Development plans for Folder HelpDesk

Below is what we want to see in future versions of Folder HelpDesk. The priorities are fluent, but if you like a feature and wish to make it reality soon, you are very welcome to sponsor it. Then we will put "your" feature on the top of the list.

We also welcome all suggestions for future development, whether your organization has a possibility to sponsor it or not.

Under development: Folder HelpDesk V 13 Release is planned to May 2013
	Support for the 64-bit version of Outlook 2010. Currently Folder HelpDesk only supports the 32-bit version.

	Support for the 32- and 64-bit versions of Outlook 2013.

	Support for Windows 8.

	A new ticket form – a standard Outlook post item, including all the Outlook editing options. This makes Folder HelpDesk more stable to work with, and using a standard Outlook item is better for future development. It also gives you all the Outlook formatting options right in the ticket. Blog post

	Possibility to make a call from inside the ticket via a desktop calling application.

	Possibility to generate Excel reports on ticket data. Blog post

	A new settings dialog, to make it possible to rename incident types and categories – and also other values – without getting problems with the statistics of old tickets. The old tickets will just take the new category name, and the statistics and search can continue as before.


	In the current version of Folder HelpDesk the settings has a tab for maintenance. These functions will be moved outside the settings, so that access to the settings may be restricted without harming the possibility to use the maintenance. Instead a button to reach the maintenance dialog will be added to the Folder HelpDesk toolbar in the Outlook ribbon.

	In the current version of Folder HelpDesk a message about opening the ticket is always shown after manual conversion of an e-mail. We will add a checkbox with the option “remember my choice” in this dialog. If that box is checked and the user answers Yes to open the ticket after conversion, Folder HelpDesk will remember the choice and not show the message anymore.

	The current Folder HelpDesk dialog for search of closed tickets gives three possibilities: to search by, Incident type, Responsible or Free text. To search for ticket ID in the Free text gives irrelevant hits, so we will add a separate field for searching by only ticket ID to make the search quicker and more efficient.

	Enhancement of the Search closed tickets dialog: – we will make the it possible to expand the dialog more than the default 800x600 pixels, and all controls should auto-expand to fit and make use of the space. – we will make it possible to use the tabulator function to move between fields – we will show a message if the search is unsuccessful.

	Extended attachment setting for outgoing e-mails. We will make two checkboxes instead of one. One of the checkboxes will apply to auto-emails and the other one will apply to answers to callers sent from within the Folder HelpDesk tickets. This way attachments may be included in the e-mails to callers sent from the tickets but excluded from the automatic e-mails.

	Attachments in closed tickets will be saved. When an SQL Server database is used with Folder HelpDesk they will be saved directly in the database. The Access database has a limited capacity, so organizations who use this database will instead have their closed ticket attachments in a separate subfolder in the Folder HelpDesk server folder, where Folder HelpDesk will fetch them when tickets are re-opened.

	Removal of the dependency on Office Web Components.

	New technology In Folder HelpDesk V13 we will replace most of the old VB6 coding with more modern .NET technologies. Users will not notice this directly, but with .NET it will be easier for kalmstrom.com to maintain and develop Folder HelpDesk in the future.

We thank our Community Members The Swiss Post and Rail Cargo Hungaria, who sponsor some of the new features in version 13 of Folder HelpDesk!

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Future development Architechture Folder HelpDesk version 14 is going to be a total change from the previous versions. We will re-build it from the ground, while maintaining the features that you have come to like and rely on in the earlier versions. Our foundation will continue to be in Outlook where there is a lot of functionality we will build upon. The back-end architecture will be different, though! Folder HelpDesk will no longer rely on a shared network folder or Outlook public folder. Instead we will use three options for sharing and storage of data: an Access database, and SQL Server database or a SharePoint site. Each user will connect to the shared data by entering username, password and URL. The add-on will be entirely based on the VSTO tools and .NET, which will give us a lot of new opportunities.

Ticket

	Sort Ticket IDs as numbers, not as text.

	Make the Open ticket button work for Tasks created from tickets also.

	Add a possibility to make an appointment from a ticket, like you can make a task in the current version.

	If Kanban Task Manager is installed on the same machine it will be possible to create a Kanban Task Manager task from a ticke.

	Make it possible to include CC in the ticket and to reply to all persons included in the e-mail.

	Addition of a Merge Ticket feature, which will make it possible to merge existing tickets or parts of tickets into one parent ticket. This feature might be useful for many reasons, for example if you wish to merge all tickets from one customer into one single ticket.

	Possibility to manually create tickets from several e-mails at the same time by using the CTRL button with the Create ticket button.
	Make it possible to create ticket templates and to quickly create new instances of those templates. Helpdesks often get tasks that need to be done often. In a template ticket the admin may put information about such a task, with lots of information filled out This will save the helpdesk staff time in not having to fill out the same information over and over.

	Make it possible to drag an e-mail to a ticket so that it is added to the ticket.

	If you enter a value that is not present in the Settings in a default ticket field, it can be added automatically according to the settings under the Ticket form tab. We would like to add the same functionality of adding new values also for the custom fields.

	Quicker Search and Reopen closed tickets if there are many tickets.

	Addition of a Caller category field in the Search closed tickets Advanced dialog.

	If the "save e-mail history in subfolders" is checked: option to automatically delete e-mail subfolders when the corresponding ticket is closed or deleted.

	Option to keep attachments in closed tickets. In the current Folder HelpDesk we do not store attachments of closed tickets. Ticket body and other field values are stored in the database, but if the ticket is reopened the attachments are not there. With the "keep attachments" option selected, closed tickets will instead be stored in an Outlook subfolder, "Closed tickets", from where they can be reopened with their attachments.

	Possibility to convert e-mails to tickets even if no one is logged in to Folder HelpDesk. Today one user must have the Folder HelpDesk folder in Outlook open or it can be running on a server.

	Possibility to set a default due date value, so that the user can select no. of days from current date. Now the default value is always the current date.

	Close Ticket button in the Outlook toolbar, which will close the selected ticket. This way you don't have to open the ticket if you are sure it should be closed.

Responsible

	Add a possibility to set a default responsible for an Incident type.

	Add a possibility to set more than one Responsible.

	Make it possible to automatically send an e-mail to the second responsible if a ticket is reassigned, just like an automatic e-mail can be sent when the ticket is assigned the first time.

Other

	*Find KBase* path*. Before tickets can be converted into knowledge base articles, the administrator has to give Folder HelpDesk* the path to the KBase installation. That will be changed, so that the administrator only has to check a box for use of KBase. Then Folder HelpDesk will find the path.

	Add callers from Active Directory. We want to develop a tool that will add all the user from Active directory to the Caller table in the Folder HelpDesk Settings.

	Display Print Options. When you press the Folder HelpDesk Print button you will have a possibility to select another printer than the default one.

	Possibility to *use Folder HelpDesk* with smart phones** like Android and iPhone. We plan to build simple web-interface for both our issue-tracking solutions wherein the user can view and update his/her own tickets. In addition to that we hope to give users the ability to record audio updates as well as upload images directly from their mobile phones.

	If the network path to the file PFHelpDesk.htm is changed, each person with Folder HelpDesk installed has to browse to the new location and set the homepage manually. We want the Folder HelpDesk client tools to handle that situation instead.

	Rules Wizard. With the help of a Rules Wizard you can create rules that make Folder HelpDesk do many things that you now have to do manually, like sending e-mails, setting responsible or caller, move e-mails etc. It will work in the same way as the Outlook Email Rules Wizard. An example: Alpha has bought two products from your company, and therefore their incident reports need two different Responsibles. As Alpha often sends their requests by e-mail, you can create a rule that is triggered when an e-mail from Alpha is converted to a ticket. If the subject line of the e-mail contains "Product A", the ticket is assigned to Maria and an e-mail is sent to her about the new ticket. If the subject line of the e-mail contains "Product B" it is assigned to John and he gets the e-mail instead. You may also make a rule to send an e-mail to Alpha that the request is received and will be taken care of, and other rules can send messages to Alpha when the ticket is updated and when it is closed. Each Rule is made up of Trigger for the rule, like when an e-mail is converted, or when a ticket is updated or closed Condition(s) that must be present for the rule to act Action ‒ the task you want Folder HelpDesk to perform automatically Your rules will be gathered in a list, where you can enable or disable them. In a later step we plan to add a possibility to make the rules send out SMS also.

Welcome with your own suggestions on how to improve Folder HelpDesk! We are grateful if you use the support e-mail for this, and the more you can describe how you want it to work, the better. You can leave the technical solution to the kalmstrom.com developers, just tell us how you want to use your new feature.