Hope you all are enjoying new updates in Vision Helpdesk, specially the latest refreshing design change released in V2.6.4 For those who have not yet upgraded to V2.6.4 stable — please go for it. V2.6.4 has several bug fixes and the new Admin Access feature that gives you perfect control over domain admins and their access rights.

Now What’s New?

Leaving up to our promises — we are committed to come up with Vision Helpdesk API’s.

What is Vision Helpdesk API – (Application Programming Interface) ?

Vision Helpdesk API is nothing but a door (a code) that will open access to several functions of Vision Helpdesk. Using Vision Helpdesk API your script can interact with Vision Helpdesk functions. Example you have a WHMCS Billing Software and you want to fetch Vision Helpdesk Tickets list in to your WHMCS script — yes that is now possible with Vision Helpdesk API.

In short Vision Helpdesk API will allow your script to communicate with Vision Helpdesk code and integrate Vision features seamlessly into your script.

Vision Helpdesk API Example Usage

Below is the example of communicating with Vision Helpdesk API System.

The following PHP code will Add Staff to Vision Helpdesk, and is how we recommend interfacing with it.

   <?php
      /*---------------------- [Required Fields Start] ----------------------*/
      $url='http://yourdomain.com/support/manage/api/index.php';
      $postData["name"]='vision_admin';
      $postData["passw"]='#######';
      $postData["operation"]='add_staff';
      $postData["user_name"]='harry';
      $postData["email"]='harry@yourdomain.com';
      $postData["departments"]='1,2,3';
      /*---------------------- Required Fields End] ----------------------*/
      /*---------------------- Optional Fields Start ----------------------*/
      $postData["full_name"]='Harry Potter';
      $postData["password"]='q8r3i56y7';
      $postData["contact_no"]=; 
      $postData["groupid"]=1;
      /*---------------------- Optional Fields End] ----------------------*/
      $handle=curl_init();
      curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
      curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
      curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 100);
      curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
      curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);
      $returnData=curl_exec($handle);
      curl_close($handle);
      $returnData=explode(";", $returnData);
      foreach ($returnData AS $temp) {
          $temp=explode("=",$temp);
          $results[$temp[0]]=$temp[1];
      }
      /*--------------------  [Retrun values]  ------------------------
          On sucess message and staffid
          On error message
      -----------------------------------------------------------------*/
   ?>

Vision Helpdesk API Functions

For more details on list of Vision Helpdesk API functions please check — http://www.thevisionworld.com/help/index.php?title=Vision_Helpdesk_API

More updates to follow..

With our next immediate upcoming release V2.4.12 we are introducing a completely new Client Portal design. We hope you like it.

The new client portal is clean and gives you more options to customize as per your website design. With our new client portal users will be able to create their own themes too – Add your own header / footer, change logo make css modifications and much more..

Below are some screenshoots of our new client portal design..

A) Submit Ticket Screen

B) Ticket Listing Screen

The V2.4.12 is schedule to be released in first week of Jan 2010 or earlier.

We welcome your Comments / Suggestions / Feature Request — Feel free to comment this post with your thoughts about our new design..

We will keep posting more about the new version release – stay tuned.

The new feature that we are including with our upcoming release is –

Ticket Listing Views

Scrolling through the feature request queue we found — it would be interesting to provide ticket view customization to users that is, staff can customize ticket listing columns example they can select or deselect columns like flag, ticket id, ticket subject, ticket priority, department, last activity etc, also staff can decide column sequence i.e. what column occurs first, second and so on..

This feature will also allow staff to sort ticket based on last activity, ticket subject, and other related fields..

We are always ready to take input from our customers – If you think you can contribute to enhance this feature please feel free to comment this post with your suggestions / thoughts.

After completing Pre and Post Parser — our team is ready to go behind advancing Paid Support Module.  Our existing Paid Support module allows users to integrate with billing systems like WHMCS | Blesta and create invoice, track invoice payment and add billing note from Vision helpdesk.

We are taking this feature one step ahead –

Things that will be implemented –

• Auto billing time tracking for ticket  — This will auto calculate billing time for a ticket based on the amount of time staff has worked on that ticket.
• Setting billing rate  — per ticket | per minute | per hour
• Pre Paid billing.
• Billing reports.
• Multi currency support.

We are always ready to take input from our customers – If you think you can contribute to enhance this feature please feel free to comment this post with your suggestions / thoughts.

Vision Helpdesk team is constantly working on new features to bring you best helpdesk tool for your business.

Our upcoming version is schedule to be released in first week of Nov 2009 — This new version will include powerful tool i.e Pre & Post Parser.

Pre and Post parser will allow users to set filter criteria and based on criteria they can specify several actions.

Filter criteria allows users to define what conditions they want to match against incoming emails.  Users can create pre or post parsing rules and decide execution order for rules.

Pre and Post parsing turns out to be perfect tool for automation — based on rule actions can be decided — example changing department, marking ticket as spam, changing ticket priority, ticket status and so on.

Pre and Post parser gives you complete control over your incoming emails.

We will keep updating this post with more information on release schedule.