Planio Support (english)

Since many users have asked us how to set up and use custom fields in Planio, we have prepared a brand new guide to help you do just that!

Follow our step by step guide and learn how to create and use custom fields in your account here: https://plan.io/create-new-custom-fields/

We are proud to bring a new Planio update to our customers with usability, configuration and speed improvements in many key Planio functions.

Issue improvements¶

Issues are one of our central features and have received a lot of updates. The most visible change is the issue history, which can now be viewed either as a unified history or as only Notes, Property Changes, and where applicable only Time Entries, Associated Revisions or Chat Logs. Using those new tabs you can now focus on only the parts of the Issue History that are important to you.

The editor for formatted texts also has been improved in several ways. A new toolbar button allows for quick and easy creation of tables and formatted texts can now be previewed in place. Quick and easy also best describes the new autocomplete helpers for issue numbers (just type # followed by an issue ID or some part of the title text) and for web pages (just type [[ and some part of the wiki page name or title).

All those improvements to the formatted text editor are also available for all formatted text editors in Planio, not just for those in issues!

Default Queries¶

Keeping in line with improvements to the usability of Issues are Default Queries. Administrators can now set a global Issue Query as a global Default Query, and project managers can choose a Default Query at a project level that can override the global Default Query. You can now configure which columns, filters, sort order and groupings are used by default in the Issues Tab for each project and globally!

Many more small improvements¶

While those are our favourite new features there are many more across the board. The project list for example can now be filtered. You can create new users by importing users from a CSV file. Groups can now be added as Watchers to Issues. You can now download all attachments from an Issue at once instead of downloading each Issue attachment individually.

One security improvement we would like to make Administrators of Planio accounts that use LDAP authentication aware of is certificate checking. Up until now connections to an upstream server using the LDAPS option would benefit from strong encryption for connections made to the LDAP server, however the validity of the LDAP server's certificate would not be checked. The new default for LDAP servers is to check the validity of the LDAP server's certificate, and we would encourage existing Administrators of Planios with LDAP authentication to switch to LDAPS with certificate validation available in the LDAP connection's configuration.

Upgrade to Redmine 4.2¶

Everyone who’s keeping an eye on Redmine development as well, will have noticed that many of the improvements in Redmine have either appeared on Planio first or have been integrated in Planio throughout the last couple of months already. Today’s update marks the “official” upgrade of the Planio code base to Redmine 4.2 though, meaning that Planio is now up to date with all the small and minor code changes and quirks of the latest Redmine release.

We hope these improvements will make using Planio more productive for everyone and would love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions regarding those new features or anything Planio related please get in touch.

As an administrator of your Planio account, you can now allow non-admin users to invite new users to their projects via email. For example, you can allow project managers to add new members in order to streamline the onboarding of new users.

Configuration¶

The whole feature is opt-in and must be enabled under Your Avatar → Administration → Settings in the Authentication tab, where you can choose who is Allowed to invite new users via email:

Once you have set the field Allowed to invite new users via email to Administrators and authorized project members, you will then need to give the relevant roles the permission Allowed to invite new users via email. Please be aware that, in order to be usable for this purpose, a role must have the Manage members permission, as well as User visibility set to All active users. You may create an additional role for this purpose, or modify an existing one accordingly.

If you created a new role, don't forget to assign it to the relevant users in those projects, where they should be allowed to add new users.

Adding new users to a project¶

With all things set, your project managers can now invite new users to their projects by going to the project's settings → Members . All they have to do is to enter the email address of the new user in the search field, and select the roles for the new project member.

New users created this way will have a random password set and receive an email with instructions for activating their account.

As you might already know, Planio Help Desk allows customers to view the past communication on an issue via a public tracking page. This page shows all previous communication with the customer which was either sent to or received by them.

Although each tracking page can only be accessed through its secure individual link, which is only known to the parties involved in this communication, some of our customers expressed the desire to disable the tracking pages entirely, or to turn them off after some time, i.e. once an issue was resolved or had gone inactive.

Whether you are handling really sensitive data, or just generally want to reduce the amount of information that's exposed externally, you can now fine-tune the tracking pages visibility on the project level. To do so, navigate to the Help Desk settings of your project, where under Update notifications and tracking pages, you can configure the number of days of inactivity after which tracking pages will expire and become inaccessible. Selecting Never will entirely disable all tracking pages for this project.

Please note that only external comments sent to the customer by a logged-in user will count as activity in the context of this feature. A mere change of issue attributes for internal reasons will not affect tracking page visibility.

If you ever struggled with finding what you are looking for in Planio's issue lists, this one is for you.

The contains filter, which previously did a simple sub string match, now finds the given query terms even if they appear in a different order or are separated by words that are not part of your query. For example:

Suppose you have an issue named Water the flowers. Previously, a contains subject filter for water flowers or flower water would not have found that. Now it does! In order to get the previous behavior and match an exact phrase or substring, just enclose it in double quotes: "the flowers".

But not only the contains filter got an upgrade, searching for related or parent issues works in the same way:

Note that if you have previously used the (undocumented) % and _ wildcards in your filters, you might want to use spaces instead from now on. Searching for % or _ now actually finds you values that contain that character.

We have recently added Microsoft to the growing list of identity providers that you can use to sign into your Planio account. In order to connect your Planio account with your Office365 or Microsoft Azure account, click on Your Avatar → My account → Enable login with Microsoft.

After clicking Yes on the consent screen, you will be able to sign into your Planio account in the future just by clicking the Microsoft logo above the login form.

It is now possible to be added as a watcher to issues automatically whenever you update them.

In combination with one of the existing notification options that allow you to be notified for changes on items you are watching, this provides a great way to stay on top of the things that do concern you. To take advantage of this, click on Your Avatar → My account and enable the Issues I contributed to option in the new Auto watch section:

We are pleased to announce a few improvements and refinements to Planio across the board, we hope many of you will find something useful in this update!

First of all you can now allow certain users to log time for other users. This is possible when logging time, when editing logged time and even when importing time logs via a CSV import. The ability to log time for other users is subject to a new permission, please make sure to activate this permission for users requiring it.

Furthermore you can now remove the grouping by container in the Files section, sort files by size, creation date and other attributes and filter files by their names. The visibility of files and attachments is as always limited by the permissions of the current user.

Last but not least, users who prefer the reverse chronological order for issue comments, i.e. the newest comments are at the top of the issue history, will find the usage of this mode much improved. Everything needed to edit the current issue and add a new comment is now located near the newest comment, i.e. the menu and edit form will now be located between the issue description and issue history when using the reverse chronological order for issue comments.

We hope these improvements will make using Planio more productive for everyone and would love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions regarding those new features or anything Planio related please get in touch.

While we're currently more focused on infrastructure and backend work we are still trying to make Planio better and easier for your everyday use.

Many of you already know the issue context menu from the issue query lists and the subtasks and related issues lists (if don't know the issue context menu, go right-click on a row in the issue list to try it out!). We have now extended its availability to the Gantt charts (in the left-hand issue list but also on the issue progress bars of the Gantt chart) and the calendar pages. You can now make small changes to issues in the Gantt chart or calendar pages without leaving those pages, which will enable quicker iteration of your project plans.

We're sure all users of the Planio Gantt charts and Planio calendar will find their experience improved by those changes and would love to hear your feedback. If you have any questions regarding those new features or anything Planio related please get in touch.

External Git repositories could be integrated with Planio by means of mirrored repositories and web hooks for a long time already. A recent update now streamlines the process and makes connecting repositories on GitHub and Bitbucket with Planio a matter of just a few clicks.

Here's how it works:

In the project settings' Repositories tab, above your existing repositories, you find two links for connecting Github and Bitbucket repositories. Clicking on either of these links will load a list of potential repositories to connect from the provider.

For each repository there is a Connect to Planio button which will set up the mirrored repository in your Planio project. Any web hooks and deploy keys necessary to keey the repositories in sync will be set up automatically for you.

Please note that the first time you attempt to connect with either Bitbucket or GitHub, you will be prompted to sign in with the provider and / or give Planio permission to access your repositories.