OpenPaaS Newsletter 11 - January 2018
For this first newsletter of the year, let’s wish you all the best you deserve! :D
On our side, our teams are running at full speed since the end-of-year festivities, and in January, we want to showcase here a special focus on Ticketing and Social OpenPaaS modules.
Ticketing
In our November newsletter, we introduced Ticketing: the centralized helpdesk platform we are developing to allow Linagora’s customers to exchange with us on Open Source Software.
Summary of Ticketing’s achievements
Started in October 2017, the Ticketing project has today 4 sprints to its credit in which the awesome team has added a lot of awesome features, allowing you to:
- create Organizations, Entities and Users,
- create Contracts including Requests and their SLA times,
- create Software, Versions and their Support Priority,
- create Issues and displaying them on a dashboard,
- find existing Organizations, Users, Software and Contracts,
- use a Glossary for Software and Requests
A Ticketing demo server is now available for stakesholders. Continuous integration has been set up meaning updates on our project code forge are synchronized with the demo server.
Ticketing’s latest news
Ticketing app now has its own page separated from OpenPaaS ESN (Enterprise Social Network) with its own menubar and page navigation (see the overview just above). The app is available in English, French and Vietnamese.
The team: in addition to Quang (product owner), Tuan, Chien (our main developers) and Nassere, Valentin, Elliot (Telecom Nancy Engineering School’s students assisting us on the project), Chapour, Olivier Daniel and Sourisack joined the team in the role of stakesholders.
In terms of features, we worked hard during the past two months to provide you with tons of great features:
CONTRACTS
Each organization listed in the Ticketing platform can have multiple contracts and Permissions, which are the rights granted to an entity on the contracts, are of 2 types:
- View issues,
- Submit issues.
Permissions on each contract will be determined through entities of organization: if one entity has permissions on a contract, all users of the entity will have these permissions on that contract.
Today, an Administrator can:
- Handle permissions: some or all entities will have permissions given by the administrator,
- Add demands: on the contracts, Demand allows the administrator to manage unique triplets “demand type, software type and issue severity” and times to respond, workaround or solve an issue base on those triplets,
- Add software: In a contract, the administrator defines software which are supported by Linagora.
ISSUES
An issue is a support request submitted by a customer under a given contract agreement. Submitting an issue follows several steps: firstly, a Contract must be chosen, then, Demand type, Issue severity and Software type are chosen from the supported values of that contract.
Since Sprint #4 is finished, an Administrator can:
- List all issues in the system,
- Create issue in any contract.
To get more insight on our product vision for the Ticketing part, you can check out this article:
Ticketing’s next highlights
For the next sprints, we will be working on:
- managing different User roles,
- managing Issue workflow and progress,
- allowing Issue comments,
- notifying Issue events on the dashboard or by e-mail.
For the planning, we will release an internal demo in March to get internal feedback. In Q2 2018, we should be ready to release a Minimal Viable Product for OSSA new customers. By the second half of 2018, we should have all existing customers migrated to the new OSSA platform.
Social Team
The OpenPaaS Social team worked those last two months to refine the experience of private conversations. The chat module of the OpenPaaS platform, which is still in beta preview, allows for two different team communication experiences:
- the first one requires the creation of a channel, which is some kind of room where people can enter and leave,
- the second experience is user-centric, and is called “Direct Messages”.
In the previous implementation of Direct Messages, we basically copied the channels behaviour and made them private. Which was leading to problematic behaviours, like having a direct conversation with yourself, or several direct conversations with the same peer.
With all the work done from September to December, we rewrote all the functional part, so:
- a Direct Conversation with John is always unique, and even when you close it, it will come back, including history, next time you talk to John.
- Also, when including a new person in a Direct Conversation, for example using our nice bot, then a new conversation is created for this new group of people. This prevents the past messages to leak to the newcomer.
The Social team also worked on performance improvements when switching channels/conversations in the interface, leading to a better global user experience for heavy users.
As a Conclusion
This January newsletter was a good time to showcase what’s new inside the Ticketing and Chat modules. So, you discovered that, since November, the core concepts of Ticketing have been implemented, and now the Ticketing teammates are moving to build the interface. Moreover, about Chat module, you had an insight of the two different team communication experiences.
In February, you will discover 2 apps being currently integrated into OpenPaas:
Keep in touch with OpenPaaS on Twitter, Facebook, GitHub.
Interested in joining Linagora? Apply for job offers.
