Issuetrak 17.1 is here, and we've got a nice combo of new features, feature updates, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements for you!
The first thing we want to talk about is the new Request Assistance feature. This is a setting that Sys Admins can toggle for a specific period of time, which will allow our Support team to sign into your site to help you with your Issuetrak instance. To be clear: we will never be able to enable this for your site on our own, and you must enable this access to your site in order for us to use this feature in collaboration with you.
Next, let's talk about the performance of Tasks - specifically, the time it takes to save them to an issue. Saving an issue should just take a few seconds, but in some cases it was taking about a minute. We didn't like that, and we're sure you didn't enjoy that either, so we set about fixing that. With some wizardry from our Development team, we think we've nailed it.
17.1 also comes with some nice improvements to site deployment. We're now allowing the use of gMSA accounts to deploy and run a site. Further refinements have resulted in a ~30% increase in site deployment speed. That means less downtime when you upgrade to 17.1 and beyond.
Incoming Email is seeing the introduction of a new setting to fine-tune mailbox processing behavior - Reply Only: Only process replies to existing issues.
We're rounding out this release with fixes to bugs that our customers have reported to us. Let's talk a bit more in-depth about 17.1 further below.
Task Performance
Tasks have been refactored to reduce the time it takes to save an issue with many (dozens, even hundreds) of tasks.
Deployment Tools
All deployment contexts will now deploy in parallel, resulting in a decent speedup to deployments. In our testing, we've seen deployment times reduced by around 30%.
Enable Support Access
We've added the ability for Sys Admins to grant Issuetrak Support access to their site from three different locations in Issuetrak to provide help with the site:
- In the help menu (circle with a "?") in the top right of your screen, then under the Contact Issuetrak or About Issuetrak sub-menus.
- On the Issuetrak License page from Settings (gear icon) > License within the System section.
- On the Issuetrak Security page from Settings (gear icon) > Security within the System section.
Access to the site is achieved by way of an effectively a two-stage scheme:
- A Sys Admin in your site navigates to the "Enable Support Access" option in your site, selects a duration to provide access to Issuetrak Support, then clicks Enable. The duration can be between 1 hour and 1 week, and can be revoked at any time.
- Issuetrak Support internally authenticates to our license service, then sees your site marked as having requested assistance. Issuetrak Support can then sign into your site to help you.
gMSA
We have made it possible for our deployment tools deploy and run a site using a gMSA account. The steps to do this are nearly identical to deploying a site using Integrated Security.
Incoming Email
A new configuration option is now available for each mailbox: "Reply Only: Only process replies to existing issues." As the verbiage of this setting implies, when this is enabled, IEM will only process emails targeting existing issues.
Asset Management
When a user opened the Asset Issue History for an asset, incorrect data would be displayed.
Billing Module
- The date would change on invoiced billing line items when they were updated.
- The date field for billing line items was no longer being automatically populated with today's date.
- It was possible to create duplicate Billing line item entries if you clicked on the "Update" button multiple times.
Deployment Tools
The IDM was not including sites that used Integrated Security when it scanned for existing sites.
Identity Management
When we added the "exact match" toggle for third party identity management in 17.0.2, we accidentally introduced a bug that prevented the toggle from working with organization and department mappings.