Creating tickets by email is a very powerful feature we introduced lately, but the out-of-office auto-reply emails created a problem. Since after the ticket creation the sender gets an email notification, this created the “auto-reply loop” — when tickets keep getting created, assuming the automated emails are “real” ones.

This issue is not easy to address — automated emails, like out-of-office auto-replies, do not have a unified format. There is no sure way for a computer to separate them from “real” emails.

To solve this issue, we approached it from another side. Now we compare new emails with the previous ones, and, if the emails are a total match (same subject-body), we do not process those emails (no new tickets are created from them). This should prevent the “auto-reply loop” from happening (since auto-replies have identical content), as well as stopping any duplicate emails re-sent by mistake.

Let us know if you experience any problems with automatic emails. Please note that the first auto-reply will still go through – which actually can be valuable, since it logs the fact that the user is out of office, for example.

Yes, it has been another year since smartQ has been released. Another year of constant improvement based on our clients feedback.

We are glad to see smartQ being used in a very wide range of industries – it is a mature and stable product at this point. But we do not plan to stop here – stay tuned for new features and improvements!

Halloween is here! Carve your virtual pumpkin with no mess and send it to your friends and family! [ click here ]

Now you can search tickets not only by title/description but by any other text fields, including custom ones.

We also addressed the issues with creating tickets from forwarded emails and added an extra option to allow the creation of tickets by the original email sender, not by the forwarder (useful if you are have automatic email forwarding set up).

“We run a custom fabrication business that encompasses two retail stores, one company workroom and up to four specialized outsourced factories. Before smartQ, we really had no way to track or organize our work orders. Jobs were constantly falling through the cracks due to misplaced work orders, and we were on the phones with each other non-stop and. Now, with smartQ, we enter each job along with images of the item, materials and a copy of the work order. As the job progresses, the workrooms are able to move the order along, and our retail stores can see the status of each job in real time. When there are questions or problems, the workroom uses smartQ to email questions and pictures to the salesperson. We are also able to track all customer communication, so everyone knows when and what has been communicated to the end consumer. There is no doubt that we save 10+ hours a week in communication and jobs don’t fall through the cracks anymore. [continue reading…]

You can print out a ticket information, with all the notes, from Edit/View Ticket window using the print function of your browser (CTRL+P). The same applies to the List View. Now the layout and formatting of the printed version has been improved to look/fit better on the paper.

We are excited to release the biggest update of this year! It includes:

• Email integration – create tickets through email and answer to email notifications directly through email [more info ]
• External Form – create tickets through an external form [ more info ]
• External Access – people not registered in your smartQ account can submit tickets and track their status through a simplified interface [ more info]

These new features make it possible to use smartQ as a Help Desk or Issue tracking app, with anybody being able to submit tickets without any registration.  It expands considerably the projects and workflows smartQ can manage – we are looking forward to see all the possible usages you will come up with!

smartQ Universal Imported is a new feature that makes it easy to import Tickets from external files.

UImporter allows loading into smartQ of CSV or Excel files – it automatically tries to detect the fields and will allow you to map them manually.

You can access this feature from the “options” menu (if you are an Account Administrator). We also already support the import of data from 5pm project management app.

smartQ interface is now available in Czech! Special thanks to Jan Votruba who helped with the translation. More languages are coming out soon.

All together smartQ is available in eight(!) languages now: English, Spanish, Brazilian (Portuguese), German, Italian, French,Russian and Czech!

Do you want to see smartQ translated into your language? Any smartQ user can contribute – just use the “options” menu on the top of your smartQ screen. There is a link there called “Translation Area” that will take you to the public translation area.