A new release is available on our FTP-server, version 5.9.1! It is just about two weeks since we released Service Market 5.9.0, which was a rather big release for us. A big release in several aspects both when it comes to the time it took for us to complete it but also big changes and the amount of new functionality. So we thought we should try to explain a little more in detail what version 5.9.0 actually contains.
5.9.0 was mainly about graphical improvements, something that we will continue to implement in all our services in Service Market. We started with the services that are most popular, Request Software, Request Hardware and Request Service.
This is how Request Software looks in version 5.9.0. We have tried to put things together, remove unnecessary space and trying to make it look better. We have also done a lot of small things like the list of available Software products is now populated when you enter the service, we only show categories that actually have any products in them and a better indication of the number of available products.
We have re-designed and improved the cart for all the services. It is now a better view of the content in the cart both when it is closed and opened. We have added a “Next”-button so you can easily move on to the next step directly from the cart. You can easily add or remove the amount of products by using the + or – buttons, if you still like to specify the amount by entering a number you can always use the product popup and add the desired number of products to the cart.
The detailed product view has been updated with more structured information, a smoother “Add-to-cart” button and the background is darker to keep the view in focus.
In the summary view we have removed all redundant information and we have also made it possible to remove products from your request at this stage.
A more informative order confirmation is shown in the last page after submitting a request.
All these changes have been implemented in Request Software, Request Hardware and Request Service. There are two other services that are used a lot, My Requests and My Approvals. In order to improve these services in the way we wanted we decided to re-write these two services. There is still a great recognition factor for all who have been using the old services.
The performance in these two services has been improved a lot. A button on the right side for each request to clarify how you can see more information.
The “more information” page for a request is no longer a popup instead a completely new page where you get more information about the request but also the possibility to approve or reject an order if you are in the service My Approvals. You can also see and send order comments.
What more, well we have also improved the mail templates but we did choose not to enable the new mail templates as default since we currently only support English and Swedish. The old templates will still work great. In order to enable the new templates you need to make some changes in the web.config file which is available in the inetpub folder for Accelerator. In that file look for the value “DefaultMailFactory” and replace it with “EmptyMailFactory”. If you need help or have any questions or feedback regarding the mail templates contact us at productsupport@atea.com. In future releases the new mail templates will be enabled as default and we will not make any improvements or changes in the old templates anymore.
We have of course made several other improvements such as the build process as you can see in the version we include or build number now. Product Questions are now supported in Request Software. We have also made some changes to the installation so we can get a better understanding of which versions that are being used. This also makes it easier for us to contact you if we discover something that is not working as intended and you might need to upgrade.
What about version 5.9.1? We didn’t want to introduce to much new functionality in 5.9.1 so we have dedicated the last two weeks to fix problems, both big and small problems. In fact we have resolved more than 100 issues, many of them small issues but still improving the overall impression of Service Market. So what is next … We will continue to make Service Market even better and fix things that you report to us. Next week we will start looking at how orders are placed in Process Manager and how we can make sure that you can upgrade without losing any orders that are waiting for approval. We will also continue to improve the graphical user interface so we would love to hear from you what you think about the new design and what you think we should improve next. On Monday we start with the next version!