Unwrap Freshservice's Delights: December 2024 Release Notes
Freshservice has unwrapped its December 2024 updates, bringing a sleigh full of features designed to make your IT service management more efficient and delightful. With feature availability rolling out throughout December and into early January—including festive themes starting December 16th, workflow enhancements available now, and enterprise-level features such as audit logs launching January 6th—this update has something for everyone. Let’s dive into the highlights: Let’s dive into the highlights:
1. Festive Themes for the Agent Portal
Add a sprinkle of holiday cheer to your workspace with two new festive themes. Admins can enable these through the Agent Portal Rebranding settings, and agents can choose their favorite. These themes will be available starting December 16th, making it a simple way to brighten the season and boost morale.
2. Bulk Editing for Dropdown Fields
Updating dropdown menus just got a whole lot easier. With the new bulk edit feature, you can modify multiple options simultaneously, saving time and reducing errors. Plus, the system now smartly distinguishes between renaming and editing actions, ensuring your changes are spot-on.
This is a godsend for those with huge category lists or needing to manage complex lists. Something we’ve been asking for!
3. Business Rule Enhancements
Freshservice has introduced powerful updates to business rules:
Restrict Email Searches on the Requester Portal: Admins can now block requesters from searching for or entering email addresses in the requester/end-user portal. This ensures better protection of sensitive data and aligns with privacy regulations, offering a more secure user experience.
Requester Groups in Tickets and Changes: Business rules now support Requester Groups in Tickets and Changes, expanding functionality beyond the previously supported Agent Groups. This applies to both global settings and all workspaces, enabling more flexibility and control in managing ticket workflows.
This is HUGE! Up to now, admins had to maintain different ways of working for targeting content in the portal to customer groups, for service items, and user attributes for anything else. This is a big win.
4. Public APIs for Alert Management
Integrate and automate with ease. The introduction of public APIs for Alert Management allows for seamless integration with your existing tools, enhancing your alert handling capabilities.
Now, rather than having to pass off complex calls to tickets, taking action or associating data to alerts will be a lot simpler.
5. Alert Suppression During Maintenance
Keep things quiet during scheduled maintenance. This feature suppresses unnecessary alerts, reducing noise and helping teams focus on what's important.
This is a great feature for those with a heavy integration into alerting. Now when your changes are happening in maintenance windows, you can link up your alerts and prevent false alarms!
6. Reader Node for Alert Workflows
Gain finer control over your alerts. The new reader node in alert workflows enables more granular processing, improving efficiency in incident management. Reader nodes are super powerful for setting out arrays of decisions or other important information about our businesses. So being able to do this straight from alerts is a big win.
7. Asset Field Addition in Document Generation
Admins can now add asset fields in document templates to enable clear record-keeping and acknowledgment of assigned and returned assets. With this capability, admins can automate the creation of asset receipts or acknowledgements.
This is particularly useful for onboarding and offboarding processes and for managing the issuing of kit. Inventory management for remote workers is a fantastic use case here, especially given the rising percentage of lost kit due to remote work.
8. Workflow Enhancements for Stages
This update drives automation in inventory and software management with new capabilities for scheduled workflows. Freshservice now offers:
Hours since the agent responded
Hours since the requester responded
This is great as it enables advanced supervisor rules. We’re excited to see where this is going!
9. Enhanced Email Actions
Admins can now search for and select multiple Agent Groups as recipients using the “Send Email To” action in workflows. This small but mighty change ensures efficient communication, allowing emails to be triggered to specific groups directly through workflows.
10. MS Excel Exports in Analytics
Data analysis just got more flexible. You can now export reports directly to MS Excel from Freshservice Analytics, making it easier to manipulate and share data across your organization—because let's face it, we all still use Excel!
11. Comprehensive Audit Logs
Security and transparency are paramount. Now, audit logs capture the creation and updates of credentials, as well as configurations of Orchestration Apps within workflows. Admins can monitor changes effectively, ensuring a secure environment. Another enterprise-ready upgrade to what’s already a flexible and powerful tool!
These updates reflect Freshservice's commitment to delivering a user-friendly and secure platform, empowering your team to work more effectively and joyfully. Ready to make the most of these features? Contact Zest today for expert guidance and tailored solutions to take your Freshservice experience to the next level! What features are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments or reach out to Zest for help optimizing these updates for your workflows!