issuetrak's Administration menus have been standardized and vastly improved.  This provides a better overall experience for administrators when it is necessary to change important settings in the product, or for new customers setting up Issuetrak for the first time. 

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center.
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist.
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently.
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators to better differentiate between settings.
• Each option label has been made bold for better emphasis.
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been 'bundled' with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule.

Additionally, care has been taken to ensure that these changes render correctly in all of the supported browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Edge
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 11

Logging

We've made behind-the-scenes improvements to our logging settings.

Custom Screens

• Custom Screen section headers containing asterisks (*) were being detected as required fields, which prevented them from being removed from the Custom Screens they were assigned to.
   
• When a Custom Screen's first field was set to Issue Type or Issue SubType, then the preview for that custom screen would not display any fields. 

Incoming Email

The Display Name of messages processed by IEM was being truncated at 50 characters.

Issue Search

The "Email to User List" feature was sending to all users, and not just the ones selected in the search results. 

Tasks

When tasks were deleted from the Tasks administrative menu, the tasks were deleted from all issues that had previously used them. 

Issue De-Escalation

The ability to de-escalate issues that have been marked as Escalated has been added to the product.  Up to this point, issues that had been escalated by an Escalation Rule were always marked as Escalated, and that was not possible to change. Issue De-Escalation is disabled by default and must be activated from the Features screen before it can be used. You can find out more about this feature in the "About Issue De-Escalations" article. 

Associated Issues (UDF)

A new Issue user defined field (UDF) type called Issue Association is now available for use. This allows users with "Can Edit Issues" permission to use this field to link other issues that are related to the issue they are currently working in. You can learn more about this in the "About User Defined Fields" article. 

Hyperlink (UDF)

A new Issue user defined field (UDF) type for Hyperlinks is now available for use.  This feature provides a dedicated place for hyperlinks to be added to issues without having to manually place them in the Notes, Description, or other fields that typically contain other information. 

Tooltips

We've added the ability to set a tooltip for each Issue user defined field, allowing users to hover over the user defined field to see the descriptive text that you've set for the field.  Additionally, TrakTips have been re-labeled as Tooltips. 

Quick Picks

Where applicable, it is now possible to see which Quick Pick was used to submit an issue by adding "Associated Quick Pick" to the Included Fields on your Custom Screen. This applies to manually submitted issues, recurring issues, and even issues submitted via IEM. It does not retroactively apply to issues submitted prior to upgrading to this release. 

Issue Change Log

We've enhanced the Issue Change Log so that it now tracks changes to Issue UDFs.

Recurring Issues

It is now possible to set the specific time of day that Daily, Weekly, and Biweekly recurring issues will be submitted on. In order to support this new ability, the Recurring Issues scheduled task has been changed to run on an hourly basis. 

Report Writer

Survey completion information has been added to the Surveys / Issues data set in Report Writer.

User Interface

The Mobile Settings screen now provides a "Default View" setting that allows you to set the default view for Mobile users to either "Mobile" or "Desktop". This makes it possible to effectively disable the Mobile view of Issuetrak and better control your users' mobile experience.

Issue Search

Exporting searches with sort criteria was resulting in an error.

Report Writer

Clicking on "Export to Excel" from the Query Results screen was resulting in a 500 error.

Issuetrak 11.10.1 Patch Release

release date: 1.8.2020

Deployment Tools

Performing a database migration from one environment to another could result in problems with the SQL logins.

Incoming Email

Incorrect issue labels were being inserted into the subject line of email notifications when custom issue labels were being used. This resulted in IEM processing any replies to these notifications as new issues.

Scheduled Reports

Scheduled reports containing the "Billing Line Item Amount" were not sending out. 

Submit Issue Screen

Manually typing a value into the "Caller" field would result in a 404 error when submitting an issue.

User Interface

Hyperlinks appeared in a lighter color after upgrading to 11.6 and above.

Visibility Controls

The issue search "Detailed Output to Excel" contained fields that users shouldn't be able to see.

Issuetrak 11.10.2 Patch Release

release date: 1.22.2020

Departments

The Departments screen would become inaccessible after all of the departments were deleted.

Deployment Tools

The Deployment Tools were only looking for SSL certificates in the Personal store on the Web server. The Deployment Tools will now check both the Personal and WebHosting stores for SSL certificates.

Incoming Email

"Notify on Error" emails did not contain any of the original IEM email body if the character length (including underlying HTML code) exceeded 7500 characters. These messages will now be truncated at the 7500 character limit instead of omitting the content altogether.

Quick Picks

It was often not possible to scroll through the list of Quick Picks on Apple devices with Firefox or Chrome when submitting an issue. 

User Interface

The Mass Updates screen has been updated with text to explain the necessity of choosing a data set that contains "Issues".

TrakPC:  Faster and More Secure

We're pleased to announce that TrakPC is now capable of communicating via SSL, with no additional IIS configuration required to make it work. Past releases required changes to your IIS configuration in order for TrakPC to post audits if you had SSL enabled on your site. We have also removed the "ScanPC Bypass URL" configuration option from the Asset Management feature because it is no longer needed.

Additionally, we've made some behind-the-scenes changes that allow TrakPC to conduct asset audits more quickly. 

• If you're a Cloud customer, please go here to get the updated TrakPC executable. 
   
• On-Premises customers that used the Bypass URL feature for Asset Management should contact Support for assistance with removing the now-unnecessary IIS configuration that was used for posting audits.

TrakMac:  New Capability

Organizations that use a mix of Macs and PCs have been requesting a way for our Asset Management module to audit Macs in the same way PCs have been audited, and we've listened. Today we are releasing TrakMac: the Mac counterpart to TrakPC. TrakMac will allow you to audit the Macs in your organization just like you've been using TrakPC to audit your PCs. 

The addition of TrakMac comes with the introduction of a new "Mac" asset type that is included in new installations of Issuetrak and added during upgrades if it isn't present. We've also added the ability to set the default asset type for assets imported via TrakMac on the Asset Management Settings screen, and we've set the default value to Mac.

Merge Duplicate Assets

We've added a "Merge Duplicate Asset" feature to the Asset Management system. The assets to be merged can be Non-PC, PC, or Mac assets. This feature allows you to select the asset to keep (ie. the primary asset) and the asset to remove (ie. the secondary asset). The merge will result in the primary asset having all of the history records, issues, and audits that were associated with the secondary asset. An additional benefit of this is that the subsequent audits of the same asset will be matched to the now-merged asset, which means that you won't need to worry about creating additional duplicates that need to be merged.

Asset Management

We've removed the Asset Management option to specify an alternate URL for ScanPC audit uploads, since it is no longer necessary.

Password Reset

The "Reset Password" (when enabled) option on the Login screen was not properly setting expectation of when a password reset email would be sent to the end user. The message that appears will now communicate more clearly to the end user.

Report Writer

• Report writer queries using the "Issues / Assets" data set and a UDF were returning a 500 error.
   
• Users without Sys Admin permission were unable to remove filter expressions from Report Writer queries that they had created.

User Interface

• Users that didn't have access to the "Summary" tab on the My Issues screen still had a "Summary of All" option for their "Default Home Page" on their My Settings screen. 
   
• The scrollbar would go missing in IE11 when viewing Location pop-up windows.

Asset Management

TrakPC was incorrectly reporting the build numbers of Windows 10 machines.

Issuetrak 11.11.1 Patch Release

release date: 2.25.2020

Incoming Email

We've changed the POP email retriever so that it will provide additional logging and continue processing messages after it encounters an unhandled exception. 

User Interface Enhancements

The look-and-feel of a large portion of Issuetrak's Administration menus have been standardized and vastly improved. This provides a better overall experience for administrators when it is necessary to change important settings in the product, or for new customers setting up Issuetrak for the first time. 

The following Administration areas have been updated:

• Issue Audits
• Issue Types
• Mass Updates
• Priorities
• Quick Pick
• Recurring Issues
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Solutions
• Special Function Table
• Substatus
• Tasks
• About

UI Changes, in Detail

We know what areas changed. But what exactly did we change about them?

The areas listed above have had the following changes applied:

• All of the page content has been left-aligned where it was previously centered or just off-center.
• Section headers have been added in some areas where they previously didn't exist.
• Page headers and section headers are sized differently.
• Section headers are now accompanied by a horizontal rule to help administrators to better differentiate between settings.
• Each option label has been made bold for better emphasis.
• Where applicable, each option's summary text has been 'bundled' with section headers before the accompanying horizontal rule.

Additionally, care has been taken to ensure that these changes render correctly in all of the supported browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Edge
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 11

Security

We've updated some of the underlying dependency libraries to keep the product secure.

Active Directory

• We've patched the product for a March 2020 Microsoft Windows patch that will affect the way LDAP works. 
   
• We've added a User ID field to the Active Directory settings page to work in conjunction with the LDAP changes. You may need to update this field after upgrading.

Auto Assignments

• We've made it possible to inactivate Auto Assignment rules. Any Auto Assignments that were previously hidden will now appear in the main list of Auto Assignments. We recommend that you review Auto Assignments for corrections after upgrading.  
  
  Additionally, an Auto Assignment rule will become inactive if one of the following events occur:
  • The user or group assignee loses the permission Can be assigned issues.
  • The user or group assignee is inactivated.

Notifications

• "Task Available" notifications were being sent to users when the task in question wasn't available yet. 
   
• SMS notifications weren't being triggered at all in situations where they should have been.

Incoming Email

• When certain special characters were present in an IEM mailbox's "Return Address" field, the page would be rendered incorrectly and the settings would not be viewable, forcing a need to re-enter the settings. 
   
• IEM was failing to process messages when it encountered "Exclude Text" matches that spanned multiple HTML nodes.

Report Writer

• Queries and reports that had been shared with "Everyone" were displaying values other than Everyone in their "Shared With" fields.
   
• Only the first page was being printed when users attempted to print a report.

Embedded Images

Sites with a lot of embedded images would time out when attempting to display the Embedded Images page.

User Experience

The "Default Home Page" setting for user accounts was not using the custom label (if set) for the Knowledge Base feature.

Security

• We've applied security patches to underlying library dependencies.
   
• CSRF tokens, when enabled, now have a minimum length of 39 characters.
   
• We've added a SameSite cookie attribute to outbound Set-Cookie headers in the default IIS configuration for Issuetrak sites. This adds some protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks and Cross-Site Script Inclusion (XSSI).
   
• We've removed AspNet-Version and AspNetMVC-Version headers from the default Issuetrak site configuration in IIS. This prevents the server from disclosing the version of ASP being used.   
   
• SItes will no longer display verbose error messages when a problem is encountered.

User Session Timeout

The System Defaults screen has been updated with a new option to allow you to set a global user session timeout from within the application. This improves security by forcing users to log back into Issuetrak after they've exceeded the session timeout threshold.

Note that this timeout value must be shorter than the Core app pool's recycle interval.

User Authentication

In previous versions, when Active Directory was enabled, an option called "No Authentication" could be set on user accounts to force them NOT to use AD authentication. This option has been removed and replaced with a dropdown menu called "Authentication Type" which is less ambiguous. The following two options appear in the dropdown menu: 

• Issuetrak
• Active Directory

Database Schema

The database schema has been updated to reflect the change to the Users table and an additional field that can be used for the Report Writer:

• The "NoAuthentication" column has been removed from the Users table and replaced with "AuthenticationTypeID" to serve a similar purpose. 
   
• We've made it possible to query the new "AuthenticationTypeID" column in Report Writer.

Active Directory

An error would appear when attempting to use the "Search AD" button on the Add User screen. 

API

When the API was used to create an issue, it was not allowing the PriorityID value to be blank.

Knowledge Base

When anonymous KB access was enabled, an error would appear to users that anonymously accessed the KB after clicking a category.

Round Robin Issue Assignments

The star of this release is Round Robin Issue Assignments. The core of this feature is the Round Robin attribute for groups. Groups with the Round Robin attribute enabled can be set as the assignee for Incoming Email (IEM), Auto Assignment rules, or anywhere else that designates an issue assignee. However, the resulting behavior is somewhat different: Any issue assigned to a Round Robin group gets assigned to a member of the group. The order of assignment is determined alphabetically by User ID.

• Find out more about Round Robin in this brand new article!
   
• Are you curious about Round Robin, but not sure if it will be useful to you? Have a look at various use scenarios for Round Robin!

Incoming Email Toggle Slider

We've made it easier to toggle IEM mailboxes with a new Active slider on the IEM Mailbox List screen.

Auto-Wildcarded Entity Search

It can sometimes be difficult to search for entities (Organizations, Users, Groups, Locations, and Departments) if you have a lot of them with similar-looking names. We've made it easier to search for entities in Issuetrak by allowing you to search for fragments of entity names, and returning results containing those search fragments.

Location Column in My Issues

We've added the Location column to the My Issues screen. Note that this column will only appear on the My Issues screen if it is in Expanded View mode.

Improved Password Change Screen

We've improved the user interface for Administrators so that the Change Password screen is easier to understand. When you change another user's password, it is much more clear which password goes into each field.

Application Programming Interface (API)

Issues submitted via the API were being required to contain a value for PriorityID, despite the Priority field not being a required field for custom screens.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

CSRF tokens were incorrectly being added to custom site logo URLs. 

Incoming Email

It was possible to unintentionally prevent incoming emails from being processed from an email address by adding the address to the Keywords list.

Report Writer

Users were able to access private UDFs in Report Writer without having the necessary permissions.

Saved Search

When users ran a Saved Search, the message "No token found" was displayed and they would be logged out.

Special Function Table

The Special Function Table would not appear on the Administration menu for Sys Admin users unless they went to the Optional Fields page and clicked Update. 

Surveys

When users took a survey and went back a page, the Back button would disappear.

Users

Users with their default home page set to "Knowledge Base" would no longer be able to access the site if the Knowledge Base feature was subsequently turned off.