Release Notes

Freshservice Release Notes - May 2022

Related products: Freshservice

Important update: We have updated the scope of work for ‘Escalation levels in the on-call management’ on 20th May 2022. With the new scope, users can now increase the total interval between escalation levels by up to 1 day instead of 7 days.

Note: All the features/enhancements below will be available on Starter and Growth plans on May 16th. For Pro and Enterprise plans will be available on May 30th.

Product version: 2022.R05L.01


New Features and Enhancements

 

Increase the interval between escalation levels by up to 7* days

Category: IT Operations Management

In the On-Call Management module, users can now increase the escalation interval across all levels by up to seven* days. Earlier limited to 30 minutes, the time gap can now be configured in days, hours, and minutes.

More details here.

*Important update: We have updated the scope of work for ‘Escalation levels in the on-call management’ on 20th May 2022. With the new scope, users can now increase the total interval between escalation levels by up to 1 day instead of 7 days.

 

Lookup fields to Ticket Forms 

Category: IT Service Management

Admins can now create ticket fields by referencing relevant data within the service desk. With lookup fields, location, users, departments, and asset values can be referred to in ticket forms.

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Upgraded APIs - Version 2

Category: IT Service Management

To empower our users with improved API consistency and enhanced experience, we are deprecating the older version (API V1) by November 30, 2022,  and moving to an upgraded version (API V2).

The following features will be impacted due to this deprecation. We recommend replacing API V1  calls with the corresponding API V2 endpoints in the below features.

  • Workflow Automator ( Web Request nodes and “Trigger Webhook” Action nodes)

  • Custom apps

  • Portal Customization 

  • Any custom services or middleware developed using Freshservice APIs

Post the deprecation date of November 30, 2022,all API V1 endpoints will not be operational. I.e. all workflows and customizations using API V1 endpoints will stop working. 

More details here.

 

Upgrading from the Reports Module to the Analytics Module

Category: IT Service Management

To empower our users with a more robust analytics solution, we are upgrading them from our legacy Reports module to the Analytics module and deprecating the Reports module. This deprecation will affect all the customers using the legacy Reports module, who have already been given access to the Analytics module. 

More details here.

The timelines for the process are:

Date

Changes

Action Required

June 2022

  • The ability to create and edit reports and schedules will be disabled in the legacy Reports module. You will need to leverage the Analytics module to create and edit new reports, schedules, and exports.

  • Migration of old reports to the Analytics module will begin in a phased manner.

  • All schedules that you created in the legacy Reports module will be migrated to the Analytics module in a disabled state. 

Users should move to the Analytics module for all their reporting needs as they will not be able to create reports, schedules or exports on the legacy Reports module from June

Nov 2022

  • The legacy Reports module will be deprecated and customers would no longer be able to access it.

  • All schedules migrated from the legacy Reports module will be enabled in the Analytics module.

  • Agents who are authorized to access the reports module would automatically be granted the corresponding permissions for Analytics.

 

Renaming ‘Department’ & ‘Requester’ Fields in Analytics [For Single Account MSP Customers only]

Category: IT Service Management

To ensure uniformity in field names across all modules, we are renaming ‘Department’ and ‘Requester’ fields to ‘Company’ and ‘Contact’ respectively in the analytics module in November 2022.

This change applies only to our Single-Account MSP mode customers and might have an impact on any third-party integrations/reports built using data exports if the Department / Requester field names are used in those reports. Users must revisit the analytics integrations/apps built using data exports and make necessary changes to the field names.

 

Deprecation of password-based authentication for Google & Microsoft Email

Category: IT Service Management

Google and Microsoft are going to deprecate the support for password-based authentication due to security protocols. Going forward, they will only support OAuth for their email servers.

To prevent any disruption to the ticketing system due to this deprecation and to continue to allow Freshservice to send and receive email through their Gmail/Microsoft accounts, users will need to reauthorize Freshservice to access them using OAuth.

More details here.

Who is impacted by this change?

It applies to customers who have configured helpdesk mailboxes using Google and Microsoft email addresses through password-based authentication.

Date

Changes

Action Required

31st May 2022

Google will no longer support password-based authentication. Mailboxes that continue to use password-based authentication beyond this date cannot send and receive Freshservice mail.

Re-authorize the configuration if you see a banner inside your helpdesk, or a ‘Migrate Now’ sign next to the custom email server(s) 

30th September 2022

Microsoft will no longer support password-based authentication. Mailboxes that continue to use password-based authentication beyond this date cannot send and receive Freshservice mail.

 

New error codes for unauthorized API V1 usage

Category: IT Service Management

We have moved from the generic 200 response code for unauthorized API V1 actions to causation-based error codes.

Previous Code

  • Error Code 200: The user is non authorized to continue with the action

Current Code

  • Error Code 401: The user has input the wrong password/API key

  • Error Code 403: The user doesn't have sufficient permission to make that particular API Call


 

Bug Fixes

 

These were the product defects detected and they’ve now been fixed.

  • Users were unable to attach files while raising tickets via the feedback widget (applies to both pop-up and embedded widget).

  • In the Freshcaller integration widget, during an active call ‘create ticket’ slider disappears.

  • When the schedule is being added the second time to the on call calendar, it throws an error.

  • Execution logs did not work when the orchestration feature was not present.

  • In user management ‘can see all tickets from this department’ or ‘department_ids’ field was being set to false by an API call

  • When a group is created via the MS AD Orch app and a value is entered in the ‘OtherAttributes’ field, it fails to complete the action.

The link for the “More details“ for API redirects you to https://support.freshservice.com/en/support/solutions and not to https://support.freshservice.com/en/support/solutions/articles/50000004220-introducing-upgraded-apis-for-freshservice?_gl=1*254gdc*_gcl_aw*R0NMLjE2NTE0NzE5MTkuQ2p3S0NBaUFsZnFPQmhBZUVpd0FZaTQzRjM0TWVTZEYyakx5dHFMS3VveFJwQkNCaVhyck85azRadm83eWRvYVZkSnZTMUVFVW1FUEJob0NVTkVRQXZEX0J3RQ..*_ga*MTk1ODg1MTM0MC4xNjQwMjUxMTI2*_ga_5S1FBQDGB1*MTY1MjQ0MDUxNS45NS4xLjE2NTI0NDM5MjAuNDM.


Great round of updates!


Re: ‘Lookup fields to Ticket Forms’
Will the Analytics reporting we able to display the new Lookup fields in the Tabular Data format? We have been waiting for the Analytics to be able to display the data lookup fields on Service Items (#8238717) for some time. I’m hoping this is all resolved in this latest round of updates. Could you clarify?


Glad to see “Lookup Fields to Ticket Forms”, I hope this means that custom objects will be available to access in ticket forms soon as well!!! That would be game changing!


Lookup fields to Ticket Forms


Does this include Custom Objects 👀


Will these updates be automatically applied or does are administrator need to review then push out an update? Can we update ourselves if we have administrative rights? Lastly, has the update been released and if not when is expected date for that?

Thank you, 

 


Does anyone know how or if it’s even possible to do a Time Sheet Report with the Analytics module? We can’t run our business without this but I can’t seem to figure it out in the Analytics. 


The link for the “More details“ for API redirects you to https://support.freshservice.com/en/support/solutions and not to https://support.freshservice.com/en/support/solutions/articles/50000004220-introducing-upgraded-apis-for-freshservice?_gl=1*254gdc*_gcl_aw*R0NMLjE2NTE0NzE5MTkuQ2p3S0NBaUFsZnFPQmhBZUVpd0FZaTQzRjM0TWVTZEYyakx5dHFMS3VveFJwQkNCaVhyck85azRadm83eWRvYVZkSnZTMUVFVW1FUEJob0NVTkVRQXZEX0J3RQ..*_ga*MTk1ODg1MTM0MC4xNjQwMjUxMTI2*_ga_5S1FBQDGB1*MTY1MjQ0MDUxNS45NS4xLjE2NTI0NDM5MjAuNDM.

Thanks for pointing it out. This is fixed now.


Will these updates be automatically applied or does are administrator need to review then push out an update? Can we update ourselves if we have administrative rights? Lastly, has the update been released and if not when is expected date for that?

Thank you, 

 

Hey Jimmy, most of the updates will be directly added to your account (timelines depend on the Freshservice subscription plan you are on), as mentioned at the start of the release notes.
For some updates, you might need to do a few things on your end. Please reach out to your CSM; they can help here.


Does anyone know how or if it’s even possible to do a Time Sheet Report with the Analytics module? We can’t run our business without this but I can’t seem to figure it out in the Analytics. 

yes this PDF Reports are essetial for our business also, please bring the old Time Sheet Report back asap


Does anyone know how or if it’s even possible to do a Time Sheet Report with the Analytics module? We can’t run our business without this but I can’t seem to figure it out in the Analytics. 

yes this PDF Reports are essetial for our business also, please bring the old Time Sheet Report back asap

@AwantikaJha


@juergen.marmann @phodgkinson This solution article explains how to build a timesheet report: “How to build timesheet report”.

Hope this helps.


@juergen.marmann @phodgkinson This solution article explains how to build a timesheet report: “How to build timesheet report”.

Hope this helps.

so far we could not get it all in PDF like the old Report. There was a choice to export as PDF,CSV,Excel

we need the PDF Export of all Data not only the first page

 


@juergen.marmann @phodgkinson This solution article explains how to build a timesheet report: “How to build timesheet report”.

Hope this helps.

so far we could not get it all in PDF like the old Report. There was a choice to export as PDF,CSV,Excel

we need the PDF Export of all Data not only the first page

 

Please raise a support ticket at support.freshservice.com. Our agent will pick this up and provide all the necessary help.


@Mirela Xhota 


The Time Sheet report has been completely ruined by the new “improved” analytics module.

 

Major issues:

 

  1. Can only see 10 items on a page at a time when used to be able to see an entire week or worth of time which made it easy to find time items without descriptions or other omissions.
     
  2. Export to CSV exports the actual time as Nh NNm NNs like 1h 15m 0s instead of decimal like it used to, 1.25 was previously exported and could be used directly importing into quickbooks or other software so you can bill for 1.25 hours @ rate… Now this new format can’t be imported into anything not even excel wants to translate it back.
     
  3. Export to PDF is missing, used to print these as a history item and they were formatted nicely.

 @russell_16303  - Please find my inline comments in blue. 
 

The Time Sheet report has been completely ruined by the new “improved” analytics module.

 

Major issues:

 

  1. Can only see 10 items on a page at a time when used to be able to see an entire week or worth of time which made it easy to find time items without descriptions or other omissions.
    In case if you are referring to a migrated timesheet report, on the reports page(the page that appears as soon as you open the migrated report), we would have been limiting the data that is shown in the tabular widgets in order to honour the layout of the report and give better performance. You can choose to expand the tabular widget and get better visualisations, and customise the columns that are represented in the tabular data as needed.
     
  2. Export to CSV exports the actual time as Nh NNm NNs like 1h 15m 0s instead of decimal like it used to, 1.25 was previously exported and could be used directly importing into quickbooks or other software so you can bill for 1.25 hours @ rate… Now this new format can’t be imported into anything not even excel wants to translate it back.
    You can choose to change the format of the time representation to “Hours”(or as needed) by opening the widget which shows cumulative time sheet hours. Below image for reference. You can change the time representation format to “Hours”(or as needed) by opening the widget which shows cumulative timesheet hours. Below is an image for reference.
  3. Export to PDF is missing, used to print these as a history item and they were formatted nicely.
    The export button on the right top of the reports page would, by default, export the report in the PDF format (below image)

    In addition to it, you can also choose to open any specific widget and export the widget data both in PDF and CSV formats(below image)
     

     

Feel free to drop an email to support@freshservice.com in case you need more help adapting to Analytics reports which got migrated from the Legacy reports module or to get more clarifications on the capabilities of the Analytics module. Your email would be created as a ticket automatically, and we would have one of our support reps assist you with the same.  

 


Thank you!  That wasn’t the exact solution but was able to figure out that changing the report of the individual tickets from Total Hours to Average Hours by Hour I got the decimal output that was needed!


Glad to see “Lookup Fields to Ticket Forms”, I hope this means that custom objects will be available to access in ticket forms soon as well!!! That would be game changing!

Hi @zachary.king ,

This item is part of our roadmap, we are exploring pre-requisites for implementing. Post this we should be having a definite timeline. 


Lookup fields to Ticket Forms


Does this include Custom Objects 👀

Hi @sean.groomes,

Currently we don't include Custom Objects. We are exploring pre-requisites for implementing this. Post this we should be having a definite timeline for this item.