Planio Support (english)

For some time now you've been able to import issues into Planio using CSV files. Today we have greatly improved the issue importer. Additionally we've added imports for time entries and Planio Help Desk contacts.

We've documented each import in great detail in specific guides: issues, time entries, and contacts.

But here are two of the new features:

Over the last weeks we've been busy enhancing Planio Help Desk. We've made it easier for you to keep your customers in the loop about changes to their tickets.

It's always been possible to select attributes, which should be visible to the contact. They are shown on the tracking page of each issue. Now we've enhanced the list of available attributes further. Additionally it's now possible to select an email template for automated update notifications, which will be sent to your contacts whenever one of the selected attributes is changed.

This keeps your contacts up to date and saves you from writing the same update messages to your contacts over and over. We've added a default update notification template to your account as an inspiration.

Furthermore attributes, which are visible to your contacts, are now highlighted within the issue form. In the project's help desk settings you may select which fields should be public and which ones are considered internal.

Along with these new features we've also improved the management of companies and contacts. You may now directly create and edit these records from within the issue form. This will be especially useful for contacts which have been created automatically via Planio Inbox.

Up until now, the handy Atom feeds Planio provides for repositories would always include all commits on all branches. It wasn't possible to get notified for new commits that happened only on a certain branch, like your production branch for instance.

Well, now it is. The screenshot above shows how you can get your Atom feeds for individual branches. So, yes, now you can get notified about commits directly in your Slack channel via their RSS integration.

Or, you could simply use Planio Team Chat where all Planio events feed into your channels automatically.

Warning: Be careful when sharing your Atom feed URL, though. Unless your repo is public, the feed URL will include your individual Atom access key! It may be a good idea to create a separate user with limited permissions for your integrations.

This is an update for our Japanese users. In the spirit of moving off of plan.io, we have been working hard with our friends from Far End Technologies to make planio.jp available for new account registrations.

Starting today, any new Planio account registered via our Japanese web site will already get the new TLD by default. Existing users from Japan can switch their TLD via your avatar → Administration → Settings.

Stay tuned for more new TLDs and Planio coming to a data center near you soon.

Up until now, your Planio account would always have a URL in the form of yourcompany.plan.io. Starting today, we're enabling users to choose other top-level domains as well. Beginning with yourcompany.planio.com and ihrefirma.planio.de (for our German customers), we will be adding more local TLDs in the coming months.

Feel free to navigate to your account → Administration → Settings to select a new domain for your account. You will also be able to choose a new subdomain if you so wish.

Yes, that means that we're gradually moving off of plan.io as our primary domain. However, your Planio account will always remain available on plan.io in addition to your new Planio domain - if you choose one - so no links will be broken.

Pro Tip: You can also get your own domain (how does projects.yourcompany.com sound?) including a custom SSL certificate for a small monthly charge. Get in touch if you're interested.

We're constantly at work to make sure the Planio platform and all accounts are protected by state-of-the-art security techniques. Today, we are introducing two-factor authentication to further improve the security of user accounts.

With this feature, users can add a second authentication factor to their account using an app supporting the TOTP (time-based one-time password) scheme. Such apps are available for most major platforms, for example Google Authenticator, Authy or Duo Mobile.

Users can activate this feature in their My account area. If required, administrators can make two-factor authentication mandatory for all users in their Planio account via your avatar → Administration → Settings → Authentication → Two-factor authentication. All users will then have to set up their second factor at their next login.

Last but not least, users can also generate and print backup codes to use should they lose access to their TOTP App. We highly recommend that administrators who activate two-factor authentication for their account also generate and print backup codes.

Many of our clients are using Planio Inbox and Planio Help Desk in their projects to handle and centralize incoming and outgoing email with external project partners.

Today, we're improving how incoming emails are handled by Planio with 3 small new features/changes:

Regular expression support for mail body delimiters¶

Most email clients will include the entire previous email thread with every single new email reply. After a while, emails get longer and longer and become hard to read. Luckily, Planio keeps the issue history clean by cutting off that email thread, adding only what's new. In order to do so, it uses a set of delimiters to detect when the main email is over and the rest of the thread starts. You can set your own delimiters via Your avatar -> Administration -> Settings -> Incoming emails. By default, Planio includes delimiters like:

--- Please write your response above this line ---
-----Original Message-----
Sent from my 

Now, you will also be able to add regular expressions here to detect patterns used by some email clients. One that makes sense for instance would be On .+ wrote: as it would match lines like On Wed, 11 Oct at 1:05 PM, Jon Smith wrote:

Regular expression support for excluded attachments¶

Another challenge with incoming emails are file attachments from signatures. Many emails contain an image file that's part of the sender's signature. After a bit of back and forth, you'd end up with a bunch of file attachments on a single issue all displaying the logo of that company the contact works at. Until now you could filter out these attachments by filename and we've added regular expression support here as well. Adding something like .*footer.*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png) should effectively remove all images having the word footer in their name.

No more mandatory field checks for emails from external contacts¶

Up until now, all incoming email to issues in Planio would be checked against mandatory (custom) fields as set for your trackers. For emails from external contacts, this made little sense in most configurations as external contacts aren't allowed (or wouldn't know how to) set issue attributes in the email body. Hence, we're now ignoring these checks when an email is received from an external contact and Planio Help Desk is active. In all other cases, mandatory fields remain mandatory of course and will be checked against.

As a Planio power user, you probably know the context menu feature that you see when performing a right click within lists – for example the project's issue overview. This context menu allows you to quickly perform actions on that item without having to visit its detail view.

You can also perform bulk actions on several issues at once in this manner by selecting the issues' check boxes on the left before opening the context menu.

This feature stems from Planio's core, the open source software Redmine where it had been introduced almost 10 years ago. Unfortunately, a lot of users have always been missing out on it as the right-click interaction has never become very popular in the browser.

We've now made this much more obvious and accessible by adding a small icon to all lists in Planio where a context menu is available.

We hope this helps improving your work with Planio even more.

Planio always had a time tracking feature to log the minutes and hours you spent on issues and projects. You can check where your time went by creating detailed and customizable reports in your projects.

We have just made these reports even more accessible. To check how much time you spent on your projects, you can now access your Spent time reports directly from the project menu.

With Planio, you can upload files to about anything in your projects, including issues, blog posts, wiki pages, ... Now, we made it even easier to preview these files right from your browser without having to download them to your computer first.

For each attachment, you can click on the name or the small preview image to open the file in your browser. We currently support the following file types for a preview:

• most image formats like PNG, JPEG and even BMP,
• plain text files like code patches or text files,
• and PDF documents.

In the future, we will expand this list to support further file types.

To directly download the file, you can click on the download icon to the right of the attachment. Alternatively, you click on the Download button on the attachment's preview page.