Final updates before release. Our biggest update yet!

We’ve been working diligently for the last month, pulling together a few promised developments (and a few very excellent surprises!) on our path to leaving beta on February 28th.

Version 0.6 is now available: this is our largest change to date and brings with it a host of huge technical improvements, features, and quality of life changes.

The system service is complete and live. This has been a huge project that gives us tremendous flexibility in the platform going forward and the ability to build some very powerful tools, including things like running interactive scripts from the backend or in another user’s session. We believe this is something that no other product on the market does currently. As of today, it is being used for:
- Improved auto-updater that will be faster and more reliable.
- Executable watchdog.
- Bi-directional communication, enabling some of our most requested features such as chat and real-time refresh of the diagnostic data.

Remote command line. (optional) We have added a really, seriously, ridiculously fast remote command line. (Get in there and toss a “tree c:\” at it.) This is currently enabled or disabled on the backend with the same checkbox as the “remote access tool”. This is the base framework for a lot of other very powerful and cool tools that we will be introducing in the next few months.
New 99.99% uptime guarantee. Our critical backend runs on AWS “Serverless” lambda with redundant data centers in geographically isolated regions. If we go down, most of the internet is probably down with us. We have been ensuring people of our reliability since the beginning, now we are putting our money where our mouth is with an Official SLA of 99.99% uptime.
Geo IP Whitelisting, Anonymous IP Blocking, Breached Password Protection: We are very aggressive about security and want to be way, way ahead of the curve on this. To that effect, we have added a section on the backend to restrict logins by country code, ISP or IP address. This is in addition to all of our other security features, which you can read all about on our blog post “How we protect your account from bad guys, Russians, and robots”.
Phonescan.net: submit tickets with no internet connection! For those of you who don’t know, we have added the ability to submit tickets even without internet access by putting a QR code up on the screen for users to scan with their phone. We have a huge host of network diagnostic tools we are embedding in the QR code being tested internally right now set to go live by next month. Now, if a computer is offline, you’ll start with an idea of where to look, whether it’s an IP conflict, bad DNS, or one of several other common LAN issues. To address the frustrating inconsistencies between how Android and iPhone camera apps handle QR codes, we built phonescan.net to bridge the gap. Now if a ticket fails to submit, end users will get a screen that looks like this.

Take a second to try it yourselves and let us know how you like phonescan.net, and let us know if it works well on your phone. It can be used for other QR codes, too!

Quality of Life improvements:

Device list is now sortable and searchable. We have color-coded the most recent check-in times as well. Expect more improvements to this in the future.
Virus scanning. We have been working much more closely with antivirus vendors and virus-total to make sure that our software isn’t flagged as a false-positive. We have made several changes which should reduce the occurrences of this. Our general recommendation is to white-list our directory, just in case.
Password field removed from the Settings page. Password Managers kept interfering with the update process. So instead we:
Added an Account Settings widget to Settings and Home pages. It’s in the top right corner of these pages. Sub-users can change their passwords! We will be breaking the Settings page into multiple pages in the future.
Added Copy MSI URL to Builds page.
Failures are now silent. If the script or executable fails now, it will drop an entry into the log and be restarted by the watchdog service rather than put an error on the user’s screen. (Also, this problem has been caused by an anti-virus removing pieces of our platform 99% of the time, so please consider whitelisting our directory.)
Improvements to 2fa new user registration process.
“remember this computer” on the 2fa login so you do not have to enter it every time you click a ticket.
Get started documentation. In addition to other documentation we’ve pulled together, we’re working on helping the setup process be clearer to you. We’re also offering demos/walkthroughs if you haven’t been through one yet, where we can show you the full set up and help you with your integrations and deployments.
The ticket links are now slightly more controlled and should return more useful results.
New! Append to Private Note through our update to Advanced Options/Custom Rules.
Building a new installer has been sped up by a factor of 20. Whereas it used to take 10 minutes to build a new installer, it now takes 30 seconds.

Bug Fixes

Mac address Duplicate devices. Mac addresses are not as unique as we thought they were. Additionally, there are instances like docking stations where machines might change their mac intermittently. We have adopted a more complex methodology for identifying unique machines and you will see this in the v0.6 update. When you push it out, you might see your machine count spike up temporarily as we migrate to the new convention. It should be back to normal within an hour or two of pushing the update as our migration jobs run.
Fixed the logo scaling issue for larger logos on the landing page when windows DPI is turned up.

A note on February 28th.

We truly want you to benefit from our beta program because your success and feedback makes our product even better. We’re leaving beta on February 28th – that’s three Fridays from now! New pricing will take effect on March 1st. Lock in your current beta pricing for life by installing the Helpdesk Buttons software on 100 devices or by purchasing 100 physical buttons. We’ve added starter packs that include the set up of your PSA Integration, RMM deployment, and any custom rules you dream up and would like help troubleshooting. You can find a pack that suits you, here: https://cms.helpdeskbuttons.com/product-category/starter-pack/.

We’re extending our Beta lock-in period to an undetermined future date for our Australian customers due to wildfires. We recognize it’s mostly NSW and Victoria who are hardest hit, but we have heard first-hand accounts of a few of you who have been tending to family and hometowns and want to support you best we can.

For our non-Australian clients, if you’ve been wanting to do something about the devastation caused by the fires, here are direct links to the Red Cross and the fire services in the two worst-affected states:

We’ll add $10 to your Helpdesk Buttons escrow account for every $100 you donate.

And on that note, we’ll be in touch with our next round of updates at the end of February. If you have any questions, or just want to say hello, give us a call at +1 833-328-8866.

Warmly,

T2T

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