Improved case spacing for smaller laptop screens

You let us know that especially on 13″ laptops, you could only view 2 or 3 cases in Bulk View; we’ve increased that spacing to show you 5 cases in Bulk View.

Changed color of Macro-affected fields from Red to a Cooler Color

Many of you told us that you’d like a different color to alert you to macro-affected text, so we’ve changed that color to a calmer tone.

Fixed an issue downloading Office Documents from a case

We also resolved an issue that caused  Word, Excel, and Powerpoint attachments to be downloaded as zip files.  Documents received prior to the fix will still download as zip, and will need to be renamed with the proper extension to open.

In addition, we have started to incorporate your feedback, and have made initial changes to the Agent desktop:

• Removed “Customer Card” on left hand case pane for better use of vertical space.
• Changed background color of viewed cases in filter view to distinguish from cases that are currently been worked on.

On Friday February 10th at 11PM Pacific, we will be updating the system for this change.  The update is planned for <15 minutes.  After the update you and your customers will be able to access your Desk.com site at yoursite.desk.com.

To make the transition easy, we will be redirecting your assistly.com address for at least 6 months.  After the update your new address will be yoursitename.desk.com (unless you have a custom SSL certificate with us, in which case there will be no change for you).

• Your customers can still find you at your assistly.com address, although this is a great opportunity to set up your own address for your help center.  You should also transition links to the new desk.com address as you have time.
• Your employees will be redirected to their desk.com site from the assistly address, but you should begin using the new address to avoid the redirect.  After the update, agents who have chosen to be remembered will need to login.

For more detail check out our knowledge base article,  What’s changing with Desk.com?.

The update also adds compatibility with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

We are continuing to  work with our partner, Facebook, to address the underlying issue.

As always, if you have any questions about your account, please contact us and we will be happy to help.

Update – January 15, 11:07PM : This update was successfully re-applied.  Thanks for your patience.

Update – January 13, 12:07AM : We identified an Issue with the January 12th update and have had to revert the changes.  We will reschedule the update shortly.

Tonight’s Assistly release brings two changes – one change that may send you a new email notifying you of system errors, and another change that releases new reply, notification, forward, and acknowledgement templates.

System Error Email now Sent To Site Contact

When your site has errors in Assistly, we’d like you to know about them in a timely fashion. Email notification of system error logs is now required – the Site Contact will now start to get these notifications. We’re here to help – so if you get the email and don’t know whether it’s an informational message or an error, feel free to  contact us.

New Look for Email Templates

We’re also releasing some new default templates for the Reply, Notification, Forward, and Auto-Acknowledgement emails you receive from Assistly. Here’s an example of the changes in style (and if you’ve customized these templates – don’t worry – nothing’s changing.)

What’s Changing

We’ve improved the design of these templates and also made changes for better compliance in multiple email clients. To demonstrate what’s changing in our email replay templates, take a look at the same email content, first displayed in the old email template, then in the new template.

An example email, displayed in the old reply template:

The same content, displayed in the new Reply Template:

What You Need to Do

If you haven’t made any changes to your reply template (you’re using the default), you have two choices:

• You may adopt the new template, in which case you don’t need to do anything – you’ll get the new email reply template on Thursday night this week.
• You may keep the old design by upgrading your account to use Advanced Templates and create a new reply template before Thursday 11 PM Pacific Time.

If you’re already using a custom email reply template today, nothing will change. Your current design will remain unaffected.

Thank you, and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

How do I turn on Textile?

To enable Textile for Agent email responses, visit Admin > Channels > Email > Advanced Settings and enabling the option for “Allow Textile.”

If you’re using the Q&A feature of your Support Center, you can enable Textile by visiting Admin > Channels > Support Center > Advanced Settings and enabling the option for “Allow Textile”.

How do I preview a Textile-formatted response before I send it?

How can I learn more about formatting my responses?

Check out our Knowledge Base Article on Using Textile to get more information and specific examples for formatting content in your responses. If you have additional questions, please contact us.

When:
          Saturday, January 7th, 2012
          7 PM to 1 AM (next day), Pacific Time

On Saturday, January 7th, 2012, we will be making a substantial upgrade to Assistly’s database infrastructure to improve your experience. During this time, the Assistly Agent and Admin will be unavailable for up to six hours. Your customers will still be able to reach your Help Center. We are confident these enhancements will result in faster performance and increased reliability.

What is Happening?

Assistly understands that the integrity and availability of your customers’ information is vital to your business operations and our own success. As a Salesforce.com company, we are deeply investing in the infrastructure that supports your business.

To deliver on the promise of Assistly, we will be upgrading the technology that supports our main database. We will begin the maintenance on Saturday January 7th at 7 PM Pacific Time. Based on our global usage statistics, Saturday evenings are when Assistly has the fewest number of agents working in the system. While we realize there is no perfect time for extended maintenance, we anticipate this schedule will have the least impact on our customers. We hope to make it up to you with an improved experience and we will do our best to minimize the disruption.

In order to fully safeguard your data, we will be taking Assistly offline for four to six hours. We hope to complete our work within four hours — but our number one goal is to safeguard your data, so we are allowing ourselves a full six hours if necessary.

How do I Prepare?

During the maintenance, you will not be able to log in to Assistly or use the Admin or Agent interface. Additionally, the API will not be available. However, your customers will still be able to reach your help center. For more information, see Your Help Center – Now available during Assistly Maintenance.

During our maintenance windows, your Help Center will be available in “read only” mode. You can take some steps to improve your customers’ experience with your Help Center while it’s in read only mode. For more information, please refer to the help article Configuring your Customer Help Center for Read-only Access.

How do I Monitor the Progress?

We will provide updates as we begin work and as we move through the process on our @AssistlyOps Twitter account. Please bookmark this page and visit it to follow the progress.

Details: Building a Better Cloud

We feel this is an essential upgrade to Assistly and well worth the minor inconvenience of an extended maintenance window.

As way of background, everything in Assistly (including customers and cases) is stored in a high-performance database that is accessed hundreds and thousands of times per second. The speed and reliability of this database is the fundamental building block of your Assistly experience, and it is stored on high-speed hard drives provided by Amazon Web Services — the same web services that Amazon.com uses to provide their online retail storefront, as well as their streaming media services. Amazon Web Services are used by thousands of companies and have become an essential part of the Internet cloud infrastructure.

As a Salesforce.com company, Assistly is able to deeply invest in infrastructure improvements for your benefit. As our growth has accelerated, we’ve started to push against the limits of the basic Amazon Web services. Amazon, as a partner of ours, has identified a high-performance upgrade which allows us to move our database layer to a bare metal direct connect solution. This will increase Assistly’s performance to keep up with your needs, while still allowing us to leverage the power, economy and depth of Amazon’s services.

Thank you in advance for your patience while we perform this critical maintenance that will improve the performance and reliability of our service.

What Does it Mean that a Browser is “Supported”?

When we say that a particular browser version is supported, we mean that we have tested it extensively with Assistly and that we prioritize development resources toward fixing any errors or incompatibilities that we discover when using Assistly with those versions. Does this mean that Assistly will stop working with older browser versions (versions no longer supported)? Not at all. On the contrary, we expect that Assistly will continue to operate with older browser versions, perhaps with some slight nuances or incompatibilities, but that major functionality would continue to work unabated.

Here is our official browser support policy:

Agent Desktop, Admin Panel, Reporting & Analytics

For our Agent and Administration tools, we support the current and previous major releases of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Support Center

For our Assistly Support Center web sites, we support the current and previous major releases of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third-oldest version. For Internet Explorer, we will support the current and two previous major releases.

Based on expected release schedules, we currently support the following browsers in December 2011:

Agent Desktop, Admin Panel, Reporting & Analytics

Support Center

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please contact us.

Note: This post was updated on 12/15/11 to make the following clarifications: 1) our policy begins in January 2011; 2) Chrome 16 is already released; and 3) our note on Firefox 3.6 was removed as that is no longer a supported browser.