We have been working hard on the forthcoming SupportPal 5.0.0 release. As we apply the finishing touches and put it through final testing, we'd like to preview the major changes the new version will bring.
The flagship feature of version 5 is the new reports section. It has been redesigned from the ground up to help you get a better view of how your help desk and team are performing.
Reports are now made up of one or more dashboards, and each dashboard can have multiple cards. Each card shows some specific data, be it a number, a chart, or a full table. This lets you see more data at once and makes it easier to compare statistics and data points.
As before, a timeframe and filtering options can be applied to relevant reports, updating all the cards dynamically. Individual cards can be printed or exported as CSV.
A handy new feature is the ability to view the underlying data behind a whole card or an individual data point in a chart or table.
This brings up a window showing the data, usually tickets or users, with relevant links or context. A good example where this is useful is when you have a few tickets with a long first reply time or time to resolution and want to assess what happened on them - now you can click the data point in the graph and access those tickets quickly. The underlying data can also be exported.
The new reports work under the same add-on system that powers our plugins, channels, and more. We will have a full development guide available at the launch of the new version.
The SLA plan system is now much more flexible than before. A new "next reply time" target has been introduced so you can set a target for the next operator response to the ticket since the user's last unanswered message (after the first operator reply).
SLA targets can now also be left blank, if for example you do not want to set a due time for the resolution of the ticket, but just for the next reply to the ticket.
The reply and resolve due time of a ticket are stored and shown separately, making it easier to track each case. If you don’t use SLA plans, you can still manually set a due time for the reply or resolve separately.
Finally, there is new reporting of SLA targets and breaches. Keep track of the performance of your team for each SLA plan target set and also see a list of breached due times and the corresponding tickets.
We're introducing support for two new search engines, in addition to the existing MySQL full-text engine.
If you're unhappy with the accuracy or speed of the default MySQL full-text driver, these new drivers will be welcome choices.
Users can now set more than one email address on their profile, which can be used when parsing incoming emails. This is useful in cases where the user may contact you from different email addresses. Email addresses are also now kept and combined when merging users.
PHP 7.4 is now end of life, and as such the new version will require PHP 8.1. We are similarly bumping the MySQL required minimum version to 5.7.
PHP 8.2 support will be available in a future release once there are supported ionCube loaders.
The release is currently going through final testing and quality assurance, we expect it to be ready soon - keep posted!
