Busy technicians can now send messages to a ticket's contact when making a time entry or note, in both Autotask and ConnectWise. They no longer need to return to the PSA software to send the time entry or note to the contact.

Emails to contacts was previously only available for time entries (not notes) in ConnectWise, and nothing was available in Autotask, due to restrictions in the ConnectWise and Autotask APIs.

ConnectWise customers: to enable this feature, you'll need to grant the TopLeft API member's security role the "Company/Contact inquire level" permission. Full instructions for security role setup are in the Knowledgebase.

Autotask customers: TopLeft doesn't need new permissions for this, but if you experience any trouble please review the API security settings in the Knowledgebase.

Administrators may want to customize the format of the messages sent to contacts. If you chose not to do this, messages to contacts will have a very basic format and responses will be sent back to the technician who wrote the note or time entry. But there are a lot of options for configuring message subjects, reply-to headers, and HTML and plain text templates. The template formats support the most important fields, using the same formatting as your PSA, to make it as easy as possible to duplicate the templates used in your PSA.

For full instructions on configuring this, choose your PSA: ConnectWise docs or Autotask docs.

Messages are sent from TopLeft's email service using a "From" address at topleft.team, so you don't need to worry about configuring any email servers or DNS settings on your domain. If you've configured the "Reply-to" header, replies from contacts will be sent back to your ConnectWise or Autotask connector and result in a new ticket note. If you haven't configured the header, responses from the contact will be sent back to the technician's mailbox.

Try it out! And send any questions or problems to help@topleft.team.

Here by popular request, timers for your tickets! We know technicians in both ConnectWise and Autotask frequently use the timer/stopwatch feature from the respective PSAs, and now you can do the same practice in Kanban.

You can start timers on cards and then transfer the time to the time entry dialog, or start open the dialog first and use the timer there- it's up to you.

Documentation is in the Knowledgebase, as always.

TopLeft is now offering regular drop-in training sessions twice per week. We'll show how to use and configure the software, how to improve service and project practices, demo new features, and answer questions.

The recurring sessions are:

• Tuesday 8:30-9:30 AM Pacific Standard Time (Vancouver)
• Wednesday 3-4 PM Pacific Standard Time (Vancouver)

Details are on our website: https://www.topleft.team/training-sessions/

You can now set Work In Progress (WIP) limits that apply to each technician on your team, instead of the Kanban board as a whole. You can also apply the limits to projects, priorities, boards or queues, or any type of swimlane.

This helps you ensure work stays evenly distributed in your team. You could always apply a limit to the Kanban board as a whole, indicating when your whole team had exceeded the limit in a column. But this wouldn't help you catch cases where one technician had too much WIP but other technicians had less WIP and so it all averaged out.

Now you can more easily see when just one of your technicians has too much WIP- because even a single technician with too much WIP can slow down your team's overall velocity.

This option also calculates the whole-board WIP limit automatically by setting the board limit to (per-swimlane limit) * (# of swimlanes). This means you don't need to adjust the board WIP limit when you change the number of people on your team.

To make column WIP limits apply to swimlanes instead of the whole board, on the board edit page on the General tab, just enable the "WIP limits per swimlane" option.

When using Kanban, you may have said to yourself, "I wish I could see just the cards with orange warnings or red error indicators- so I can focus on the work having problems and not even see the work that's going just fine."

Well, friend, now you can do that. Just use the new "c" (Card) keyboard shortcut. The "c" shortcut cycles the board between three modes:

1. Show all cards
2. Show only cards with orange warning or red error indicators
3. Show only cards with red error indicators

Whether you're a manager reviewing your team's work, a technician looking to fix your own tickets, or using the Kanban board in a team meeting, this will help you stay focused on work that has problems and needs your attention.

You can use the Help > Keyboard Shortcuts menu item to see all available shortcuts.

If you've ever wondered "How many story points are in my Kanban column?"- or needed to know info about any other numeric custom field/UDF you use to track your work, TopLeft can now help you keep track of that.

You can have TopLeft show the sum and average of numeric fields for cards in a column, swimlane, and the whole board. To do so, just move the custom field to the Selected box on the board configuration page.

This works for numeric custom fields only.

If you're using the new board/swimlane/column metrics, now you have a way to turn the metrics off and on very easily- keyboard shortcuts!

Sometimes you want to see detailed metrics, and other times you want to see a more compact board so you can see more cards. You can do that easily- press the "h" key to toggle through these modes:

1. Full metrics mode- show all card counts and summaries
2. No metrics mode- show no card counts or summaries
3. Basic metrics mode- show only card counts (total cards, cards with warnings, and cards with errors) but don't show full summary metrics

The "h" keyboard shortcut only has effect when the metric options are enabled on the board configuration page.

To see keyboard shortcuts, click the Help > Keyboard Shortcuts menu item.

Do your team members look like that guy? 👆

If that image feels familiar and the following describes your MSP:

• Tickets stay open for weeks or months
• Work is forgotten until customers follow up
• Managers have no idea when a ticket will be completed
• Engineers feel overwhelmed
• There's no time for proactive work

Then you'll want to join our brand-new three-week bootcamp, the Completed Ticket Challenge.

For only $199, we're teaching MSPs to take back control of their work. Here's how: 

For three weeks you receive:

• 4 guides delivered to your inbox each week with accompanying video instruction- learn the exact recipes for success
• Weekly community call- bring questions and suggestions for your peers who are reaching for the same goal
• Online community access for 24/7 questions and encouragement

Learn more and register today!

If your on-premise ConnectWise server is behind a firewall the filters by source IP, you will need to update the allowed IPs over the next few days. We have new source IPs in our infrastructure.

Details are in the knowledgebase, as always.

We'll announce more in a few days, but the exciting news is that TopLeft now offers service in multiple worldwide regions. This improves performance for users in western North America, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand and addresses data residency issues for some European customers.