V4 Update #5: Staff, user, permissions management, interface screencast, roadmap revisions

Welcome to the fifth in a series of Version 4 development updates and previews.

In preview #4, we looked at the live chat interface and visitor engagement options. In this preview, we will look a little closer at the administrator control panel interface, the redesigned grid layout interface, staff, permissions and department management and we will finish off with a short screencast which walks you briefly through what we will cover in this preview.

Roadmap revisions

In July of this year, we published our roadmap estimates for the development and release of V4. Today we are making some revisions to our roadmap:

• Q4: Pricing and licensing details to be discussed and finalized (unchanged)
• Late Q4/Early Q1: Partner previews, initial API publication (was Q3)
• Q1: Public BETA (was Q4)
• Late Q1/Q2: Final release (was Q1)

As always, we hope we can deliver each earlier than anticipated.

However, we are a small team working on fantastic new additions to the product line. We are also committed to proposing and previewing new features to customers, incorporating feedback into the products even late in the development process. We want to keep things flexible, and this is sometimes at the expense of deadlines – which is why we are still calling this new roadmap an estimate, issued for your guidance.

We very much appreciate your patience and overwhelming feedback, and we are sure that you can appreciate our efforts made to keep you informed and our process open.

New grid interface, managing staff accounts

Version 4 sees a newly designed grid interface. Existing Kayako users and developers will be familiar with ‘The Grid’ – a common library that generates simple tables to display data in the staff and administrator control panels (such as lists of users, statuses, e-mail queues, etc).

Tables are dynamically sortable on-the-fly, and feature a search-as-you-type field that lets you quickly filter through results. There are no unnecessary page reloads – for example, paging to a next portion of a list or sorting a table by a field happens instantly, using AJAX.

This particular example demonstrates a filtered (by the term “edwards“) view of the staff user management area in the administrator control panel. The grid displays users’ teams, username, full name and their online status.

Enabling and disabling staff accounts

Staff accounts can be enabled and disabled. Should one of your team no longer need access to their account, it can be disabled. This prevents anyone from logging into that account, but keeps that staff account’s data and history intact.

Staff accounts can be mass-managed. In the example below, multiple accounts are being disabled at the same time.

The example also demonstrates SWIFT4′s new common notification interface. Successes, confirmations, warnings and errors are clearly displayed through use of a color and subtle graphics.

Editing a staff user account

Under the General tab, the following account properties can be set:

• First name, last name
• Position in organization
• Username (with support for username changes)
• Password (with on-the-fly password policy checking)
• Team membership
• Account status (enabled or disabled)

Under the Profile tab, the following personal settings can be set:

• Profile picture
• Mobile phone number (for SMS alerts)
• IP restrictions (per-account IP restrictions, supporting address ranges)
• E-mail signature
• Live chat automatic greeting

The Assigned Departments tab provides you with an interface to set department access permissions for the staff account. Permissions set here will override group-based permissions, which take precedence by default.

The Skills tab (shown below) allows you to specify skills for this staff user. See preview #2 for more information about live chat operator skills.

New permissions interface

Version 4 introduces an array of new and more finely grained permissions. To make editing and managing these easier, we have designed a new accordion-based interface for displaying permissions.

The example above shows the new permissions interface, displayed when editing administrator control panel permissions for staff users with administrator privileges. To make managing permissions across multiple groups easier, a Copy Permissions function is provided, which can be accessed via the drop-down menu shown at the top of the permissions list.

Permission interfaces can get long and complicated very quickly, which is why we have separated permissions by area, into collapsible lists (the permissions area in view in the example is “Core”), and consolidated View/Insert/Update/Delete permissions into check boxes, rather than separate rows and radio buttons.

End user group management

The end user (your customers) group management interface has been moved to the administrator control panel.

User accounts can still be managed in the staff control panel, but as the result of feedback from customers, management of user groups is now restricted to those with administrator privileges.

Screencast: Interface demonstration

Things shown in the screencast that we didn’t mention above

• The Language tab when editing a department allows you to specify translated names for your different languages.

• Per-staff and per-team department access permissions can be set when creating or editing a department.

Feedback from the last preview

In V4, will the pre-canned responses have the ability to have variables in their text?

(from Tony Valentini) Yes, canned chat responses and predefined replies will support variables.

Why don’t you just make the same interface that’s available for visitors (talking about live chat) also available for operators? That would solve the cross platform compatibility issues.

(from Danny) This is an option, but we believe our engineering time would be better spent developing full solutions for other platforms, even if this does mean later after launch.

Will there be any improvements on the side of integration with billing systems, such as WHMCS? The current integration is a little rusty, and I’d rather not have to deal with 3rd party modifications.

(from Ricky) SWIFT4 will support a new and extensive API, modular framework and drop-in plugin system which will make integrating Kayako with your own systems much easier. Find out more information about the SWIFT4 framework.

I’ve got a simple question – with the “How can I help you?” dialog above, how does a customer close/ignore that dialog? It looks like all they can do is click “Chat now” when in reality, they should also be able to close/ignore it as well.

(from Tony Valentini) This is a good suggestion, and one which we are already working on.

I really like the new interface. Question: if user and staff is in an inline chat and user decides to browse to another page (click a link); what happens to the chat session?

(from Anthony) The user will be warned about navigating away from the page. If they close the page, the chat session will end. However, we will add a chat persistence feature (like Facebook Chat in a future version.

This isn’t chat related, but another report that would be extremely useful would be the number of replies per ticket. That would be a good report because it will help us gauge the efficiency of our support team.

(from Tony Valentini) Good suggestion, we have added it. Please add your future reporting suggestions to this thread.

It would be nice to “schedulate” a ticket. I mean that I would like to be able to say WHEN a staff should work on a certain ticket. (Let’s say on Monday from 9.00 to 10.00)

(from Cris) We are currently engineering a feature that will probably cover this particular request, so stay tuned.

Currently, if you wish to use different live chat icons (online, offline, etc), you have yo create a different template group. This is a bit overkill for something like this and forces you to clone the live chat window templates if you wish to keep them the same. In V4, will there be / can we get the ability to specify the URL to the different statuses when generating the tag?

(from craigbrass) Yes, we have implemented this feature in V4.

Is there/will there be an option to make this function like the LivePerson system, in that when a user requests a transcript (at any point during the chat) it is sent at the end of the sessions, thus they get a complete history, not just a transcript up until the point they requested it?

(from Carl Silver) Not at present, but we have filed the suggetion.

[IRS-style search for predefined replies for staff] [...] The most obvious, relevant replies should be clearly displayed therefore enhancing the level of assist Kayako provides to the speed of replying [..]

(from multipoint) Great suggestion, noted.

Hopefully the spam filter is still to be an addition within v4. If not it would be nice to see a easy option to configure 3rd party filters like Postini.

(from multipoint) V4 will ship with an intelligent spam filter which can be trained.

My biggest issue is for email autoresponders. I’d like the satellite helpdeks/template groups to also change the links in emails. This will cause less confusion for the users.

(from jonathanbloom) This will be supported.

I should point out that a basic feature such as keeping a log of what the staff is up to is not included in Kayako as of yet. What I mean is monitoring when they login to supportsuite, when they logout, when they set themselves away, busy etc.

(from kk1) Wider and more detailed logging will feature in V4.

Suggestions?

It is never too late to file your feature requests. To do so, create a new thread in the relevant section on our forums.

To comment on this preview, leave a comment on this post or post in the discussion forum thread. We look forward to hearing from you!