Note: All the features/enhancements below will be available on Starter and Growth plans on Dec 14th 2023. For Pro and Enterprise plans will be available on Jan 3rd 2024.
Product version: 2023.R12L.01
New Features and Enhancements
Holiday Theme Enablement
Category: IT Service Management
Bring the spirit of the festive season into your everyday experiences with our holiday theme. With the holiday season around the corner, users can enhance their daily routines to make them more joyous and magical!
To disable this theme, click on your profile and use the toggle to turn off the holiday theme.
Note: This will be enabled for all customers from December 14th onwards. Also, this enhancement is optional for all users.
Create new Freshchat trial accounts from Freshservice
Category: IT Service Management
You can now create and integrate a new Freshchat trial account within Freshservice.
A new home for legacy Freddy AI features
Category: IT Service Management
Admins can now enable and disable Similar incident suggestions and Field suggester from under Freddy Copilot in Admin > Freddy AI > Freddy.
Note: These features will continue to be free for customers who signed up before November 10th, 2023. For customers who signed up after November 10th, this will be charged as a part of the Copilot add-on starting February 5th, 2024.
SLAs for Changes
Category: IT Service Management
Users can now set up SLAs for changes, enabling stronger governance and effectiveness for change management. To enable SLAs for changes, go to My team > SLA and OLA policies, and activate the toggle under the Changes tab.
Note: Enabling SLAs for changes activates the 'Due by' field, business hour policies, and email notifications for changes that breach SLAs.
List all Groups API
Category: IT Service Management
The list all groups API (/api/v2/groups) will return agent groups from the primary workspace by default. Upon specifying a workspace ID ("/api/v2/groups?workspace_id=[number]"), the agent groups belonging to that workspace are returned.
Sandbox support for Major Incident Management
Category: IT Operations Management
Enterprise customers will now be able to design and test their Major Incident Management process in their sandbox accounts. This would include:
- Enabling the Major Incident ticket type and configuring workflows using the Workflow Automator to specifically handle major incidents
- Using the Major Incident ticket type to trigger escalations via On-Call Management
- Uploading and testing email templates for stakeholder communication
- Trying out Post Incident Reporting
This ability will help organizations fine tune and deploy their major incident management process quickly and with greater confidence, while containing risks from major incidents.
Delegation of Onboarding/Offboarding form submission requests
Category: Freshservice for Business Teams
Stakeholders involved in employee onboarding/offboarding workflows will be able to delegate form submissions assigned to them during their absence. This would ensure the timely processing of onboarding/offboarding requests without any delays.
More details here.
Reports on Onboarding and Offboarding
Category: Freshservice for Business Teams
HR operations leaders will now get actionable insights on onboarding and offboarding operations through curated and custom reports. This helps with the identification of gaps and bottlenecks, further streamlining employee workflows for enhanced efficiency.
Read the article below to learn about the report and the impact on onboarding APIs.
More details here.
Workflow Automator Enhancements
Category: Automation
Admins can now use the service desk portal URL placeholder in Freshservice Workflow nodes. This can come in handy to customize notifications by embedding portal link placeholders in automated notifications.
Important updates
Upgrades and Deprecations
Reminders for upcoming upgrades and deprecations
Follow-up to our “Notices for new upgrades/migration activities” communication sent in Nov 2023.
The following change will be made effective by May 2024. Ensure that you’re prepared for it in your Freshservice account.
- Incremental Data Exports in Freshservice
To provide you a faster, scalable solution to download data, or transfer data into your BI platform or custom applications, we are upgrading to Incremental Data Exports from May 1st, 2024.
Who will be impacted?
If you are currently using data exports from Freshservice Analytics to build reports using external BI tools, or are consuming data exports in your custom applications, you will be impacted by this upgrade.
What should you do?
- If you consume data exports in your BI tools, reconfigure your BI tools to receive incremental exports instead of full exports.
- If you consume data exports in your custom applications, modify your applications to process incremental exports instead of full exports.
If you have questions, reach out to support@freshservice.com.
More details here.
- Discontinuation of Team Huddle
The Team Huddle feature will be discontinued by Apr 1st, 2024, as we will be focussing on our integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack, where we will continue to further enhance and add new collaboration features.
Who will be impacted?
If your agents use Team Huddle for collaboration, you will be impacted by this discontinuation.
What can you do?
Explore and transition to our Slack and MS Teams based collaboration capabilities, or stay tuned for our upcoming “Share Ticket” feature.
Reach out to support@freshservice.com if you have any questions about this change.
More details here.
- Discontinuation of the legacy Slack Servicebot App
As the new Servicebot supports enhanced capabilities, the legacy version of Slack Servicebot app will be discontinued by May 1, 2024
Who will be impacted?
If you are currently using legacy Slack Servicebot app for ticket notifications, you will be impacted by this deprecation.
What can you do?
Please install our new Servicebot from the Freshservice Marketplace.
More details here.
- Discontinuation of Conversational UI
As Freshservice prepares to focus only on the latest version of the support portal and collaboration platforms like Slack and MS Teams., the legacy Conversational UI platform will be discontinued by May 1, 2024.
Who will be impacted?
If your employees currently use the legacy Conversational UI interface of the support portal for their everyday requests and interactions with Freshservice, you will be impacted by this discontinuation.
What can you do?
You can choose from any of the following options:
| Freshservice No-code portal | Virtual Agent | Freshchat Integration |
| Use the Freshservice Support portal & make it your own with our intuitive no-code customization capabilities. | Leverage our Virtual Agent which offers support within collaboration apps like Slack and MS Teams. | Explore our Freshchat widget integration within your Freshservice portal at a small additional cost, and get live chat support. |
If you have specific use cases that you would want us to help you with, please reach your customer success manager, or write to us at support@freshservice.com.
More details here.
- Discontinuation of Canned Response Suggester & Solution Article Suggester
Since the new Reply Suggester, which is part of our currently available Freddy Copilot offering, is an enhanced version of both the Canned Response Suggester (CRS) and Solution Article Suggester (SAS), and can perform more meaningful actions, these will be discontinued by May 1, 2024.
Who will be impacted?
If you were using either CRS or SAS, you will be impacted by this discontinuation.
What can you do?
Try out the Reply Suggester feature in Freddy Copilot. It is currently on public beta and will be available as a paid feature starting Feb 5th, 2024.
Note: Users will be able to create and use canned responses and solution articles. Only the ‘suggester’ (that intuitively suggests responses or articles) will be discontinued.
If you have further queries, please write to us at support@freshservice.com.
More details here.
- Discontinuation of Ask Freddy in Freshservice Analytics
The Ask Freddy functionality in Freshservice Analytics will be discontinued from Jan 2024.
Who will be impacted by this discontinuation?
If your agents use Ask Freddy to generate widgets by posing a question to Freddy, you will be impacted by this discontinuation.
What can you do?
Please reach out to support@freshservice.com if you have any questions about this discontinuation.
More details here.
Bug Fixes
These were the product defects detected, and they have now been fixed.
- If no services were configured to be displayed on the status page, even open incidents published to the status page were not displayed.
- The {{approval.portal_url}} placeholder in email notifications was not correctly utilizing portal-specific URLs.
- When collaborating on Major Incidents using email, the search box for users showed only the first 30 users in alphabetical order, even if more users were present.
- The workspace settings panel opened randomly when any icon on the left navigation pane was clicked.
- List of users against any admin role showed a maximum of 30 agents instead of the complete list of agents.
- Dashboard widgets that referred to ticket filters created using custom fields showed the wrong set of data in the ticket list view when drilled down further.
- In a multi-workspace setup, some users received ‘liquid error’ when they tried submitting a ticket without logging in.
. I know it has its challenges - it does however facilitate notifications to L2 and 3 escalations.