Release

Zammad 3.2.0 & 3.1.1

December 3, 2019 · Today, we’re pleased to announce a brand new release of Zammad!

Besides the bugfix release Zammad 3.1.1 we also release the new Zammad 3.2.0 with the following major improvements.

Zammad 3.2.0 (minor) & 3.1.1 (patch)

#1: 💬 Chat - Alternative display name & forwarding

Chatting with customers has become a standard channel and is almost unthinkable to be without nowadays. This has enabled us to implement two functionalities that have often been demanded.

Alternative display name
If a customer starts a chat with an agent, the name of the agent and his avatar will be shown. Now each agent can decide for himself which name will be shown and whether to chat with or without an avatar. The setting can be changed in the personal chat settings. For example, you can only use your first name to make the conversations more personal.

Forwarding of chats
In larger environments, it is often useful to forward entire chat conversations to other departments (e.g. a second level). This can now be done with a new action in the chat properties.

#2: 🔗 Clickable URLs for custom object attributes

With your own attributes, e.g. for tickets, you can very easily implement new requirements, e.g. for storing serial numbers on a ticket or to introduce categorization. Now it is also possible to store a link to external systems for text attributes. This means that e. g. a serial number no longer has to be entered into the search field of an external application via "cut & paste" via the clipboard, but can be opened conveniently from within Zammad by clicking on the serial number.

Screenshot Zammad attributes external link

#3: ✍️ Group-Based Macros

Macros are fantastic for performing recurring actions on tickets with just one mouse click. It can happen in more complex environments that a large selection of macros becomes confusing. Macros can now be assigned to groups (like text modules since Zammad 3.1). If a macro is not assigned to a group, the macro is available for all groups.

#4: 👮 SAML authentication

SAML is supported in Zammad 3.2 and offers the possibility to authenticate users via single sign-on (SSO). This is done by redirecting the user to a company login page when clicking on the SAML button on the Zammad login page. Various identity providers (IdP) such as Keycloak, Gluu, PrivacyIDEA or others that support SAML authentication and are already in use in many companies can be used for this purpose. After successful authentication, the user is then redirected to Zammad, where he is automatically logged in with the provided data.

#5: ✉️ Auto responder for oversized e-mails

For security reasons, a size limit for e-mails can be set in Zammad. E-mails that are larger than the limit were not processed by Zammad and left unprocessed in the mailbox. The respective Zammad admin had to take care of the further processing of these oversized e-mails. From now on, e-mail notifications for such oversized e-mails will be sent to the sender without an administrator having to carry out a manual intermediate step. This accelerates the flow of information to the sender of the oversized e-mail, who can then immediately and independently create and resend a smaller e-mail.

Technical notes (for self-hosted):

Performance improvements:
CPU usage - Several improvements have been made to significantly reduce the CPU usage of the scheduler (further improvements will be made in future versions).
Memory footprint - A new environment variable for Ruby memory allocation has significantly reduced memory consumption (in optimal cases, memory consumption is reduced by 38% in long-term operation).
Fulltext search: In Elasticsearch values for fields in the original format are stored 1:1 in a field automatically generated by Elasticsearch. This field has the extension .keyword. For historical reasons, Zammad has stored this 1:1 content in fields with the extension .raw. As of Zammad 3.2, this was converted to the Elasticsearch standard extension .keyword. This requires a re-indexing of Elasticsearch (zammad run rake searchindex:rebuild).