Important update: We have updated the release timelines of “Service Health Monitoring in Public Beta” on 31st Oct 2022. This enhancement will be available by Nov 15th instead of Oct 31st.
Note: All the features/enhancements below will be available on Starter and Growth plans on Oct 18th. For Pro and Enterprise plans will be available on Oct 31st.
Product version: 2022.R10L.01
New Features and Enhancements
Introducing Redesigned, New Tickets Experience
Category: IT Service Management
We have redesigned the tickets experience that gives you faster performance, improved readability, and better accessibility.
Ticket:
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Reply to and forward private notes
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View the details and description of the ticket in tab format
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Quickly move to the next activity using the app pane
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Determine at a glance if a ticket pertains to an incident, a problem, or a change from the icon next to the ticket title
Incident Create Form:
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Experience consistency with the Save, Cancel buttons moved to the bottom
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Drag and drop attachments and attach multiple files to an incident
Service Request:
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Improved search experience with the revamped search tab
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Search across categories using the new All Items option
More details here.
Sharing Tickets and Changes with other Requesters
Category: IT Service Management
Requesters can now share service requests and tickets with their subordinates. The current CC option only gives them incremental updates but does not give the complete view of the ticket. With this, they can add them as a co-requester of the ticket. If email notifications are enabled, they can also receive notifications based on the ticket status updates.
They can also share Changes associated with their Department (if they have access to it) from the Requester portal.
More details here.
Note: To ensure the option is enabled do check “Allow requesters to share tickets with others” and select “Yes”.
Ticket Custom Field Limit Increase
Category: IT Service Management
We have increased the total number of Ticket fields that can be configured in the form. Here's the split up.
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Dropdowns including multi-level nested drop-downs: 150
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Single line text fields: 150
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Date Fields: 25
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Paragraph fields: 50 by default (There will be a character limitation of 3000 chars)
Service Request and Change Approval via Email
Category: IT Service Management
With this enhancement change and service request approvers can respond to the requests directly from their inboxes. Freshservice will send an email to approval recipients where they can just reply with certain keywords in order to approve/reject the request.
This will remove additional steps for approvers to navigate across multiple screens to login into the product for approval/rejection of the requests.
More details here.
Service Request Creation Enhancement
Category: IT Service Management
Agents can now copy the field values while creating service requests for checkbox and dynamic sections from the parent form to additional items.
Support for paragraph fields in Problem, Release and Time Entries
Category: IT Service Management
Users can now view and export paragraph field values of Problems, Releases and Time Entries modules in Analytics.
Virtual Agent now supports Hybrid responses and Feedback controls on Slack
Category: IT Service Management
Reduce the number of times your employees resort to ticket creation by giving them more control over Virtual Agent’s responses to their queries. This is now supported on Slack in addition to Microsoft Teams.
Note: This was released on September 20th 2022 for all Enterprise accounts.
More details here.
Virtual Agent search no longer supports tag-based search
Category: IT Service Management
The virtual agent algorithm will use semantic and context-based search going forward. It will rely more on visible content (i.e. document title and description) and less on tags and keywords for powering this new search.
Note: This was released on September 15th 2022 for all Enterprise accounts.
Notify On-Call Agents on WhatsApp
Category: IT Operations Management
On-call agents can now receive notifications and respond to them over WhatsApp. They will be able to acknowledge, escalate, or resolve incidents from within WhatsApp. This enhancement is especially useful for users who've been unable to use SMS for notifications because of regulatory restrictions.
Service Health Monitoring in Public Beta
Category: IT Operations Management
Users can now define and monitor business and technical services by mapping assets and inter-dependencies for a service. By gaining clarity on ‘what’ powers a service, users can figure out ‘how’ to fix that service much more easily.
More details here.
Important update: We have updated the release timelines of this enhancement on 31st Oct 2022. This will be available by 15th Nov’22 instead of 31st Oct’22.
Four New OOTB integrations in Alert Management
Category: IT Operations Management
Users now have the option of four new out of the box integrations in the Alert Management module, namely:
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AppDynamics
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Logz.io
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Sumologic
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Loggly
With these additions, the total number of OOTB integrations now stands at 23.
In addition to these options, users can continue to employ email as a channel for alerts, as well as create custom integrations via webhooks.
More details here.
On-Call Management now available in IND data center
Category: IT Operations Management
Customers associated with the India data center will now be able to access the On-Call Management module. They will be able to use modern channels of communication such as WhatsApp and the Freshservice mobile app to acknowledge, escalate, and resolve incidents.
Probe Email Alerts
Category: IT Asset Management
Admins can now stay updated and resolve probe issues effectively using probe email alerts.
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Identify the number of devices and users scanned along with the scan errors attached in the scheduled sync summary report.
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Notify agents with proactive emails if probe hasn’t communicated with Freshservice over a specified number of days using the inactivity report.
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Stay informed when the probe encounters an error during scan due to invalid configurations and other unexpected issues using the error report.
More details here.
Note: This feature will be available from Oct 31st 2022.
SCCM Integration Enhancements
Category: IT Asset Management
Map additional properties from up to 5 tables in SCCM rather than just the single table supported earlier.
More details here.
Note: This feature will be available from Oct 31st 2022.
Send External Emails using Placeholders in Workflows
Category: Workflows/Automation
Users now have an option to send out emails to external email addresses from workflow automator actions. For instance, during the onboarding process, send out automatic email notifications to the employee’s personal email address as and when the onboarding steps are completed.
Important updates
Follow-up to our “Get ready to get upgraded” communication sent in May 2022
Ensure that you’re prepared for the following changes which will be effected on your Freshservice account in November 2022:
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Reports Module Deprecation & Upgrade to Analytics Module: If your account was created before 13th March, 2020, we’ve upgraded your legacy Reports module with the more powerful and robust Analytics module. All your older reports have already been migrated to Analytics. The legacy Reports module will be unavailable November 2022 onwards. More information here.
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Deprecation of Password-Based Authentication for Google and Microsoft Mailbox Connectors: Google and Microsoft have deprecated support for password-based authentication for connecting their mailboxes to Freshservice. If you’re still using password-based authentication, switch to OAuth-based authentication to fix issues and prevent disruptions. More details here.
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MSP Mode - Department and Requester Field Name Changes in Analytics: If your account has the MSP mode enabled, we will be renaming the ‘Department’ and ‘Requester’ fields in Analytics to ‘Company’ and ‘Contacts’ fields in November 2022. This is being done to ensure consistency with the rest of Freshservice. You will be impacted if you have any third party BI integrations built using data exports or schedules with ‘Department’ or ‘Requester’ fields. More information here.
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[Postponed] Deprecation of Freshservice API V1: We have postponed the API V1 deprecation date from November 2022 to May 2023. Ensure that you transition over to API V2 in your workflow automators, portal customizations, and custom applications before May 2023 to avoid disruptions.
Refer to this solution for additional information about these upgrades and deprecations.
Bug Fixes
These were the product defects detected, and they’ve now been fixed.
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There was an irrelevant activity displayed on the ticket when an incident was assigned to an on-call group when there were no ongoing shifts at that time of assignment.
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If the user accesses the ticket link or approval link via Freshservice mobile app, it was not redirected to the Freshservice app. Rather, it redirects to the browser.
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If field values contained field names within them in the “query” clause of a “Filter Agents” API call, they caused an error.
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Requester groups that included many VIP Requesters showed the VIP badge only for the first 20 VIP Requesters.
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Reports created in the Analytics module were not loading for a few customers.
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Articles created from external URL, in the Freshservice knowledge base, were not appearing as suggested articles when agents respond to tickets.
