Important update:
1. The release of audit logs for the service catalog has changed and will now be available for all plans from the first week of October.
2. The audit log for department fields enhancement will be made available by early August, instead of July 29th, 2024.
Note: All the features/enhancements below will be available on Starter and Growth plans on July 16th, 2024 & on Pro and Enterprise plans on July 30th, 2024.
Product version: 2024.R07L.01
New Features and Enhancements
Translate incoming tickets on the go with Freddy Copilot
Category: IT Service Management
When agents receive tickets in unfamiliar languages, support becomes challenging, delaying resolution and reducing employee satisfaction. Freddy Copilot’s Translator helps agents translate tickets into their preferred language, enabling swift and effective support. This streamlines cross-regional communication, cuts response times and boosts employee satisfaction for globally distributed teams.
More details here.
Respond effectively with Freddy Copilot’s improved reply suggestions
Category: IT Service Management
Drafting fast, effective responses requires incorporating relevant context from across the service desk. To ensure this, Freddy Copilot’s enhanced reply suggester now includes context from tickets created in the last six months, as well as resolution notes, to provide comprehensive and context-rich resolution.
Analyze and report on Knowledge Base performance
Category: IT Service Management
Maintaining a knowledge base based on real-time employee needs is integral in meeting the workforce’s everyday queries and deflecting them to free up agents’ time. With knowledge base reports, users can now analyze and report on the knowledge base’s performance to fine-tune it to the employee’s needs. Users can measure article performance based on views and helpful/unhelpful votes and track article reviews/pending approvals in a single pane.
Note: For customers using the beta version of this report, upcoming improvements will overwrite the current curated report. Customizations and schedules need to be refreshed and updated to leverage recent improvements.
More details here.
Archival of Historic Tickets
Category: IT Service Management
Following our communication in March, please note the following updates regarding the archival of historic tickets:
- The default configuration for ticket archival has been updated from '6 months' to '1 year'.
- An account must have a minimum of 500,000 total tickets to be eligible for archival.
- For accounts with over 500,000 tickets, the archival process will be completed in a phased manner by the end of October 2024.
- For accounts reaching the 500,000-ticket threshold after October, ticket archival will be triggered automatically on a weekly basis.
- Administrators of all accounts will receive email notifications stating that the account is eligible for archival and that it has started.
More details here.
Auto Refresh for Tickets and Changes
Category: IT Service Management
Multiple agents working on a ticket simultaneously or workflow automations triggered by ticket property updates can cause visibility issues unless the agent manually clicks on "update." To ensure real-time visibility and to seamlessly integrate critical updates into the interface, we are launching an auto-refresh mechanism for the ticket and change modules.
More details here.
Extended Support for Lookup Fields
Category: IT Service Management
The timeline for the lookup field support has been changed from June to August. Enterprise customers will have access to this feature only if they are using the new Sandbox.
Audit logs for Service Catalog
Category: IT Service Management
The service catalog will now be captured in the audit log. This includes all creations or modifications of service categories, service items, and fields, ensuring better governance and tracking.
Important update: The release of audit logs for the service catalog has changed and will now be available for all plans from the first week of October.
Introduction of CAB APIs
Category: IT Service Management
Freshservice now supports APIs for programmatically creating, reading, updating, and deleting CAB (Change Advisory Board) entries.
More details here.
Field Sorting Enhancements
Category: IT Service Management
Admins can now sort both default and custom fields alphabetically, including dropdown fields, dependent fields, and multi-select dropdown fields, improving data organization and fostering ease of use.
Analytics Support for Change Planning
Category: IT Service Management
Analytics support is now expanded to the planning section under the change management module. This section will cover the reason for change, impact, rollout plan, backout plan, and other custom fields, allowing for more comprehensive insights.
Enhanced ticket privacy options
Category: IT Service Management
Admins can now make a user the ‘Department Head’ while restricting the user's access to all tickets within that department. This approach helps keep ticket data confidential while still ensuring that the department head can approve the necessary tickets.
Get access to multiple Sandboxes
Category: IT Service Management
Users can now purchase access to multiple Sandboxes at an additional cost, up to a maximum of two. To learn more about the pricing terms, please write to us at support@freshservice.com or reach out to your Customer Success Manager or Account Manager.
Note: This enhancement will be available starting 16th July 2024 and is available only for customers on the Enterprise plan.
Enhanced Audit Log for Department Fields
Category: IT Service Management
Audit logs now track all changes made to the departments in the service desk. This includes monitoring updates, additions, and deletions of the department fields. With this enhancement, users can easily record all modifications in departments for better transparency and control.
Important update: This enhancement will be made available by early August, instead of July 29th, 2024.
Audit logs for on-call services
Category: IT Operations Management
Admins can now track changes made to on-call schedules, shifts, and escalation paths via audit logs. This allows them to determine who made changes to their on-call management module and brings more transparency and accountability to their team members.
Note: Audit logs are available for Enterprise plan customers only.
More details here.
Additional filters on the alerts list page
Category: IT Operations Management
Users can now select a specific date range when filtering alerts based on the ‘Created On’ and ‘Updated On’ values. Users will now be able to quickly identify and focus on alerts within a particular period for more precise tracking and analysis of alerts.
Disabling Take Action Feature
Category: IT Asset Management
We are revamping our approach to cloud resource discovery and management in Freshservice. To support this approach, we have temporarily disabled the "Take Action" feature for cloud assets from the Ticket details page.
More details here.
Auto-generate Test Cases with Freddy Copilot
Category: Project Management
Users can now get ready-to-use test cases generated automatically with the power of AI. With this, testing & QA engineers can leverage the power of AI to generate test cases and save time in the end-to-end QA cycle.
More details here.
Custom Object Enhancements
Category: Automation
Admins can now delete or edit specific custom objects directly from the list view page. They can also manage individual object fields and records, providing greater flexibility and control over their custom objects.
Integrate ServiceNow with Freshservice
Category: Apps & Integrations
The Freshservice and ServiceNow integration offers service management teams enhanced visibility and efficiency when collaborating with multiple stakeholders through seamless ticket sync. Admins can set up ticket sync using predefined recipes to create and update tickets between both systems.
More details here.
Integrate Five9 CTI with Freshservice
Category: Apps & Integrations
The Freshservice integration with Five9 CTI App offers an all-in-one solution for efficient call management. It ensures every user interaction is logged, recorded, and accessible within Freshservice. Agents can handle inbound and outbound calls from within the Freshservice dashboard, enhancing productivity and service delivery.
More details here.
Integrate GoTo Resolve with Freshservice
Category: Apps & Integrations
The integration between Freshservice and GoTo Resolve offers agents an effective way to access and manage the requester’s desktop to troubleshoot and solve issues faster. Agents can now initiate a remote session and gain access to the requester’s desktop directly through a widget from the Freshservice ticket console.
More details here.
Integrate ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus with Freshservice
Category: Apps & Integrations
The integration between Freshservice and ServiceDesk Plus allows service management teams to collaborate better through automated ticket sync. Admins can use the predefined recipes to enable the automatic sync, which handles creating and updating tickets between both systems.
More details here.
Important Updates
Notices for new changes/upgrades/deprecation activities
The following changes will be made effective by Nov 5th, 2024. Ensure that you’re prepared for it.
- Fair Usage Policy (FUP) for Freshservice Analytics
To ensure that all our customers have an uninterrupted, performant, and smooth reporting experience, we are implementing safeguards in some of our analytics capabilities starting Nov 5th, 2024. Please note that there is no immediate impact to your existing reports. You can continue to create and edit reports without any restrictions.
Who will be impacted?
If you have created reports, data exports, or schedules in Freshservice Analytics that violate the Fair Usage Policy, you will be impacted by this change.
What do you need to do?
Ensure all your reports adhere to the FUP before Nov 5th, 2024. Follow in-product instructions displayed starting May 16th, 2024, and resolve FUP violations.
More details here.
- Discontinuation of Legacy Versions of Marketplace Apps
We will discontinue legacy versions of a few Marketplace apps to ensure that you get enhanced and consistent app experiences. To ensure that these apps work as expected without disruptions, you will need to upgrade them by Nov 5th, 2024.
Who will be impacted?
You will be impacted if you are using any of the older versions of these apps.
What do you need to do?
Upgrade to the latest versions of these apps.
More details here.
- Discontinuation of AWS Orchestration App
To ensure that you get both Cloud Discovery and Orchestration capabilities in a single Cloud Management app, the AWS EC2 - Orchestration app will be discontinued on Nov 5th, 2024.
Who will be impacted?
If you use the AWS EC2 - Orchestration app (for cloud asset actions and custom workflows), you will be impacted by this discontinuation.
What do you need to do?
You can install the new AWS Cloud Management app and uninstall the AWS EC2 - Orchestration app.
If you have workflows that use nodes from the Orchestration app, replace them with new nodes from the AWS Cloud Management app.
More details here.
- Deprecation of the current Sandbox version
To ensure you experience the enhanced capabilities of the revamped Sandbox in Freshservice, we will be deprecating the current version of Sandbox by Nov 5th, 2024.
Who will be impacted?
You will be impacted if you have an active Sandbox created using the current version on or before Nov 5th, 2024.
What do you need to do?
If you have an active Sandbox that belongs to the current version, you can destroy or sync it to enable the revamped Sandbox version in your account.
For example, If your account has Sandboxes across three workspaces (Global, IT, and HR), destroy or sync all of them to access the revamped version.
More details here.
Bug Fixes
These were the product defects detected, and they have now been fixed.
- When an on-call shift was created in a timezone with daylight savings, users were blocked from creating a shift with the error “something went wrong,” as the shift start time was in the past. Now, shift creation takes daylight savings into account and does not falsely throw the error.
- We fixed the issue with providing coverage in on-call management that led to shift override time being overridden to 0 hr 0 min, thereby changing the hand-off time between the shifts.
- Saving a dashboard after removing the ‘Leaderboard’ dashboard widget threw an error. Now it can be removed and saved without issues.
- Agents with "Cancel Approvals" permission were not able to cancel approvals for tickets in non-IT workspaces. Now, approvals can be removed based on the permission across all workspaces.
- Removed stale ticket field entries from the analytics to prevent the display of irrelevant data.
