Release Notes
Version 1.10.0
24 min
introduction welcome to the release notes for version 1 10 of servicely this update brings a host of enhancements and new features designed to improve user experience, performance, streamline process, and continuous service improvements across the platform we have focused on refining the ui/ux, expanding configuration options, and increasing the efficiency of existing functionalities additionally, we've addressed feedback from our user community to make practical adjustments that align with modern design philosophies and platform advancements as always, we thank our customers for their invaluable feedback and hope you find these updates beneficial for your organisation to extend their use of the servicely platform who should read this this page is primarily intended for system administrators and platform owners who are responsible for managing and overseeing the servicely platform we strongly encourage individuals in these roles to carefully review these release notes to understand the latest updates, enhancements, and fixes that have been applied to the platform an understanding of these changes will enable you to work with other stakeholders to determine what new functionality and enhancements you would like to test, review and deploy on your servicely instance release highlights notification engine v2 the notification engine has been updated to natively support multi channel outbound communications and allow a singular template to be used across multiple different notifications key highlights a single outbound notification configuration can be configured to simultaneously send notifications out through multiple channels i e on an incident creation, notify the incident’s requestor via email and / or via teams on top of emails, teams and whatsapp notification channels are now supported out of box (please note that teams provides extra functionality than whatsapp due to its extended capabilities more details below) the updated notification engine is backward compatible with notification v1, i e pre 1 10 release configuration you can use both engines simultaneously and update existing notifications as you desire (noting that the v1 engine does not support multiple channels) messaging template capability has been introduced and it is reusable across multiple notification configuration for example, if both the incident creation notification and an incident client journal notification need to send the incident’s summary and the latest customer communication journal entry, then both notification can make use of the same messaging template (including the full layout) the messaging template capability also accepts contextual script input from the notification configuration, to allow for tweaks specific to the notification users, via their user profile page, can decide the channel(s) that they want to subscribe to for notifications messages, like emails, are also logged in their own logging table teams notification extended functionality in addition to being a part of the updated notification engine, teams specifically has additional functionality on top of the other providers key highlights supports the new enhancements for the new notification engine (for providers) provides the ability to update comments on servicely tickets, and approve/reject approvals including rejection reasons, from a teams chat without having to login to servicely examples below ability to create a teams group chat from a work record for more information, please see microsoft teams notification setup and microsoft teams group chat setup checklists in situations where there are a number of to dos one needs to complete as part of a task, you can now set up checklists to help with managing the progress key highlights automatically assign a checklist template and its items to a record upon meeting a condition (such as a specific catalog request, classification, etc) manually add your own items to a checklist associated to a task on top of what have been added by a checklist template reference the checklist and its items in scripts one use case is to use the information to configure something to automatically happen after all checklist items for a ticket/task are completed, any updates to the checklist will be logged into the activity log ability to create a subtask from a specific check list item add checklists to any table extended from work for more information, please refer to checklists email override rules in certain situations, administrators have requested to have specialised behaviour on emails being sent in and out of the system for email addresses flagged as no reply addresses to help with this, we have introduced a new feature known as email override rules key highlights an override rule for a given email address, can be configured to apply any (or all) of the following rules never process incoming emails from the email address this may be useful for example, if the email address is used to send mass alerts emails that are not relevant for the function servicely serves in your business never send any email to the email address override “auto reply” classification of emails coming in from the email address for more information, please refer to email address overrides multi scim support scim configuration now supports mappings for multiple entra id tenants key highlights multiple scim configuration records can be configured, one for each entra id tenant each scim configuration record results in its own unique url for the respective entra id tenant to map to example e g https //\<instancename> servicely ai/scim/{configurablekey}/v2?aadoptscim062020 for more information, please refer to scim microsoft entra id multi sso support (microsoft entra id) identity providers in servicely can now optionally supporot multi tenanted sso from entra id key highlights requires only a single sso configuration for all the tenancies it manages, as opposed to maintaining an sso configuration for each entra id tenant allows you to only need to assign one identity provider to a user in situations where you have multiple identity providers in the system for more information, please refer to single sign on microsoft entra multitenant user presence we have introduced the ability known as the “user presence” on any record viewed on the platform, this shows other users who are viewing the same record the logged on user is currently viewing, at real time key highlights users of the system are able to see others viewing the same record in the top right of a record this will show every user and will dynamically update as other users come to view the form for environments that have stricter rules around user visibility, if a user is not visible based on the user’s roles and groups, they will be seen as an “anonymous user” bulk / filtered multiple reference selection currently when you are adding a value to a multiple reference field, you can only add users one by one however, it is now possible to add multiple records at once for more information, see forms and fields | multiple reference list filtering and usage key highlights allowing you to filter a list of records and add all at once to a multiple reference field (via the related list) allowing you individually select multiple records and add them as a related record at once timecard schedule there is now a new schedule in the system to allow you to view and create timecard entries on a calendar and timeline view key highlights allows you to see the timecard(s) of one or multiple users on a calendar or timeline view allows you to put other types of tables on the same schedule view allows you to create and modify time cards directly on the calendar and timeline views this can be accessed (with the user defaulting to your current user), here https //\<instancename> servicely ai/#/multitimetrackingschedule/tt?userquery=currentuser() shows the records being shown on the schedule in a list before the calendar / time line view with access to preview and utilise any table operations directly upgrade considerations outbound notification outbound notification context script no longer supports the use of “systememailrec” if you are using it to add attachments into your outbound email, for example you will need to replace it by returning the ids of the attachment records into an attribute in the answer object, called “attachmentids” const attachments = current attachments() map( rec => { if ( rec mimetype() endswith("pdf")) { return rec getid(); } }); // if you have other existing attributes in the answer variable, please include them answer = { attachmentids attachments } we strongly encourage you to review all your outbound notifications and the context script to determine if you are using this please note that no out the box notifications to date use this feature systememailrec may also be used for other reasons, so if you do, you will need to replace / remove any references if you are unsure how to proceed, please reach out to us via the support portal in addition to this, we strongly encourage that if you change any notification that you gradually migrate them to the new version of the notification engine this will provide you additional features and also allow you to leverage the same messaging template, across multiple emails file attachment security we have added a level of restriction on types of file attachments you can upload into servicely as part of an upgrade, we recommend that you test the common file types that your general user base uploads into servicely records anything that you found to be rejected but you absolutely need, you may add the file extension and/or mime types to application property system upload accept and ensure they are not part of the application property system upload reject if you are unsure, please reach out to us via the support portal for more information, please refer to enhanced security properties outbound notifications / messaging accounts considerations in previous versions of servicely, when setting up messaging accounts, you did not need to specify a default outbound messaging account, as long as on the outbound notification it defined a messaging accounts as of this version you need to ensure you either have the “from” field on the outbound notifications set or have a default messaging account set as true if you do not do this, there is a chance email notifications will not be generated fixes/enhancements enhancements platform new intelligent routing functionality to allow users to set up automated routing based on a number of condition this can support functionality often known as “round robin” for more information see intelligent routing platform a new application property, system search role required, was introduced to control which role a user needs to have to see the full text search function at the top of the servicely instance page if the property is not defined or empty, the search remains always available platform new button support has been added to custom related lists this uses the same renderer property that standard related lists use, i e enablecreatebutton platform numerous performance improvements for multi tenanted environments platform the attachment selector that previously was only available on customer communication journal field, is now available on all journal type fields platform editing a field’s choice values can now be done from the field’s contextual menu item called “edit available values” the contextual menu item will present a modal/pop up window that you will add/update/remove the field choices for more information, please refer to choices | after field creation platform relative date/time query field capabilities have been expanded for complete flexibility so you can add more options in to the date/time query that servicely does not have in the base build (e g adding to last week, this month, etc queries) for an example of this, you can read query functions | creating a field query function platform related lists in tabs will now only load when the tabs are in focused/displayed, to improve performance of the platform knowledge/portal the latest articles portal component code is now available to administrators, rather than being obscured by a reference to a back end component this will therefore allow you to copy the code and make your own versions if desired reporting reports can now be created without drill down view capability through the use of “disable drill down” flag the default is no, so existing reports are not affected note that if a report is created without drill down, it will load faster reporting reports/charts inside tabs on dashboards and portal pages will now only load when the tab is activated this allows dashboards to have infrequently accessed information included on dashboards without incurring the performance penalty of loading that data on each dashboard view ui/ux it is now possible to see a datetime field, relative to your current time such as, the sla is next due in 18 hours for more information, please refer to table and field properties | table list renderer properties ui/ux the overall ui has been updated to be cleaner and more modern in certain parts of the platform ui/ux we have introduced the ability to use the quick filter certain other list options on a related list these can be accessed by right clicking the column heading of a related list and pressing “show toolbar” ui/ux an “attachment size limit exceeded for” message is now included as part of the email processing into ticket’s journal field, if the email came with a large attachment that does not fit within the size limit ui/ux application property system default list view size has been introduced to set default max number of records returned per page in a list for more information, please refer to lists | number of records displayed ui/ux a new information panel layout element has been added to the form builder to allow you to add informational text to the form, without having to add a read only field and placing the text there ui/ux a download button is now available on every attachment shown on the attachment type field, so that you can download the attachment directly without having the browser preview the content (as this can interfere with file content formatting) ui/ux sofi user interface design had been overhauled with new theme the older theme had been removed scripting there is a new out of box function to support moving attachments from one attachment field, to another on the server for more details, see other api / javascript scripts | moving attachments from one field to another scripting introduce the ability to group by with the aggregate api to easily slice the data a new group by option has been added to the aggregate api, which will allow you to group by certain values, seeing the display value in addition to the group for more information, please refer to aggregation api | grouping scripting to allow easier access to journal entries and the information found within it, we have added a journal api, which you can use to get the whole history of the journal entry to use this can be useful in areas such as email notifications please refer to the following page for more information journal api scripting it is now possible within ui events, to show and hide different layout elements (such as tabs, headers and more) please refer to the following page for more information table api (client) | layout element behaviour scripting overhaul of the server side scripting’s execution environment to suit specific requirements, so that only necessary checks and processes are executed during an operation for more information, please refer to tablechecks scripting/integrations when attempting to integrate with a customer endpoint that does not have a ca signed certificate, the integration would have failed with "unable to find valid certification path to requested target" a new application property system http client disable ssl validation allowed has been added to enable this, and a new function disablesslvalidation has been added for the http wrapper to support it more information can be found at outbound http requests (scripted) scripting/integrations additional functionality to be able to customise the body response and content type for system inbound controllers for more details, see system controllers (custom inbound scripting) | example version 2 api to provide a custom json format (no ‘data’ element) catalog service catalog form question now supports field instructions the instructions can either be in plain text or in html catalog various styling changes and enhancements within the forms builder had been implemented to align closer to new themes kanban kanban cards can now be sorted by creation date, updated date, and due date if configured kanban kanban can be configured to allow for drag and drop between the columns, but complex form logic such as ui events are not supported kanban the kanban board performance has now been improved email (outbound) all email actions' footers were previously hard coded when a user interacted with one in an email the footer is now editable with the use of localised message email action button footer content html email (inbound) a new field introduced for inbound messages called “user script” this allows you to define the logic as to what user is picked when an email is processed if not populated, it reverts to the current / default behaviour, which is to look up a user record based on the email address sending to it this field is typically used in situations where multiple users have the same email address for more details see inbound email processing email (inbound) when an email is a reply and the email threads are included in the email’s body, servicely is able to extract only the latest email body and not the thread this is done by pattern matching against common separators that various email clients use as part of this release the patterns can now be modified via the getreplyseparatorpatterns function in script library inboundemailsupport new patterns can be tested using mailutils getlastreply(body) function gmail patterns added messaging (outbound) notification preferences can now be accessed and modified by non admin users users can now go to the user settings page and modify their notification preferences there integrations api authentication inbound into servicely now supports url based bearer token authentication for more information, please see authentication (inbound) | bearer authentication token (provided by url) change sets when there are conflicts for a change set, there is now a more obvious visual indicator on the list view change sets it is now possible to see the change versions and change conflicts from the config menu (top right menu) of a record localisation localisation support for classifications is now available on a servicely instance where multilingual functionality is enabled, a localised name field will be available on the classification form if a localised name is not included, the default name is used for that classification multi tenancy tenancy/realm selector components of a multi tenancy tree in a multi tenant servicely environment are now configurable so certain parts of the tree can be hidden for certain user roles a new field on realm table, called “realmselectionrequirerole” has been introduced to add the capability to decide, based on roles, which users can see which realm in the tenancy selector roles can be placed at any position in the tree downstream realms will inherit upstream restrictions lower levels will override upstream specifications you can restrict the top level to administrators, and have other levels for agents/customers this only applies from the user’s realm and below if the user cannot see their root level, they will not see any levels below it, e g if you restrict the root level realm to the itsm agent role and no other realm have role restriction, then you will not see the tenancy selector at all unless you have itsm agent role for more information, please refer to multi tenancy | realm selector fixes reporting list reports now generate as required platform when table operations are configured to run as list context menu items, these can load and execute slower than desired table operations requests by default request the full record when being run this can be optimised on each table operation, now that a new field “do not load full records”, that has been added this can be turned on to prevent full record loads if the table operation only needs information from fields in the list view platform when records were saving, it could take longer than desired when a role check had been added to the table operation scripted condition to assist with this, a new roles and negate roles field was added to the table operation configuration form to speed this up we would suggest any configured / customised table operations you have to migrate any reference to user hasrole("role") in the condition, to this new field (when possible) certain out of box table operations have been updated as part of this upgrade platform when copying a query that has a datetime field from the filter builder, it previously copied the url incorrectly and caused the date time filter not to be added to the filter correctly this has now been corrected platform when copying a query from the filter builder, it previously had https //, rather than https // this has been corrected to only include one colon platform if you have certain character combinations (such as “%20”), in string fields with the text with link renderer, it would prevent the record from being saved the text with link renderer now allows you to save, regardless of the characters in the field platform when decimal fields are shown, the comma and number format was not localised correctly the decimal renderer is now available for decimal fields that, if used, should localise correctly platform if the “system timezone” application property is set to be an invalid value, the ui would not load except the header bar with some of the icons and logo better exception handling has been put in place to prevent this from happening platform if you had a choice list with no values, you were unable edit the available values from the popup as the popup does not render the popup will now load correctly providing the function to add/edit the choice’s available values platform when trying to create a new menu item, it did not show up immediately in certain situation unless you manually refresh your web browser the left menu should now refresh automatically after you have created new menu items platform filtering records using date/time fields such as “created on” when the user profile has a different timezone than the system timezone previously returned incorrect set of records this has been fixed to align with the user’s timezone correctly platform a new role, “propertyset access” has been introduced to allow non admins access to the property sets configuration data platform when viewing a calendar, the timezone occasionally did not translate correctly to the user’s timezone when different timezones existed for your user, browser and system this calendar has been updated to correctly make use of the user’s timezone platform personalising a list from a menu item caused all other views of that table’s list to change to the personalised list of fields until a user refreshed their web browser this has now been fixed and the expected list view will display platform the “open link in…” option for a customer communication journal’s “insert/edit link” popup, appeared behind the popup making it in accessible this has now been updated to ensure it can be accessed and viewed as needed platform when you go to a specific url with an aspect suffix, it previously generated a view aspect for that table automatically and cause unintended consequences with form displays this has now been disabled, but in its place, administrators can now generate a new view aspect with a new config menu item on a form for more information, please refer to aspect configuration | how to create and access an aspect knowledge/ui/ux when an image was added to a knowledge article, it appeared to be faded due to bug on how the opacity of the uploaded images were automatically set to lower than they should be opacity is now set correctly on the images when they have been uploaded knowledge/portal when scrolling through a list of knowledge articles in the knowledge centre, duplicated knowledge articles were sometimes shown it was discovered this was due to the infinite scroll capability and as a result this has has been replaced with pagination with the added benefit of increased performance knowledge switching classifications after searching with the knowledge centre caused classifications with a knowledge article to no longer be selectable the classification based navigation has been fixed accordingly knowledge the selectable flag unexpectedly controlled classification visibility within the knowledge centre the visibility of the knowledge centre’s classifications has been updated to not be controlled by classification definition’s selectable flag and instead this flag only limits the selection of the classification when creating and editing a knowledge article knowledge when there are no published knowledge articles for a classification, it previously showed the classification in the knowledge centre knowledge classifications will now no longer show up if there are no published knowledge articles for that classification that you can read reporting reports that simply had a number (and label), found under the “other” report category, had an error when only using an aggregation field when the returned value was empty or 0 this has been resolved to show correctly and ensures the report does not take up extra space reporting the “download csv” file function on a report, did not get generate the requested csv file correctly due to a missing setting this should now be generated correctly upon being requested reporting when certain reports were scheduled to send, it did not work and generated a broken pdf file there is an export limit of 50mb for the reports and from now on, if the limit is exceeded, the emails will still be generated, but along with the pdfs, it will outline the issue/error reporting labels were missing on pdf exports when shown on the dashboard the report exporter for pdf, jpeg and svg exports have been updated, so that report labels will show in the exported file cmdb if there was a cmdb selfservice view aspect within the system and you wanted to edit it, it would end up editing the default view subsequently, cmdb selfservice views are no longer used as the parent view for displaying cmdb rollup views and they can now be edited as required approvals when updating a workflow approval activity and the business logic script was blank, a new approval task was created with no assignee this had been updated to not create the approval task in these situations it should be noted that a workflow approval activity can be configured whether to approve or reject the approval if there is no approval task created for the ticket the workflow is running on, to prevent stuck workflows ui/ux when sorting by a large number of columns on child tables, sorting did not always happen as expected this often occurred when it had fields from a mixture of child and the parent tables sort functionality had been updated to address this and sort correctly ui/ux when percentage fields were cleared when previously having a value, the field would show “nan” this has been corrected to be blank ui/ux when using servicely on a mobile, journal fields were hard to use as the popup hid when adding notes the display of the editor controls and the user icon in journal fields have been disabled to make the journal field more usable ui/ux when personalising a list, if there is a default sort order for the list (which creates an application property), the default sort order took precedence over the personalised sort order this has been changed to have the following priority order personalised sort order (user profile property), url parameter, default sort order (application property) ui/ux when an field with the type of email was blank, they previously had an error show up even when blank, even when it was not required this has now been corrected to not show an error when blank (unless it is required) ui/ux the button styling in the catalog section was not usable for mobile browsers, however this has since been corrected to display correctly ui/ux if a user lacks visibility permission to the underlying record displayed by a reference field or related list (e g attachments display on work tables) and they clicked on the reference field/list’s reference eyeball icon, the popup/preview window would be blank and could not be closed the popup/preview window had been updated to close automatically if the user does not have permission to view the record that the preview window was attempting to show ui/ux misleading error messages were being displayed when uploading more attachments than allowed error message was updated so it displays accurate information and so it will only display once as needed ui/ux menu items for functionality that have been deprecated has now been hidden by default ui/ux when a duration field had a negative value, it did not show any value duration field has been updated so negative durations now show correctly on the form and list portal if the original ‘logo' field (now deprecated and hidden) was populated, the instance’s logo was not displayed, even when the user created and populated the newer ‘logo resource’ field on the portal definition correct fields for portal definitions are now used for the logo, regardless of whether the deprecated ‘logo’ field is populated scripting intellisense did not work for server scripts as expected the supporting dts files have been fixed so that server scripts now have working intellisense again scripting intellisense previously flagged code as not valid, despite it being valid this has now been updated in a number of areas scripting expansion of the “bigdecimal” api to support more functionality for more information, please see here money api (bigdecimal) scripting passing a blank currency value to the money format() function previously caused an error, instead of defaulting to a value (e g if somerec c rate() is blank and you run this script =>money format(somerec c rate(), “eur”, “de de”) , your script would result in an error) money format() function has since been updated so that if you pass a blank value to it, it will default to 0, rather than causing an error scripting when getting group ids from the user object, it previously required a cache clear to take effect if someone’s groups had changed the system now properly clears the cache without any intervention email (outbound) in certain situations, workflows would generate multiple notifications inaccurately if certain workflow elements were ordered in a certain way and a separate email was triggered via the normal email notification functionality the ordering of this has been resolved to avoid this from occurring in the known situations change sets the change set conflict checker was inaccurately marking change set items as conflicting when it was not conflicted this behaviour has now been altered to be treated less strictly when it is a change set, rather than a servicely platform update this was due to when you had already configured a record, it was incorrectly flagging it as a conflict, despite it being an updated version of what you had previously updated catalog the “show question” dialog to display catalog’s questions and answers for a submitted record could fail to display if there was at least one answer that contained an id of a record that has been deleted the “show question” dialog has been updated so that deleted reference fields will not cause it not to be visible catalog when using the catalog form and where it had a reference question, such as a reference to the cmdb for a user to pick their own device, this would automatically generate a view aspect for it (for self service) if someone tried to preview the record on the catalog screen this had been adjusted so that view aspects no longer automatically generate from use of the catalog localisation changing the default locale to a broken locale code previously caused the system not to load this should no longer occur localisation when using czech as your language, the date picker did not show up correctly, however, this should have since been resolved localisation for some locales, “,” instead of “ ” is used for currency/money values however, even though it displayed as a comma, users still needed to enter a “ ” when updating a currency/money field the currency/money field had been updated so users can now properly enter the decimal place symbol of choice based on their locale security agents previously had read access to the “risk assessment answers” table for change risk assessments purposes however this was deemed too open access controls to this have since been enhanced, as well as disabling the required read permissions for select tables such as the “risk assessment answers”, as they are no longer needed security users previously needed permission to read certain portal related tables (portal , dashboard, catalog category and catalog item), however, this has been updated to remove the need to have these permissions the base build permissions has been updated accordingly and your own permissions can be updated if required itsm the out of box itsm work collaborator field reference qualifier has now been updated to ensure it looks at the merged roles of a user, rather than roles directly assigned to a user multi tenancy when changing the “role required to access” realm fields, it required a manual cache refresh, whereas it should happen automatically cache now properly updates upon changing the roles required for realm fields any further questions? if you have any questions or any concerns regarding the upgrade, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our customer support team system administrators can do this by logging onto our support portal (https //support servicely ai)