HelpDesk: new version

After months of hard work we have released the version 3.0 of our web-based Helpdesk software.

Above all, it features the improved email handler: the incoming email attachments are now transferred to the issue attachments. That's what most of our clients were asking for. We've spent hours learning MIME encoding and the way it is parsed... What a dumb format I must say! Anyway, the feature is here.

Also HelpDesk 3.0 brings a new design:



The tabbed interface is more intuitive, colors are more contrast and the overall look is much better.

Other features are listed here.

New HelpDesk, Mac-Dongle and ReadBurner

Yesterday we have added two new languages to our web-based Help-Desk product: Norwegian and Portuguese. Also the new version comes with a great new feature: when Jitbit HelpDesk works in Windows-authentication mode and detects a new unregistered user, it tries to connect to the Active Directory to get the user's email and save it to its' database.

Some interesting finds for today:

• Jeff Atwood thinks that Mac is just a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X programs.


• ReadBurner.com is a new "social" website which counts how many people have shared an item in their Google Reader, sorting items in a Digg-like way. Very nice idea.


• Neil Davidson talks about what does a recession mean for the software business. Nothing, actually. Don't panic.

Multilingual HelpDesk and AspNetForum - get a discount!

Just a quick note on what we're working on and a discount opportunity we offer.

For the last two weeks we are being focused on globalizing our ASP.NET-based software products. Our Help-Desk Software user interface has been completely reworked, and all language-specific elements are now configured as assembly resources... Don't mind this technical stuff. The point is, that the application is now easily localizable to other languages. The latest version of HelpDesk comes with English and German languages included, and we plan adding more languages in the future.

Our Asp-Net-Forum software is also being localized now. The first languages to support will be English and Dutch. Also, unlike HelpDesk, which is translated in full, AspNetForum will be translated partially (admin-area will remain in English, but all the topic pages, message-lists, search etc. will be translated). UPDATE: AspNetForum is also translated in full!

Help us with a translation and get a discount! We offer a huge (up to 50%) discount to anyone who will help us with the translation into one of the popular languages. Please contact us!

Great software for helpdesk professionals

Last week Microsoft has released a great tool for all helpdesk professionals and system administrators called "Change Analysis Diagnostic" which is intended to track changes in your operating system.

A help-desk engineer can specify a date range and the program returns an XML report with the changes made to the OS components, installed software, BHO (browser COM objects), ActiveX controls and many more. Learn more at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924732 . This tool could be a very nice addition to our help-desk software.

Bug fixing

Now this is funny. Recently a couple of users have reported, that the online demo of our HelpDesk software was down, keeping everyone from logging in. After some investigation it appeared that somebody was testing the HelpDesk's administrative functions. Specifically... resetting the passwords!

We have also located (and fixed) a very shameful bug in our MailJet software. This is rather sad than funny: under certain conditions, when sending personalized emails, the program was always placing the name of the first recipient into the email, no matter how many recipients there are. Many thanks to Michael from Bloombit Software for pointing us at this (and suggesting some very nice other features). The updated version is already published on our website.

Help-Desk: the making of

Just a small announcement on what's coming in the next version of our ASP.NET Help-Desk software that we hope to release in the next few days (fingers crossed):

• XHTML-conformance
• CSS optimizations
• Knowledge-Base will be accessible to non-authenticated users
• some more general improvements

UPDATE: a user on our forum has suggested to store the user's first/last names along with the login-name. This will also be added to the release.

Help-Desk demo

We have just launched an online demo of Jitbit's Help-Desk solution. Use "admin/admin" to log in as an administrator, or "client/client" to log in as a regular user.

I just realized, that when I choose a web-app or a component for myself, I never even look at the ones that have no online demos. Offering a server-side product as a download only, is not a good idea since few system administrators will ever install something on their production server for evaluation purposes.