We recently started work on SupportTrio 3.0. Version 3.0 will be a major update to the SupportTrio Help Desk product.
We will be incorporating hundreds of changes and additions including such things as:
Rewriting the majority of the backend code
Improving the speed and responsiveness of the entire application
Leaving 99% of the source code unencoded
CSS Based admin/public interfaces
Escalation system
SLA Management
External Login Sources
Much more….
While we have our development plans - we still want to know what you want to see in SupportTrio 3.0.
Let us know what you want changed, what you wish was added, general feedback & comments, etc… Your feedback is greatly appreciated and will be taken into consideration for SupportTrio 3.0.
The Mambo foundation is a volunteer, non-profit organization charged with the governance of the Mambo open source content management system. Mambo is free software released under the GNU/General Public license and like all such projects, dealing with emails and organizational issues takes valuable time away from software development. They use SupportTrio to manage both time and resources more effectively.
Mambo developers must work in collaboration from many different locations which makes email key to their communication. “Email is the key communication tool. The Mambo development team and the members of the Board of the Mambo Foundation are geographically distributed and work in a virtual, online environment. All email that is not addressed to individuals is managed through the help desk.” Directing email traffic through a central ticketing system allows multiple members to work together on the same issue if it is not specifically addressed to a particular individual.
Mambo foundation uses the knowledgebase in SupportTrio to provide a central location for corporate documents that require routine turn over. “For the management of Board affairs SupportTrio has proven to be an ideal solution. Previously, corporate documents were kept by officers of the Foundation and handed over to new officers following our annual elections of the Board. This meant that record keeping relied on the diligence of the individuals who handled those documents. SupportTrio is used as a central repository and archive. By keeping all documents in the knowledgebase and keeping emails we now have accurate corporate records that are available to future Board members. This gives us confidence that we can not only meet our statutory obligations but also that institutional knowledge is retained for the future - two things that are extremely important and sometimes difficult to achieve in a volunteer environment.” This improves efficiency and allows accountability that would otherwise be difficult to maintain.
“Volunteer, free software projects tend to have a reasonably high turnover in personnel. People work when they can, in their spare time, and often find it hard to commit their time in advance. By having a central document repository and by handling all email through the ticketing system it does not matter who is around and when. People can come into new roles and read what has happened previously and people can take leave for a few months while knowing that others can step in and take over handling of the enquiries.
“In the past, individuals took responsibility for one or more email accounts. There was no way the rest of the team could be certain that emails were being responded to in a timely manner and no way the team or Board could be certain it was receiving all information. By collecting all emails within the help desk the groups collectively have access to each email and the responses. This has made us more accountable and has improved our responsiveness to enquiries.
“Prior to installing SupportTrio we also had issues due to the distributed, virtual team environment we work in. Team and Board members are located all over the world and not everyone has reliable internet connections. Some countries have high fees for bandwidth. This resulted in some Board members being reluctant to take on responsibility for handling email enquiries due to costs - especially as a lot of the email is spam. By using the helpdesk nobody needs to worry about the costs because email goes into the ticket system and is not downloaded to individual’s computers. If someone’s internet connection is down for awhile this is not a problem - responding is a collective responsibility and no longer a burden put on individuals.
“The Mambo Foundation has used SupportTrio for nine months now. The improvements in our responsiveness and productivity have been significant. Best of all, we now have more time to devote to developing the software.”
SupportTrio provides a central framework to allow Mambo Foundation address the challenge of working in an environment that requires the collaboration of volunteers working in different locations. It also provides a means for maintaining efficiency and accountability in an environment that necessitates a high turnover rate.
A lot of people wonder if they can really make web-based support work for their business. Will clients tolerate having to do everything online, waiting for replies to their tickets, wondering about the response time? Don’t people just want to talk to you on the phone?
When it comes right down to it, web-based support is often simply the most cost-effective and efficient way to assist your clients. But there are some things you’ll need to do to make sure that your online support center is convenient, friendly, and responsive from the client’s perspective. Continue reading →
Next time you visit the download page you should notice a new type of download available. Upgrade Patches. Now you can generate your own special download that is tailored for upgrading your install.
With the new upgrade patch options you can choose what version you are upgrading from and what type of encoding (zend or ioncube) you use. After making those selections simply click download! The resulting download will only include files that were changed and need to be uploaded.
This should make the process of upgrading much easier for many of our clients. There is no need to scan a changed file list or upload the whole distribution.
Please let us know if you have any comments or questions regarding this!
If you could change one thing about SupportTrio what would it be? Think about the public side, admin side, features, work-flow, license options, or anything else.
Any long time user of SupportTrio can relate to how it feels when you have a ticket with 20 or 100+ posts. Finding relevant or important posts in the history of that single ticket can be a pain. Sure we have the ticket split options, expanding options, etc… but we still thought there was a better way. That is why we implemented starred posts.
Next to each ticket post you will know see a gray star. Click on the star and it will instantly turn yellow. This helps identify the post as being important. Now whenever you go back to that ticket you will see the important posts and whenever you look at the past tickets by user or by email you will see a star by tickets that have any post starred.
Here are some screens of the new feature. To obtain this new feature upgrade to 2.65.1.
We just released a new version of SupportTrio. The main change is adding user groups for public users. You can now create user groups, assign users to groups, and allow users to share tickets within their group if you wish. Click here to read more about this update.
We just released SupportTrio 2.63.2 and it introduces a rather handy new “feature.” With the latest version the public side is entirely CSS based. That should help a lot with template customizations and upgrading SupportTrio (with customizations kept). We also added an extended Reset Desk feature that now allows you to choose what part of the desk you wish to reset (so you can choose to keep CSS customizations, but to reset templates, for instance).
Also: Please note that there is no longer a limit on satellite desks! Additionally, the restrictions for lite licenses have decreased allowing you more departments and email parsers than before.
Minor changes were made to the admin side as we slowly roll out some design and layout changes. We are continuing to make minor changes to increase the usability and style.
If you should have any questions or feedback regarding our recent changes just let us know!
Whats better than the combination of SupportTrio & TrioLive features? Being able to start using the combination (or either product by itself) for FREE!
We just started to offer a free version of SupportTrio and a free version of Triolive. What does this mean?
SupportTrio Free= A free help desk / ticket solution / email management solution
TrioLive Free= A free live chat system for your web site.
Since we now offer a free version of both SupportTrio and TrioLive there is no need for our limited 30 day trials. Simply request and install a free version and should you wish to upgrade to paid at anytime it is just as easy to convert your free version to a paid version.
To view more details click on either products name above and just let us know if you have any questions!
We just released a new version of SupportTrio, the first major upgrade in 2.62.x series. We added a lot of stuff, so here we are going to mention the major ones, while the rest you can find in our Support Forum.
In the Ticket Management area, we added another column in the ticket lists pages that should reflect when the ticket was created. Also, from now on, merging ticket actions will now preserve all important ticket info, including assigned administrators, custom statuses, sticky option, importance (level), etc. When tickets are merged now, the resulting ticket will still have all info from all other tickets. Also, administrator can now manually assign public users to a ticket!
You all remember the Mark as Spam feature, and how the tickets got deleted, but still, SupportTrio was able to match the following tickets as spam. Well, we went one step further: we added a page where you can manage spam tickets. There you can delete them, which means that similar tickets will not be marked as spam anymore if you don’t want them to.
Among Settings options, we changed notification options for admins which are now department specific: your admin can specify to receive emails about assigned tickets from one department, but not from others. In Filters area, we added another option for ticket submissions via web interface (Site Filters) that will push the ticket to a specific department based on filter rules.
Flood Control also got a major improvement: now you can define a level of strictness which will dictate the behaviour of SupportTrio’s Flood Control Check. Strict level is the one you had until now. Now we added Relaxed and Loose, which will allow twice as much time for emails not to be considered as flooded emails.
Departments Manager also got one more option: whether you would like to have that departmant accept ticket attachments or not. Also, you can now specify ticket custom fields in Email Confirmations, which will have personalization tags like these: %PERS_34% (where 34 is that field’s ID).
