The ENTP Blog

HTML Emails

asciithoughts — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:37:00 -0700

Howdy!

It’s been a while since our last blog post, but today I have something exciting for you: HTML emails are now the default in Tender. This means that emails to your users will look cleaner, AND you can use Markdown to create nice looking responses (or echo templates):

We’ve also improved the notifications for staff:

Autoresponders have been upgraded as well, go try to create one!

You can find more information about how to customize your email templates on our knowledge base article.

Cheers!

Tickets in your Support, Support in your Tickets

entpstaff — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:31:00 -0700

It’s probably not a huge surprise that we use Lighthouse integration with our own Tender support (and Lighthouse support too). Using both applications lets our support team escalate issues to our developers that might need a little more time and attention. It’s particularly awesome because support staff can set the discussion aside but as soon as the Lighthouse ticket is closed the Tender discussion will be bumped back to pending dashboard.

Integration can be an incredible enhancement to your support workflow and is so simple, you’ll be up and running in no time. Check out the knowledge base article to get started - https://help.tenderapp.com/kb/general-use/how-do-i-integrate-my-tender-with-lighthouse. We also offer integration with Github Issues.

*Tender customers who are subscribed to a paid Lighthouse plan receive 15% off of their Tender account. So what are you waiting for!? Sign up today and make sure to contact us at billing@tenderapp.com so we know to apply that discount for you.

Introducing Tender Themes

zenhob — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 17:26:00 -0800

We have been experimenting with a new method of generating stylesheets for Tender sites, and this is the result: Tender Themes.

While we’ve always offered custom CSS on some plans (And we still do! Upgrade today!), this approach offers a much lower barrier to entry compared to building a complete custom stylesheet for your Tender. We’ve also reduced the range of colors in the palette (can you believe we had 14 different ‘dark blue’s?) and we do some tricky color math so that you only need to choose a few core colors to get a nice looking theme.

While theming in Tender can currently only be used to change colors, this is only the beginning! In the fullness of time, anything that can be controlled via CSS can theoretically be controlled with a Tender theme. We hope to expand this capability in the future. If you have specific suggestions to help theming meet your needs, let us know! We’ve provided a few built-in themes to get you started, but we encourage you to experiment with this new feature, make your own themes.

Color theming is immediately available to all Tender sites.

Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! (or why we love Portland)

amanda-entp — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:29:42 -0700

Like a lot of companies who make and support web-based applications, the concept of a having a physical workspace/office isn’t really critical to the work we do. We could all be working remotely, from far flung areas of the world…only wi-fi required.

So, why Portland? For me at least, the answer is clear:

Beer.

Wait. Just let me make my case.

We can all agree, developers shake their fists at bugs far less when said fists are holding pints of beer, and baby, we got all sorts of beers.

We have a few things going for us here in Portland. Namely, hops. They grow in our backyard. As a result a Pacific Northwest IPA should really smack you in the mouth with flavor. An Oregon IPA should wind-up cold-cock your mouth with flavor. Basically, in Oregon, your face is in danger. When you live here for awhile you can even start to get snobby about the types of hops they put in the beer *.

Access to the variety of fresh hops is something really unique about this corner of the world and makes our beer really something great.

Another thing special about the Portland beer scene is the sheer concentration of breweries in the city limits. With 30+ breweries, we live in a city that can support an entire brewery dedicated to sour beer. Let me put this in perspective. Sour beer (really sour beer) tastes like someone just poured a bunch of vinegar in your beer. It’s an acquired taste to say the least. There’s an entire brewery dedicated to vinegar beer and we love it. Portland brewers compete and take risks. The winner of this competition is without a doubt our greedy faces.

If all of the locally brewed beer wasn’t enough, Portland also gets amazing regional brews from Washington, California and Colorado. Portland sits at a crossroad in the middle of all the great West coast beer.

Here are a few of our team’s favorites:

Tsunami Stout… roasty, malty goodness - Nicole

I think my preferred beer is the Sierra Nevada Porter. I’ve always been a fan of dark beers and this Porter manages to offer a rich taste while still feeling light and smooth. It leaves you satisfied without feeling overwhelmed, and it’s flavorful and crisp. A good introduction to the world of Porters. - Julien

My favorite beer-drinking experience is English-style bitters from a cask. Unfortunately ESB is not the most popular style in Portland. Luckily Rogue Brewery in the Pearl district always has Young’s Special Bitters on cask when I get that urge. - Hobson

I absolutely love Laurelwood Workhorse IPA. It’s hoppy, floral, full-bodied and smooth. Ugh. It’s so damn good. - Amanda

* I am totally snobby about the types of hops they put in the beer

About Search

asciithoughts — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:24:32 -0700

The first 2 weeks of October were rough. As many of you noticed, search was requiring a refresh or two to work – and sometimes didn’t work at all for a while. Search is a big part of customer support: you need to know if other people have had similar issues to the one you are responding to, find other discussions from the same user, point users back to older discussions or KB articles solving their problems. In short: search is essential.

So when our search engine started misbehaving, we immediately started investigating what was going on to fix it as fast as possible. The machines in the search cluster were running out of memory, requiring regular restart of the search engine. This caused troubles because the search engine was not available while it was restarting and re-initializing, but also responding poorly as it was reaching the limits of the machine. We added more machines and more memory almost immediately to at least alleviate the problem and keep search generally usable, but no matter how big the machine, the server would always run out of memory. It thus became clear that something else needed to be done.

The reason of this sudden memory hunger was a corruption in the index. We repaired the index a few times, but this didn’t seem to fix it, and so we had to create a brand new index, on new servers, to come back to a stable state. In the process, we made several changes to the way our index is structured: where previously all sites were part of one big bucket, we isolated all sites on the new index, which means that search and indexing are much faster. Also, if issues arise on one site, other sites are less likely to be affected, and we can work on that site specifically.

During this whole time, we worked almost 24/7 to keep things running and to build the new infrastructure. Tender is now running on this new index, on very powerful machines, and search is working properly and fast. We still have to iron out a few things, and work will continue during the next few days, but you shouldn’t notice any problems and we’ll do the maximum to make those changes without any downtime. If you notice anything wrong (search unavailable, missing discussions or KB articles), let us know as soon as you can so we can jump on it.

Right now everything is looking good and we’ll keep improving things, but if you have any question or problem, drop us a line at help@tenderapp.com, and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks for your support and your patience. You are the greatest customers one can hope for. We love Tender, and we’ll continue to do our best to bring you the best customer experience possible, both as staff and clients.

Cheers.

See your Lighthouse Metrics on a Geckoboard Dashboard

entpstaff — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:41:52 -0700

We are excited to announce our participation in the launch of the Geckoboard Widget Editor, part of the Geckoboard Developer Platform. Geckoboard creates software that make it easy for businesses to see all of their key metrics on elegant, real-time, business dashboards.

During the last couple of months we’ve being working with the team at Geckoboard to develop a set of widgets to monitor key metrics important to Lighthouse Customers and we are incredibly happy with the results. For the very first time our customers can now see their important Lighthouse metrics together with their other metrics on one Geckoboard dashboard.

The Lighthouse widgets enable our customers to display number of open and closed tickets in a project, RAG status of projects and total number of open tickets across all projects. For a complete list of the Lighthouse widgets available, check out the details - Lighthouse Widgets on Geckoboard

To see some of the Lighthouse Widgets in action check out this sample dashboard

To see your Lighthouse details on a Geckoboard dashboard, sign up for a Free 30 day trial and get your own business dashboard http://www.geckoboard.com. If you think of any widgets we should add, just let us know at help@lighthouseapp.com.

Tips & Tricks: Splitting Discussions & Heartbeats

bemmabobemma — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 14:14:00 -0700

Did you know you can split a customer’s discussion into two or more separate discussions? Well, you can with our Split Discussion feature. The ability to split discussions can come in handy for a variety of reasons, from security maintenance to basic organization. Because let’s face it: people goof up and so do you.

Say User A writes in with a question which you believe contains private information, yet they’ve left the discussion as public. Between the time the discussion came in and the time it took for you to respond, User B comes along, experiencing a similar issue, and chimes in on this public discussion. You wouldn’t want User B seeing User A’s private information, so you could then split the discussion in two. User A gets answered in a separate discussion which would be made private, while User B gets answered in a new discussion, either public or private, depending upon the subject-voila! Split Discussions! Read more in our knowledge base article on Splitting Discussions.

Now for heartbeats. When you’re setting up your Tender, it’s a good idea to make sure your email delivery is up and running correctly. Heartbeats verify that email delivery to your Tender site is working. They’re enabled by default for new sites, but not everyone has them turned on. When enabled, Heartbeats help add more information to our health stats which help us diagnose problems faster when they come up. Help keep Tender healthy-start using heartbeats! Read more in our knowledge base article on Heartbeats.

Tips and Tricks: Using Queues

tclarkentp — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:39:47 -0700

Queues are a powerful and flexible way to manage your support load with Tender. In some ways, Queues work a bit like tagging — any individual discussion can be in multiple queues, so you can use them for everything from tracking common issues to grouping discussions by feature, or team, or even assigning discussions to individuals — or all of them at once.

Create a Queue

To create a Queue, go to your Dashboard and click the “Manage Queues” link on the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar. Simply click the “Create Queue” button to add a Queue with the name you can specify.

Assign a Discussion to a Queue

In the header of every discussion’s page, you can assign it to a Queue simply by clicking the “ADD TO QUEUE” button in the header — if it’s already in any Queues, it will tell you how many Queues the discussion is in.

Automatically Assign Discussions to Queues using Filters

You can use a filter to automatically assign a Discussion to a specific Queue. Simply go to your dashboard and click “Account & Settings” from the header, then click “Settings.” On the Settings page, select “Discussion Filters” from the left side nav bar. The total number of filters you can add depends on your particular plan’s settings. An example of a filter could be if there is a text match for API, it automatically adds the discussion to the API and Developers Queues.

Manage Subscriptions

You can use queues to assign discussions to team groups or individuals, simply by having them subscribe on their User Account page under Email Subscriptions. This allows team members to be focused only on discussions that are relevant to their expertise without having to search through all Open or Pending discussions for items they should be responding to.

Are you using Queues in particularly inventive ways? Drop us a line at help@tenderapp.com and we’ll be happy to hear how you set up Queues to work for you!

Announcing Echo Templates

zenhob — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 11:57:29 -0700

At long last, Tender provides a way to save previous support replies as templates to be used again later. We call this feature “Echo Templates”, as the name “Canned Replies” seemed kind of lame to us.

Let’s face it: Sometimes you end up repeating yourself when doing support for a large user base. You can only type a polite request for a billing address so many times before you feel that perhaps your time could be better spent elsewhere.

We have tried to make adding new templates as simple as possible. You can re-use old responses as templates for new ones, or pre-write as many as you want. Possible applications include quick replies to a large number of customers after an outage, simple requests for more info or perhaps making your support language more consistent.

Echo templates are available on Extra and Ultimo plans. Trial users can try out our Ultimo plan for free! Read more in our knowledge base article on Echo Templates.

Supporter goodies

asciithoughts — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:42:00 -0700

A few days ago, we started showing information about the user’s browser in the Private Information box. If the discussion came from the widget, we showed you the URL as well:

While this information is useful, the Private box was not the right place for it: it should show your information, not ours. So today we are moving it where it belongs: if browser information is available, via web will be underlined, and you can hover it to see the note.

In addition to browser information, we are also introducing 2 new features:

Keyboard shortcuts: you can now press R to focus the reply box (which will also scroll you down to the latest message), ESC to unfocus it, and I to mark a message as internal. Hopefully, this is just the beginning, and we’ll be adding more along the road.
Recent discussions: if a user has created more than one discussion, you will see a link appear on the right: just click it and it will expand to show you the 5 most recent discussions from that user:

I hope these small changes will make your life easier! Let us know what your think :)

Ticket Activity and Tender Discussions

zenhob — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:48:17 -0700

A feature of Tender that we use extensively at ENTP (as you might imagine) is the Lighthouse ticket integration. It allows us to track customer issues in our ticketing system, where the work is actually done. At the same time, it connects that back to our support system, where we communicate with customers about the work that is being done.

It’s a good thing we have this too, because sometimes there is more work to do than time. After support is done, all the customers have been replied to, feature requests acknowledged and bugs ticketed, there is a gap of time where discussions are put aside while the work is done in the ticketing system. When this is complete, the tickets are closed and we begin the manual process of returning to all of the associated discussions to close the loop: “Here’s your new feature,” “We fixed that bug, thanks for the heads up,” etc. This has worked great for us the entire time we’ve been using these two products together.

However, we did see an opportunity to automate part of this process and make it slightly easier to close the support loop when the work in Lighthouse is completed. Now, when a Lighthouse ticket’s state changes from an open state to a closed state, all associated Tender discussions will be reopened (if necessary) and returned to the pending inbox, making it easy for support staff to close the loop.

This relatively small change simplifies the process of closing the support loop when tickets are completed. We hope this makes it easier to work with tickets in your Tender support site.

Oh, one more thing. We now support GitHub Issues as an external ticketing system. Enjoy!

Notification madness

asciithoughts — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:01:35 -0700

Last Friday, a bug in our system resulted in thousands of system messages being marked as spam. We quickly fixed the problem and deployed a patch to prevent such a situation from happening again. Once the bug was fixed, we started to restore those system messages to their normal status. Unfortunately, due to another bug (it was a bad day, wasn’t it..), notifications emails went out. We quickly stopped that as well, but a few emails managed to get out.

These emails were just re-sent notifications that had gone out already, and they were sent to users that were already subscribed to these discussions. Since we stopped the process early, this only affected very old discussions, and mostly support staff. Both bugs are now fixed, and all system messages have been restored, so the situation has returned to normal.

We are now going through our logs to list all the users affected by this problem, and we will contact each affected site individually to follow up.

If you are still experiencing issues, or if you have any question regarding this incident, just let us know at support@tenderapp.com.

New in Tender: Assign discussions directly to Support Staff

zenhob — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 18:35:33 -0700

Tender’s all about support: Your customers don’t care who is responsible, they just want some help. For this reason, we’ve avoided implementing user-specific assignment, since support queues already make it pretty easy to divide responsbility among your team. However, there are times when this isn’t enough. To that end, we have added the ability to assign a discussion to individual support staff.

Assignment works a bit like queueing except that discussions can only be assigned to one supporter at a time (for now). Assignment is not visible to end-users, only support staff. Every member of your support staff has their own assignment “queue” that automatically notifies them.

We’ve done our best to integrate staff assignment in a natural way across Tender. The new commands mine and assign can be used to assign discussions from your email client. You can assign from the dashboard using bulk edit or from the discussion itself. This has the potential to make it even easier for support staff to know when something is their responsibility.

The sidebar on your support dashboard will now include a list of your staff, just like it does for queues. This lets you see who has open assignments at a glance. After we added this we realized the sidebar was getting a bit crowded, so we’ve also made it possible to individually hide each section in the dashboard sidebar. Bonus!

New in Tender: login with Google Apps

courtenay3 — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 23:39:54 -0700

We upgraded our OpenID implementation for Tender today which lets you register and login with your Google Apps openID. You just need to enter the domain name you registered - e.g., yoursite.com - and it should figure the rest out for you.

Tender Activity Filters are here!

zenhob — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 15:31:18 -0700

We’ve released a beta version of our latest Tender feature to subscribers of our Max and Ultimo plans. Activity Filters allow you to automatically process old or outdated discussions by closing, re-pending, queueing, or marking them private. This feature is inspired by work some of our users have been doing on their own using the API and it’s long overdue for inclusion in Tender proper.

I’d like to walk you through the basics of this new feature and hopefully show you some useful things it can do along the way. That said, I would not be surprised if some of our customers come up with uses we hadn’t even considered.

Dropped correspondence is over, if you want it

Sometimes a discussion comes in that requires research. We usually let the customer know we’re looking at it and then immediately re-pend the discussion so we don’t lose it while we go dig up the answers. Occasionally we forget to mark pending and someone forgets to follow up with the customer right away, causing us to lose track of the discussion until we go looking for it or until it gets bumped by a customer. If this happens to us, we bet it happens to you too. By creating an activity filter that automatically re-pends stale discussions, there’s now a safety net in case any correspondence ever falls through the cracks.

How activity filters work

You choose a timeout period (minimum one hour) and an action to be performed. The timeout represents the amount of time that has passed since the last customer-visible activity. The action is what happens to the discussion once this timeout has been reached. Each action has its own separate timer for each discussion, so that two different filters can still act on the same discussion without interfering.

Dealing with the backlog

A complication you may encounter with this feature is the issue of existing discussions. We made a choice not to ignore old discussions when creating a new filter, and instead provide some visibility into how this filter will affect your backlog of existing, stale discussions.

For sites with a very large number of old discussions, I recommend queueing them first to deal with the backlog (you can use an activity filter for this), and close those before attempting to add a new filter that automatically re-pends all old discussions. If your support staff already close all old/stale discussions this obviously won’t be an issue.

Countless (well at least 4) possibilities

Activity filters are almost dangerous in their scope and ability, but with great power comes great implications for your own support workflow! We are eager to see how our large-volume customers make use of this new tool and hopefully iterate on this to meet the needs of Tender’s various support sites.

Subscribers of our Max and Ultimo plans can try this out right away. New users can try out our Ultimo plan for 2 weeks for free!

Rolling Out the Welcome Mat for New Projects

zenhob — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:50:56 -0700

For a long time, creating a new project in Lighthouse has been somewhat abrupt, at best utilitarian, some might even say awkward. After project creation, this process would immediately drop you into the Access and Permissions screen without much context or prompting about where to go next. While inviting new members to your project is often a necessity, the account-scoped permissions page was not the best way to do that. Also, there are other things you might want to do after project creation besides invite people. Given all this, we decided to make project creation more welcoming.

Who’s Invited?

The first thing to go from the process was that account-wide permissions page. When you’re starting a new project, your initial focus may be inviting new collaborators or users from other projects. So this where your new project journey now begins.

We’ve done our best to trim non-project-related content from this new invite screen so it’s easy to find the important stuff, or you can simply skip it if all your users are account members.

The Wide World of New Projects

Lighthouse has always been about letting you find your own workflow, and we couldn’t really think of another step obvious enough that we’d drop you right into it like we did with invites. So instead, we provide links to the different features of your project so that you can begin collaborating in the manner that works best for you. This has the added benefit of giving newer Lighthouse users a high-level view of what you can do with your project.

This new flow is visible to project and account members on newly created Lighthouse projects right now. Feel free to check it out and let us know what you think!

From idea to shipped feature in an hour

zenhob — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:16:00 -0700

Sometimes the time between coming up with a kickass feature, having a “product planning meeting”, writing, coding, and shipping, is one hour
— c3 (@court3nay) April 21, 2012

While we were trying to scope a new Tender feature, we accidentally stumbled across a very simple and effective UI improvement that we were able to implement, test and deploy in the space of an hour. I figured I could introduce this (very small) feature with the (very short) story of how we built and shipped it.

The issue was thus: We provide per-queue notification settings for support staff. These only affect whether the staff member in question receives email notifications for a queue. However, these notification settings also represent something else. They’re a list of queues that are important or relevant to a particular staff member. Amazingly, we don’t make use of this information anywhere else! I know!

As things wound down in the ENTP office a couple of Fridays ago, Courtenay and I became so energized by this discovery. Courtenay immediately pushed his first pass at a topic branch for this feature. I reviewed and staged it. We went over the QA routine ourselves, since everyone else had mostly gone for the weekend. There was some confusion at first because I couldn’t find the right notification settings. This is why I don’t usually do QA. We pressed on, because we are intrepid and we kept the scope very small. We verified that it worked and shipped it to production to see it in action on our own support page.

Within an hour we had the following simple, new additions:

From now on when you elect to be notified about a queue, that queue will receive priority in the support dashboard UI under “My Queues”. Since we were keen to get a useful change shipped right away, we didn’t do any more than this for the first pass.

I’m not going to lie, we were already barfing rainbows over this, so great was our excitement at this easy win. But! There was one very important bit of functionality missing, in my opinion: What I really wanted was the ability to see discussions from all of my queues in the pending view at once. So we took a little more time and added that too.

We left ourselves greater leeway on the turnaround for this one, and we were able to get our usual QA approval before shipping. We were even able to pay off some technical debt in related code at the same time! This change has been very important to me personally as I find it to be conducive to my own workflow. It gives me an easy way to check whether any queued discussions that I should know about about are waiting for a response, and nothing else.

Like I said it’s the small things, or maybe we here at ENTP are hopeless workflow nerds. Possibly both.

New: JSONP knowledge base API.

courtenay3 — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:38:15 -0700

I’ve just added a callback parameter to our autosuggest json endpoint. This means you can now search your knowledge base from anywhere and integrate the results into your page. Furthermore, because it’s using the autosuggest, you can plug in a bunch of unrelated words and it will simply find the best match.

For example, you could parse the contents of your page and automatically suggest the best results for that page from your KB in the sidebar.

Here’s the URL:

http://your.tenderapp.com/search/autosuggest.json?q=query&callback=function

Here’s some sample code to get you started, using a script tag:

<script type="text/javascript"> 
function kb_search(results){ 
 $('#results').html(results[0].title); 
} 
</script> 
<script src="http://monkeys.tenderapp.com/search/autosuggest.json?callback=kb_search&q=how+do+i+find+api+results" defer="true"></script>

I’ve written a more complex example, that works with a form and a jQuery jsonp call at this gist: feel free to fork it and improve it. It attempts to minimize the number of requests sent.

How to set up and manage your notifications

bemmabobemma — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:16:47 -0700

Good day to you!

When creating a new profile in Tender, the email preferences default to notifying the user of changes in the issues/discussions they have participated in (either by creating or commenting on), but you can curate your notifications for any given category or queues that you wish by signing in and going here: https://help.tenderapp.com/profile/edit

Scroll mid-page where you’ll find “Email Preferences” and click as you see fit. A word to the wise: choose your notifications wisely, young Jedi. If you get click happy, you may find your email inbox quickly becomes inundated with things you don’t really care about.

Occasionally, users report being spammed by Tender’s support system. If this happens, have them check their email preferences before submitting a bug report. If they have any public discussion category notifications set, the user will receive all posts, regardless of their direct involvement in the discussion.

Find all the bugs

chronicole — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:12:06 -0700

Even before the beginning of a pull request for Lighthouse and Tender, TATFT is enforced. Red, green, refactor as the code is written is excellent but it won’t catch everything. Scripts are vital but can sometimes lead to complacency. I believe exploratory testing is a great tool in my web application testers tool belt. Unfortunately, it’s often misunderstood. Here are three common misunderstandings of exploratory testing:

1. Testers have to find bugs. Exploratory testing is like a hunting trip and serves no purpose.

The belief that testers *must* find bugs is false. My happiest day is when I go through a pull request the first time and can say “Ship it!”. The best exploratory testing is not blind exploring, monkey clicking through the application, but rather thoughtful investigation of the application by someone who knows the code specifications.

2. Exploratory testing is only good right before deploy.

Exploratory testing can actually enhance the automated test suite, by finding new uses of the application not already covered by existing tests. I see every bug report as an opportunity to beef up our test scripts.

3. Exploratory testing is done without scripts.

The best exploratory testing is based on carefully created scripts, but the wise tester knows when to stray from the scripts and follow the bug trail where it leads; being careful to track the steps to reproduce the bug in question.

Although it is very easy to dismiss exploratory testing as an inefficient testing method, most web application users are not as predictable as programmers would hope. Exploratory testing bridges the gap between automated testing and those unpredictable users.