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Jivespace & Supportal get an upgrade!

Posted by Will French on Apr 17, 2009 10:24:20 AM

Welcome to Jive SBS! We just upgraded our Jivespace community to SBS 3.0.1, and along with it upgraded the Supportal customization, adding a few new features and improvements.

 

If you see any issues, please post a discussion in our Supportal Feedback space or create a public case there, and we'll get it addressed quickly.

 

Now, on to the new features:

 

An updated Open Cases widget allows prioritizing by the customer

We previously allowed you to view your open cases, but sometimes when you have a few open cases it can be helpful to rank them in importance--both for you and your company, but for us as well. Have a look at it here, and it will automatically be in your account's secure space next time you log in!

 

http://content.screencast.com/users/klassikstile/folders/Jing/media/021663a7-277a-4f3f-a755-08d636bfc98c/2009-04-06_1501.png

 

Account Member Management falls into the hands of the Customer

Prior to this Supportal upgrade, if you wanted to add or remove someone from your secure space, you needed to ask Support to do so. Well, with the upgraded Supportal, you can now put this power into the hands of someone that is currently a part of your account. There is still one manual step, asking Support to appoint one of your users as 'user admin' for your account. Once designated, the user admin can add and remove users, as well as add/remove the admin privilege should that assignment need to change. You can see the link to manage account members on the Group Membership Widget on your secure space overview. Don't see it? Ask Support to add it to your account space today!

 

 

First integrated Environment tracking on cases

Are you tired of Support continually asking what version you're running, or similar questions? Well, we're tired of asking it too ! We've now taken the first step to associating Environments to each and every one of your cases. That way, if the version does matter, we can simply take a look at the environment you have associated with the case and dive right into troubleshooting. What's the catch? We are going to need you to keep these as current as possible in order to make this all work smoothly. We are hoping to evolve this to be able to eliminate the Product drop down and solely use Environments in the future. We welcome your feedback and help in shaping this new feature in the Supportal. Please visit our Supportal Feedback space to do this.

 

environments.png

 

Lastly, some new UI when creating a case

As you can see from the screenshot above, we've added some indication of what fields are required when creating a new case, and something you may also not notice is that we have taken away the 'Stage' detail as it was not useful to us.

 

Again, please let us know if you see any issues, and we hope you enjoy the new Supportal and the overall upgrade to SBS!

1,918 Views Tags: jivespace, upgrade, supportal, sbs


Apr 18, 2009 5:23 AM Ken Domen Ken Domen    says:

nice!  I'm a big fan of the Supportal. 

Apr 20, 2009 8:30 AM Senthil Vaiyapuri Senthil Vaiyapuri    says:

Hi Will,

 

  The environment association looks quite good.  btw, is it implemented as a new contentType

  in the Supportal Clearspace instance ?  Just curious.  Actually, if so and acceptable, showcasing

  that as the example/sample usage for implementing new ContentTypes would be great,

  immensely helpful to see a working implementation and the backing code.

 

  Actually it would be good to see how Cases are implemented as well.  I am interested in seeing, if

  it is a extended existing contentType with name-value properties or another new ContentType.

  A sample of each would help the customizing customers.

 

  Also, if you could expose just enough read-only information abou the JIRA cases, which are

  associated to the cases would be good as well.

 

  Best Regards,

  -senthil

Apr 20, 2009 8:51 AM Will French Will French    says in response to Senthil Vaiyapuri:

Thanks for the feedback!

 

We did implement the Environments as a new custom content type, and we have plans to explain in some detail how this was done in the near future (in a blog post here).

 

Since our 'cases' existed in 2.5.x, there was no custom content type functionality then, so it is extending Threads / Questions and using extended properties. It is a pretty developed customization, and I'll see what I can do about explaining some of our customization in a future blog post.

 

Lastly, we are working hard at exposing the JIRA issues via another custom content type, 'JIRA Issue' which actually can go back and forth between our JIRA instance, and the Supportal. This will also be blogged about when it is complete, but I don't expect it to be complete for a few months.

 

Thanks again,

Will

Apr 21, 2009 6:37 AM Greg Jankowski Greg Jankowski    says:

1) Can environments be used in other areas (i.e., discussions). When uses are answering questions in the forums, they also want to know what version the person asking the question is on. Otherwise, it is very have to answer the question.

 

2) The environments.png image does not display.

May 14, 2009 11:00 AM Austen Rustrum Austen Rustrum    says in response to Greg Jankowski:

1) Can environments be used in other areas (i.e., discussions). When uses are answering questions in the forums, they also want to know what version the person asking the question is on. Otherwise, it is very have to answer the question.

 

At this point, environments can only be used in support cases that are filed in private support cases, but long term we may end up having something similar for public discussions as well. 

 

The environment association looks quite good.  btw, is it implemented as a new contentType

  in the Supportal Clearspace instance ?  Just curious.  Actually, if so and acceptable, showcasing

  that as the example/sample usage for implementing new ContentTypes would be great,

  immensely helpful to see a working implementation and the backing code.

 

I just put up a new blog post about this feature and the answer is "yes," it is implemented as a custom content type!  For fully functional example of the content type framework, see the links at the bottom of the post.