This space has been quiet for a while. We haven't disappeared! We've just been working hard on some really big improvements. One is support for HaloPSA. The other is a whole new UI.

Familiar, yet different. And yes, that's dark mode, our top requested feature. We will have announcements about this soon. If you just can't wait, and want to try out the new UI now, email us at help@topleft.team.

By the way, if you want regular content about making work flow in your MSP, subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TopLeft

Recent ConnectWise Improvements

We do have a few improvements to share about our ConnectWise support. Here are some things we've changed:

1. Email notifications to contacts have more customization options. When technicians make notes on tickets, an email can be sent to the ticket contact, and previously only a single template was supported. But now you can create a different email template for every ConnectWise board. This is especially useful if you have a unique template for the ConnectWise board for that one special customer. Docs are here: https://help.topleft.team/knowledge/configure-emails-sent-to-connectwise-contacts
2. In the ticket creation dialog, priority and contact are now optional. If you leave the fields blank when you make a ticket, ConnectWise will choose the appropriate defaults.
3. In Kanban boards for projects, when the swimlanes are project phases, the phase WBS code appears in the swimlane header.
4. Ticket SLA times are now available from the ConnectWise API, so we use their values instead of calculating everything ourselves. This should make things more reliable... even in the case of leap years. 🤪

Those who use TopLeft for ConnectWise now have a new way to filter the tickets that show up on a Kanban board. You can select tickets where you are a member of the ticket's company's team in ConnectWise.

This limits the tickets on your board to only those for companies you are responsible for. It's especially useful for account managers or project managers.

To use this filter, click Filters in the main menu:

TopLeft can now send messages to your clients and technicians with a From address at your own company domain.

TopLeft sends emails to your clients and technicians in a few circumstances. For example, emails are sent when a contact is invited to the client portal, or when technicians enter notes on a ticket, or when a technician is assigned to a ticket.

Previously TopLeft sent these emails with a From address of noreply@topleft.team and a Reply-To header of some address at your company. This was to ensure high delivery rates and minimize the configuration you needed to do to use TopLeft.

However, now TopLeft can send these messages with a From address at your own domain. This will make messages more recognizable for your clients and technicians.

If you'd like to send emails with the From header instead of Reply-To header, please contact the helpdesk. You will need to create DNS records in your email domain as part of the setup.

Autotask can show notices about companies in the ticket editing page. For example, a company may have an agreement that only a specific individual is permitted to approve work. This notice is shown on all tickets for the company so engineers are aware.

TopLeft can now show these notices. This will help your engineers be confident they can work from TopLeft without missing out on important company information.

When a notice exists for a company, an alert icon is shown on the company label on the card.

The full notice is shown in the ticket editor.

You don't need to take any action in TopLeft for these notices to be shown.

We have refreshed our infrastructure, so if you have an on-premise ConnectWise Manage server behind a source-filtering firewall, please update your whitelist. This applies to all regions. The new list of IPs is available in the knowledgebase.

We're delighted to announce the TopLeft dashboard. The dashboard gives historical context on your workflows, summarizes the work on each Kanban board, and highlights bottlenecks in your teams.

This feature is being released with the Teams feature we announced last week.

The dashboard is organized by team. The boards for a user's teams are shown on the My Boards tab so it's easy to find the most relevant dashboards.

The dashboard for a team's main Kanban board shows the following info:

• Card volume trend: shows the daily count of cards on the board over the last four weeks, including the number of cards with warnings (orange labels), errors (red labels), and the total count of cards.
• Cards: the current count of warning, error, and total cards.
• Workflow delays: for each column on the board, the average length of time the cards have been in the column.
• Top swimlanes: for swimlane boards only, it shows the swimlanes with the most cards, as well as the count of warning and error cards.

For boards that aren't the default for the team, much simpler metrics are shown. The dashboard simply shows the current number of warning, error, and total cards on the board.

If TopLeft doesn't automatically choose the best board for a team to show the detailed metrics, the correct board can be selected on the team's configuration page.

The following links are shown for each board:

1. Open: navigates to the Kanban board
2. Open Mine: navigates to the board with filters already applied to show only the user's own work. Using this link can make the Kanban board load quickly even when the unfiltered board has many tickets and takes a long time to load.
3. Edit: navigates to the board edit page (shown to team managers and administrators only)

To get to the dashboard, simply click on the TopLeft or company logo in the main navigation menu.

Here's how the dashboard can help MSPs:

• For managers and dispatchers: shows how a team's ticket counts change over time, highlights boards with many error or warning cards, and indicates which columns or swimlanes could be bottlenecks.
• For engineers: helps to focus on the boards most relevant to the user and to ignore boards for other teams, shows on which boards the user's work appears, and makes it easy to open a board already filtered to show the engineer's own work.

Metrics are recorded nightly. They are not updated in real time. But we've been recording the metrics for a while already so you'll have useful data as soon as the feature is enabled.

Recommended Actions

We previously recommended creating at least two boards for each team:

1. a board with swimlanes for assigned engineers
2. a board without swimlanes

This was because there was not previously an easy way for an engineer to use the engineer swimlane board to see only his or her own work.

However, with the addition of the "Open Mine" button and a recent change to how swimlane boards appear when filtered, it's no longer necessary to have a separate engineer swimlane board and non-swimlane board. Engineers can view their own work very easily from the swimlane board by using the "Open Mine" button on the dashboard.

If your team has two boards, an assigned engineer swimlane board and a board without swimlanes, you can delete the board without swimlanes and have the engineers use the swimlane board for their own work.

Further Reading

Dashboard documentation is available in the knowledgebase.

You can now organize your staff and Kanban boards into teams in TopLeft. This makes it easy for staff to know which boards are relevant to them, and makes access control and configuration much more flexible.

This will be released to customers over the next week. If you'd like to try it right away, email help@topleft.team.

We are also introducing a metrics dashboard, closely integrated with the teams function. Watch this space for that announcement very soon!

Teams are used in a variety of places in TopLeft, offering an improved experience for everyone. Here's how teams can help:

Improved Navigation

In the main menu, boards are listed by their teams, and each user's assigned team(s) are listed first. The boards relevent to each user are listed at the top.

Improved Board Setup and Dispatching

Using teams makes it easier to configure and use the Kanban boards, in two ways:

• A board can be filtered to only show work assigned to people in the board's team. This means when people join or leave a team, it's no longer necessary to change the filters on all the team's boards- just change the team membership in one place, and the boards are updated automatically.
• When assigning members to a ticket, the members available to assign are limited to the board's team members. The dispatcher doesn't need to choose from the whole list of TopLeft users.

Access Control

Teams can be used to restrict access to boards in two ways.

1. Individual boards can be restricted so they are only available to members of the board's team.
2. A new app-wide setting can restrict all boards to members of each board's team. This changes TopLeft from a default-available access mode to a default-restricted mode.

Learn more in the knowledgebase.

This access control method will replace the "security groups" method in TopLeft. The old method is still supported but will be phased out soon.

Flexible Management of Boards

Users no longer need to be a full administrator to create or update boards. A manager of a team can create, edit, and delete boards for the team, withouth being an administrator.

How to Use Teams

There are two steps to use teams in TopLeft.

1. Create a team and specify managers and members.
   As an administrator, on the settings page click Teams.
   
   
   In the Create a Team form, enter the team name, then click Create. Then you can choose the manager(s) and member(s) of the team. Managers will be able to create and update boards for the team.
   
   An individual can be a manager or member of many teams.
2. Assign one or more boards to the team. On the edit page for a board, go to the Teams tab and choose the team the board belongs to.
   
   

Learn more about managing teams in the knowledgebase.

Recommended Actions

In addition to following the above steps to organize your members and boards, we have a few recommended actions:

1. If you have Kanban boards that use filters for assigned members that are part of a team, change the boards from specifying specific members to using the "filter to team" option. This will allow you to change the filters for many boards at once by changing the team membership.
2. If some users have been given administrative permissions so they are able to manage boards, but they don't need to manage site-wide settings, remove their administrative permissions and instead make them a manager of one or more teams.
3. If you use the security groups function to limit access to boards, migrate to the new teams-based restrictions instead.

We hope this function is helpful. If you have questions, email help@topleft.team.

We're excited to announce that TopLeft has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification. This significant milestone, validated by an independent auditor according to AICPA standards, emphasizes our commitment to safeguarding your data and maintaining the highest security standards. 

What does SOC 2 certification mean for you?

• Robust Security: We've implemented strong security measures to protect your sensitive information.
• Reliable Service: You can trust in the availability and performance of our platform.
• Data Confidentiality: We prioritize the confidentiality and integrity of your data.

Your trust is our top priority. With SOC 2 compliance, you can rest assured that your data is in good hands.

For a copy of our SOC 2 report, you can email help@topleft.team.

Here are highlights of what we improved in the TopLeft app in September.

Improvements

• On boards using member swimlanes to show how work is assigned to technicians, when the user filters the board to show only their own work, the board now appears without swimlanes. This permits better use of the available space on the page.
• When entering time or setting due dates, a new date picker widget is used. Some users had experienced problems with the previous date picker widget.
• On Gantt charts for individual projects, we've added a way to hide tickets in certain statuses. It's possible to hide tickets in certain statuses on a Kanban board by simply not mapping the statuses to any column, but this isn't possible on single-project Gantt charts. To hide tickets in certain statuses, an administrator can go to Settings > Customization > Gantt and select the statuses to hide.
• When TopLeft sends an email to a contact, an internal note is added to the ticket to record that the message has been sent. This makes it much clearer to technicians and managers that an email has been sent.

ConnectWise

• We've brought back the CC field on time entries.

Bugfixes

• When TopLeft sends an email to a contact or member using rich text formatting, the rich text formatting is now applied properly in the email. (This applies to ConnectWise only, since the Autotask API doesn't support rich text formatting.)

We've improved swimlanes when technicians filter a board to show only their own work.

On a member swimlane board, which shows work grouped by the technician assigned to a ticket, you may have wanted to see only your own work by clicking the "My Tickets" button. Then you would have seen your own work, but it would have still been in a swimlane:

This is useful but the number of cards in the view was limited by the height of the swimlane. It didn't use the whole window to show cards. For this reason, we have previously recommended the use of a separate Kanban board without swimlanes so that technicians could see their tickets in the full board view.

To make it easier to get the full board view for a single technician's tickets, a board with member swimlanes will now appear without swimlanes when the user filters the board to show only his or her own tickets.

This is the same view the technician would get on a board without swimlanes, eliminating redundant information on the screen and allowing more cards to appear in the window.

If you created Kanban boards without swimlanes just so technicians could see their own work using the whole window, you can consider removing those redundant boards.

This change applies only in the following cases:

1. The board has swimlanes that group cards by the assigned member. (For example this doesn't apply on a Company swimlane board.)
2. The user filters the cards to show his or her own work. (It doesn't apply when filtering for someone else's work.)