Email Templates & Help Desk Improvements
2015-12-10

This morning we released a couple of significant changes:
 
1) Email templates. See the photo below - emails from TroopTrack now use a nicely formatted template that has been tested to work in virtually all email clients. Notice the image at the top of the email - we will soon release a feature that allows you to upload a custom header image just for your unit. We will also be redesigning the newsletters to use a two-column layout.
2) Help desk changes. Previously if we solved a ticket it would be re-opened if you added a comment to it. This was fine in most cases, but in a number of cases we have had users add comments to tickets we solved months ago, often times with a completely new problem. To avoid this problem we have disabled the ability to comment on a solved ticket after seven days.
 
3) Backlog of really old tickets. As I've mentioned before, we were completely unprepared for the fall rush of 2014. We didn't have enough help desk staff members and we were completely swamped with support requests. We have since hired and trained enough people that we were mostly able to keep up with the 2015 fall rush, but we still have about 1000 unprocessed tickets that are over a year old. :( We started reviewing those tickets and found that many of them were fixed as they were reported by other users. We also realized that it would take us months to get through them all. So... we have made a decision to close tickets that are more than a year old. That should happen later today. If one of your tickets is closed you will get an email. If you feel that ticket is still relevant, all you need to do is log in to TroopTrack within seven days and add a comment telling us that the ticket is still important.
 
I appreciate that some of you may be upset by the arbitrary closing of older help desk tickets. Please be assured that we didn't take this decision lightly and that if you add a comment to your ticket it will automatically be re-opened and re-prioritized with recent tickets (see #4).
 
4) Helpdesk followup improvements. We sometimes struggle to followup on helpdesk tickets when you add a comment. One of the changes we released this morning helps us to better identify tickets that you have added a comment to. This works by bumping tickets you have commented on up in priority.
 
Have a great day!
 
~ Dave
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