We're extremely excited to announce the availability of RT 4.4.0rc1: the first release candidate for the next major version of RT.
We would be thrilled to hear your experiences installing or upgrading to this release; the more feedback we get, the sooner the official release of RT 4.4.0 can occur. Please be sure to review the upgrading documentation available in docs/UPGRADING-4.4, as there are a number of backward-incompatible changes that come along with the new version number.
In addition, to help kick off RT 4.4, we're having a public training session in Chicago on December 14-15! This two-day session covers RT basics, as well as development, and will highlight the new features in today's release candidate. If Chicago isn't a good fit for you, we'll be having public sessions in Washington DC, and Hamburg, Germany, in Q1 and Q2 of 2016 (respectively). To purchase a seat via credit card for the Chicago training, please visit shop.bestpractical.com. If you prefer to pay via other methods, or you have questions, please write in to training@bestpractical.com. And, as always, we welcome suggestions for training locations in the future.
A list of the major new features in RT 4.4.0 is included below. Many of the new features will also be described and demoed in a series of blog posts here on blog.bestpractical.com in the coming weeks.
- RT now includes the Assets extension for tracking your physical and digital resources.
- Attachments can now be stored outside of the database either on disk, in Dropbox, or on Amazon S3. Attachments can also be directly served from S3.
- SLA tracking is now part of core RT. You can define many different service levels that take your business hours and holidays into account.
- External authentication and LDAP integration are now shipped as core RT features.
- RT now has support for custom roles, along the lines of Requestor, Owner, Cc, and AdminCc. These roles can be single-member or multi-member. Privileges can be assigned to members of custom roles, you can search based on custom role membership, you can notify custom role members in scrips, and so on.
- RT now has a modern file upload interface which allows you to select multiple files in one fell swoop, drag and drop attachments onto RT, and inline preview certain file types like images.
- We've added a "scroll" option for gradually loading in ticket history as the user scrolls down, much like "infinite scroll". This considerably improves perceived performance.
- Existing attachments on a ticket can be reused in subsequent replies, so you don't have to upload them again.
- We now provide some basic Articles configuration for new deploys so that you can start using the feature immediately.
- You can now break up your RT_SiteConfig.pm file into logically-related chunks under the RT_SiteConfig.d/ directory.
- You can now specify default values at the queue level for certain ticket fields, including custom fields.
- RT now warns you when you write the word "attach" (or "attached", etc) but haven't provided any attachments yet, to avoid "sorry, I forgot this attachment" followup mail.
- RT now understands many more types of "human" date strings.
- Users can now choose any subset of the seven weekdays to receive their daily dashboard subscriptions.
- The query builder display format panel has seen several improvements; most importantly adjusting the display columns no longer reloads the entire page.
- We've added a popout ticket timer for helping you track time inside RT. The timer is associated with a ticket and will add the time to it for you.
- RT now ships with keyboard shortcuts for primarily for navigating ticket search results.
- We ship a (disabled-for-upgrades, enabled-for-new-deploys) scrip for carrying over time worked to parent tickets. Similarly, we ship a scrip for tracking time worked per user.
- We've added a way to quickly create new linked tickets in queues other than the one that the current ticket is in.
- There's a new site-level config setting and user preference for hiding unset fields on ticket display pages.
- Custom fields now have a customizable "entry hint" for helping users understand what they should be entering as values.
- TicketSQL and the search builder now support Status = '__Active__' and Status = '__Inactive__' type queries, so you no longer need to enumerate all statuses like Status = 'new' OR Status = 'open' OR Status = 'stalled'
- The mailgate has been completely redesigned and modernized.
For more information including a complete list of changes please see our official release announcement.