We are now including a set of Spanish language files for Knowledge Management.   A special thanks to Ramon for contributing this.

You can get the language files by downloading the latest version of Knowledge Management.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Help Desk & Knowledge Management both support external login connections. This means that you can easily integrate Help Desk and/or Knowledge Management with pretty much any external database/login system!

Here is our updated list of login connections that we now have available:

• LDAP / ActiveDirectory
• Joomla
• PHPBB3
• SimpleMachines Forum
• vBulletin
• Any other external ActiveCampaign product

If you need any assistance with creating your own custom login connection file just let us know!

Knowledge Management 3 has been released. If you haven’t heard what’s new, go ahead and review the list of new features.

I’ll touch on some of the interesting ones here.

Let’s face it. It’s hard to get excited about knowledge base software. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be made into an intelligent, well-designed product. Knowledge Management is just that. The front-end includes a major facelift, and the back-end has been completely re-written for much easier extensibility and ease of maintenance. Not to mention – more control for you, the user.

Themes

Right out of the box, you can customize KB to your liking. We prefer our subtle design (and have spent many hours adjusting the CSS), but we understand that it’s impertive users can change the design to fit their organization’s scheme. Changing the theme of your KB is as simple as creating and maintaining a CSS file.

Interface

Regardless of what styles you use, you can be certain your KB interface will behave in effective ways. KB 3 uses Ajax in many areas, in order to create more usable, flexible interfaces. Ajax allows for live-editing, drag-and-drop, and extremely subtle content processing, to name a few. That means a more fluid experience for you.

Search engines

As well as a better experience for users, we’ve also allowed search engines a better avenue to your KB content. Search-friendly URL’s allow your content to be indexed in a more effective manner.

Exporting

We like to think Knowledge Management helps you organize content in effective ways. However, we know sometimes users want to organize it in their own way (like with custom CSS), and this is why we made exporting an important objective for version 3. Included is enhanced PDF export support, as well as export to HTML. Also, you can use the new RSS feeds to aggregate and organize your KB content in your own feed readers.

Importing

Speaking of export, how about import? You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to bulk import articles into KB. You can also do this for Glossary and Word Index terms.

User controls

You’ll enjoy more fine-tuned user control in KB 3. Creating user groups lets you designate privileges as a whole, or to each individual. This provides a much deeper application, which can handle many users while still maintaining the sensitivity of the articles.

It has been a while since the last major update of Knowledge Management. For the last couple of months we have been working on a major update.  A core part of this update is a complete rewrite of Knowledge Management’s backend.

We’ve optimized the database to handle much more data with greater speed, no more slow pages when there are a lot of articles and/or categories. Speaking of articles and categories, icons and tags can now be added as well as SEO urls: all categories and articles will have “search friendly” URLS that include article/category titles.

Knowledge Management will include better management features including simplified importing and syncing as well as improved content management. Ajax enabled features will eliminate the need to reload pages for minor actions, meaning increased page optimization and usability.

The admin side of Knowledge Management is almost done and we’re working to catch up on the public end. A major new feature on the public side is live edit, you can double click the article title/content (or category’s title/description) and edit it right there!

Having previously been a programmer myself, I can attest to very real and maddening phenomenon that affects nearly everyone in this line of work: the urge to rewrite. It comes on hard and fast, usually immediately after finishing a piece of software. Sometimes it even comes on smack in the middle of your efforts.

The reason is simple: as you go through the process of writing the code, you gain new perspectives on the shortcomings of your original approach to the problem. It’s the same thing that happens when we look back on the events of our past and think “if I only knew then what I know now…” In a way, the better the software that you’ve written turned out, the better your perspective becomes, and therefore the more pernicious the urge to rewrite it becomes.

A great example of this is our own Knowledge Management software. It’s a great piece of software that’s very highly regarded in the industry, and an awful lot of people tell us how much they enjoy using it. We could very easily add on to the existing code base, adding new features and improving existing ones, and release a new version and make a ton of money. But it wouldn’t be as good as we know that we could make it. Because now we’ve been working with the product for years, supporting it, using it on our own site; we know too much about it now; we know what its potential is.

So what are we doing now? Rewriting the whole damn thing from scratch. And it’s going to be great. It’ll be a lot faster, more flexible, and have lots of little touches that would’ve been too difficult to work into the old framework.

Of course, like anything, there has to be balance. You can’t rewrite a product every day or even every year and still remain profitable. At some point you have to recognize that no matter how much potential you see, only a certain amount of that potential is realizable in the immediate future. No matter how good a piece of web software becomes, there will always be room for improvement. The better a piece of software gets, in fact, the more strongly it advocates for the shifting of its own paradigm. You’re always climbing into view of the next incredible set of previously unthinkable goals.

The art of software development is in recognizing when you’ve found a nice plateau, and then allowing yourself to rest there for a while. That way you have room for some horizontal growth–feature enhancements, optimizations–and this give you and your clients time to enjoy all the hard work and creativity that’s gone into the software’s current iteration.

We have just released a new version of ActiveCampaign Knowledge Management!

We have added a couple of very important bug fixes.

And after a longer period of time, we have added a new feature called “Index”.

Feature works like this:
Now you can add words into “Index” feature the same way you are adding Terms to Glossary Terms. The difference is that words in Index do not have descriptions and headers (titles). They are used to search for all occurences of that word in your KB. Usefull option!

We have also added a support for using double quotes in category names. Actualy, we have fixed a couple of areas that prevented that from working all the time. Might come in handy…

If you are upgrading from version 2.60.21, you will have to reupload the following files:

• admin/KBAdminContext.class.php
• admin/KBAdminContextSwitch.class.php
• admin/KBAdminIndexesEditContext.class.php
• admin/KBAdminIndexesManageContext.class.php
• admin/KBAdminUserManagerContext.class.php
• admin/main.php
• admin/sql/install_2.60.sql
• admin/sql/install_database.php
• admin/sql/update_database.php
• admin/sql/upgrade_2_60_22.sql
• admin/templates/indexes_edit.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/indexes_manage.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/main.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/nav_top.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/terms_edit.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/user_manager.tpl.htm
• docs/changelog.txt
• includes/ActiveRecordClasses.php
• includes/KBIndexContext.class.php
• includes/KBInflector.class.php
• includes/KBPublicContextSwitch.class.php
• includes/demoFramelessNodes.js.php
• includes/extlib/activerecord/ActiveRecord.class.php
• includes/function.php
• includes/smarty_plugins/function.printstars.php
• index.php
• templates/Default/contact.htm
• templates/Default/index.htm
• templates/Default/indexwords.htm
• templates/Directory/contact.htm
• templates/Directory/index.htm
• templates/Directory/indexwords.htm
• templates/Simple/contact.htm
• templates/Simple/indexwords.htm
• templates/lang.English.txt

Don’t forget to run updater after upload, we have modified the database too!

A new (stand-alone) version of Knowledge Management has been released. The highlights are fixes for category administration bugs (deleting and moving them), as well as a bug in counting licensed users. A few display bugs were fixed. There were no changes made to the database — however, if you have 2.60.20, it’s worth upgrading to the latest version.

ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software 2.5 has officially been released. We have had several very successful beta testing months and the stability of 2.5 is apparent.

There were a lot of changes with version 2.5 of our popular customer service software. The rewrite was a complete rewrite of the entire code base. Developed for stability and to make it easier and faster for deploying new features in the future. A big change is the conversion of all pages to use smarty templates. Now every pages design and html structure is editable. You can add, modify, or remove what you like. You can even add and manipulate php code using the smarty {php} {/php} opening and closing php tags. In addition to smarty templates 2.5 utilizes several recent ActiveCampaign changes; our new language file format and the central authentication system. The new language file format enables you to see what would be printed by default while looking at the templates and provides automated language file creation. The central authentication system allows you to share users between products. This is currently offered in Knowledge Management, Email Marketing, and Help Desk.

Aside from the reconstruction we had a slew of new features added. Such as custom statuses, email actions, break line detection, enhanced search, spell check, numerous utilities and many more. You can view the full list of What’s New In 2.5 at:

• http://www.activecampaign.com/supporttrio/whats_new.php

While version 2.5 was a large update – we are not done with Help Desk Software development. Our development is an on-going process based on client feedback. So if you have any comments or suggestions, let us know with one of the following:

• feedback@activecampaign.com general feedback
• Development / Bug Tracker feature requests and bugs
• Forum feature requests, bugs, tips

ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software 2.5 has entered the release candidate stage.

Help Desk Software 2.5 is a large update to the already popular customer service software. ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software is still the powerful ticketing/email management/knowledge management tool, but we have now extended those features even further.

With such options including:

- New search page.
- Custom Statuses Now Available.
- Smarty templates
- All public and admin pages changed to smarty templates. Email templates (where they are not in the database) are also in template files now.
- Ability to create custom fields for user registration.
- Multi-Level Departments with Department Nesting
- Image verification on registration page. (Requires GDLIB)
- Spell check for public and admin option. (Requires ASPELL / For Ticket Posts)
- New report options
- Full Knowledge Management Software integration.
- Utilities Page
- Email notification of POP failure.
- Banned emails option.
- Ability to block a ip, email, or domain.
- Quick Assign
- Message breaks detections to not include the un-needed portions of the message.
- Email parsing debug reports.
- New email confirmation personalization tags
- Instant response to new tickets now includes related KB articles and related troubleshooters.
- Ability to set max attachment size.
- Ability to stick and unstick tickets in the ticket listings.
- Preview option while creating fields.
- Ability to import public users
- New summary stats and options on startup.
- Ability to include custom fields in email confirmations.
- Central authentication system integrated into SupportTrio.
- Option to Turn Off Editing of Public Users Ticket Posts (admin user permission)
- CC option added to the ticket responce.
- Ability to edit entered custom fields in a ticket.
- Port Scanner Additions
- Ability to set the number of tickets to be shown per page in the public section.
- Ability to set saved ticket openers for admin add a ticket page.
- Quote and reply options for each ticket post.
- Ability for clients to reopen their own tickets.
- Ability to unassign users from a ticket and see on the ticket view page who is currently assigned.
- Ability to search custom fields.
- Ability to manually activate public users.
- Added options for satellite desks
- Ability to export to vcard or add to address book for users and admins.
- Ability to modify the status and all ticket information directly.
- Numerous new reporting options.
- Added a default language option for satelite desks.
- Each ticket post stores its own charset now.
- File library updates

The above list is only a sampling of the number of new changes and additions introduced with SupportTrio 2.5.

To be included in the beta – email supporttrio-beta@activecampaign.com The beta is closed to existing SupportTrio clients.

Please contact us if you should have any questions or feedback!

A very interesting thing we’re working on in the marketing department is writing case studies about our exceptionally successful clientele. I recently completed the newest case study, which explains how Backpacker Tours Australia uses ActiveCampaign Email Marketing to target niche markets, resulting in a loyal following of thrill-seekers and leisure-time travelers alike.

A lot of businesses, I come to find out, make their entire living essentially just by using our software (yeah, it’s that good.) Plenty more use our products to augment their existing business, to give them the decisive edge in the areas of marketing and support.

If yours is one of the many businesses that realize a unique benefit from using ActiveCampaign software, consider coming forward and helping us understand how and why our products have become an integral part of your business. What challenges do you face as a business, and how does our software fit in to your overcoming of those obstacles? How does our software assist you in meeting and exceeding your goals, in excelling within your market?

Helping us to author your success story can mean increased recognition of your company’s status and accomplishment, as well as having the ability to influence the direction we take our development strategy. After all, what’s important to our most successful clients is doubly important to us.

So go ahead and take 5 minutes to explain your relationship with Email Marketing, Survey Software, Knowledge Management, or any of our other products. Thanks, and enjoy.