Release Notes for all 2022 Q1 Updates

All releases listed are deployed to all Symbee Connect Regions globally. Each release begins deployment in US Virginia (us-east-1) region first, and then progresses to all other regions globally over the course of approximately 48 hours.

The release dates below mark the date of the release deployment into the first region (us-east-1).


2022 / 02 / 20

What's New

  1. New Settings to Control Amazon Connect Connectivity Leniency

    • These new settings are targetted to assist Customers that are still seeing periodically, the Lost Connectivity to Amazon Connect… red Error box for some users due to their environment
    • The source of these issues relate to ACK_TIMEOUT events coming from the Amazon Connect Streams library integration into the Amazon Connect CCP.
    • Two new settings are added to the Amazon Connect Integration Screen, under the Amazon Connect Advanced Settings section:

      • New Streams to CCP Sync/Ack Timeout setting:

        • Controls how long, in milliseconds, to wait for the CCP to respond to Synchronize events. Default (and recommended) value is 10000 (10 secs), minimum value is 3000 (3 secs), maximum value is 300000 (5 mins).
      • New Ignore Streams to CCP Sync/Ack Timeouts setting:

        • Enabling is not recommended in normal operating environments, however may be needed in exceptional cases. Contact Support for recommendations.
    • One New setting is added to User Profiles/Templates, under the AWS Integration => Amazon Connect Integration section:

      • New Lenient Connectivity Enabled setting:
        • Controls whether lenient connectivity behavior is enabled. Disabled by default. Enabling is not recommended in normal operating environments, however may be needed in exceptional cases. Contact Support for recommendations. (Causes Streams to CCP Sync/Ack timeouts to be ignored).

What's Fixed

  1. Update to address reports by some customers having issues force-changing a Contact Center Agent’s work state back to Available from within the Symbee Connect Supervisor pop-out window.

What Else

  1. Updates to the Symbee Connect Preview Channel to configure the Preview Channel S3 bucket in the clients account with S3 Encryption enabled.

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

  • Preview Channel CloudFormation
    • Updated to enable S3 Encryption at rest on the Preview Channel S3 bucket.

2022 / 02 / 03

What's New

  1. Preview Channel

    • SNS Notification added for when a file upload fails

What's Fixed

  1. Update for users getting intermittently logged out (Lost Connection to Amazon Connect dialog) on less than optimal network connections

    • Update relaxes the Amazon Connect Streams library default 3 second CCP Acknowledgment timeout introduced by the latest Amazon Connect Streams 2.0 library release, which is causing agents to get intermittently logged out when on sub-optimal network connections.
  2. Updates to address issues some customers were having with Agents not being able to select certain Unavailable (Aux / Agent States) states (cater for Agent Status names up to length 127 chars)

  3. Update to address Contact History sometimes not being displayed when running with the Zendesk CRM plugin enabled, but using the Symbee Connect UI oustide (not embedded in) Zendesk

What Else

  1. Preview Channel - Beta Preview Channel Reatime API updates

    • Update to address scenarios where new records added to a Campaign via real-time API were not always delivering to available Agents immediately
    • Update to address the “Name” field not being populated when new records are added via the API
    • Update to the behavior of an “Update existing record” request sent via the API

      • Previously when an Update was sent via API, it was (intentionally) deleting the previous record and re-adding it with the updated data
      • Behavior changed to “update the record in place”, with the only exception being if the record is actually sitting in front of an Agent at the time of the request

2022 / 01 / 27

What's New

  1. Refreshed User/Agent Interface:

    • Updates include: Engage View, Unison View, and Supervisor
    • All views revisited, and all icons refreshed, fonts updated, color palette updated
    • Pop-out windows also updated (Email Viewer, and Supervisor)
    • Reworked “Agent Status Bar” and Unavailable State selector
  2. New Agent UI setting, to allow an “Expandable” window

    • New setting added in two places:
      • Company Environment - User Interface - Pre-Login Expanded Window Width for pre-login window behavior
      • User Template/Profile - General - User Interface - Expanded Window Width for behavior after agent login
    • When checked, new setting allows the User/Agent UI to grow sideways beyond the fixed 350-pixel limit, to allow the agent to be up to 800 pixels wide
    • Defaulted to Disabled
    • Purpose is to allow chat-only agents more screen real-estate when working Chats if they want it
    • Setting irrelevant/not-usable if the Symbee Connect UI is being embedded in a CRM (such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, etc.)
  3. New User setting, to enable blocking of New Outbound Calls via Amazon Connect (e.g. for Unison Agents using Chime PSTN only)

    • New User Template/Profile setting to allow control of whether an agent is allowed to make new unsolicited Outbound Calls via Amazon Connect, or whether this option is disabled/hidden to the user
    • Defaulted to Enabled
  4. Plus (“+”) button added to User/Agent Phone Dialpad

    • Only displays in the New Outbound control, when setting up new calls or adding parties to existing calls
    • Intentionally not display on the “in call” DTMF-Tone dial-pad

What's Fixed

  1. Fix for non-omni mode not showing the New Outbound “+” button on initialization if inappropriate settings were configured

What Else

  1. User/Agent load rules reworked for Chime-only enabled users. Addresses use-case where customers want Unison users to have:

    • No Connect access
    • Inbound Chime DID calling,
    • Outbound PSTN Dialing via Chime
    • No internal User-to-User Calling
  2. AWS library updates

    • Amazon Connect Streams library to latest
    • Amazon Connect Chat library to latest
    • Amazon Tasks library to latest.
  3. Security updates

  4. Performance Updates

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

  • Amazon Chime CloudFormation

    • Security update to tighten up IAM Policy
    • Update to address permission issues seen in some customers, while downloading Symbee chime system audio prompts during install

2022 / 01 / 07

What's New

  1. Global Region Expansion - Symbee Connect now available in Seoul (South Korea)

    • New Symbee Connect Seoul region: ap-northeast-2
  2. Global Region Expansion - Symbee Connect now available in Cape Town (South Africa)

    • New Symbee Connect Cape Town region: af-south-1
  3. Administration Portal updates for Email Signatures and Auto-Text

    • New "HTML Content Preview" button added beside the following Settings:

      • Standard Email Configuration – Auto Response Content for Closed messages
      • Standard Email Configuration – Auto Response Content for Open messages
      • Standard Email Configuration – Email Signature Part
      • User Profile – Digital Channels – Email – Email Signature
      • User Template – Digital Channels – Email – Email Signature
    • New Content Preview button allows administration users to see what the Content will look like when in use. When clicked a dialog opens showing what the result of the content will look like.

    • Auto Text Item List screen updated to show the HTML Preview of content the same way the Email Editor would handle it (automatically detects any HTML tag use in the content, and reformats accordingly)
  4. Symbee Connect User/Agent UI updates for Email Signatures and Auto-Text

    • Enhanced formatting of Email Signatures in the Email Viewer/Editor

      • No user-level Email signature loaded at all if no signature content set at the user level
      • If user-signature part contains any HTML tags, the signature is loaded exactly as specified (with no additional formatting added)
      • If user-signature part does not contain any HTML, carriage-returns are replaced with <br>'s and the block is wrapped in an HTML <p> paragraph tag (to reduce gaps between text lines in the signature)
      • If Email profile-signature part contains any HTML, its applied exactly as specified (with no additional formatting added)
      • If Email profile-signature part does not contain any HTML, carriage-returns are replaced with <br>'s and the block is wrapped in an HTML <p> paragraph tag
    • After the Signature part is loaded into the Email Editor, the user’s cursor is re-positioned to prior to signature

    • The same HTML vs no-HTML formatting rules above is now also applied to any Auto-Text content added to an Email

What's Fixed

  1. Symbee Connect User/Agent update to address Contact Center agents occasionally being pushed to Available / Routable unexpectedly

    • Scenario fairly obscure, but existed - when making a new Outbound call when in an Unavailable (not routable) state, if the Outbound Call is to an invalid PSTN number (or there is some sort of Amazon Connect or PSTN Carrier routing failure) the Agent could be transitioned to Available (routable) when the call fails

What Else

  1. Symbee Connect Amazon Chat Gateway Update

    • Update to logic using the Amazon Connect Participate Service API relating to use of ParticipantToken with ConnectionToken values to address AWS Notification received. AWS update supposed to occur end of March 2022, however new behavior was seen in Sydney region earlier this week.
    • Update includes Symbee Connect Webchat, SMS, Pinpoint, and Social Endpoints when Delivery Provider is set to Amazon Delivered
  2. Symbee Connect Agent UI Email Viewer Editor change to be internally hosted

    • Email Editor and related dependencies moved and re-hosted locally within Symbee Connect cloud rather than pulled from public CDN
    • Allows customers to more easily configure HTTP Proxy rules to block Contact Center Agents from accessing inappropriate websites
  3. Further updates to DevOps regional deployment/rollout process

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

  • Salesforce Integration CloudFormation

    • Updates to allow Call Recording Playback URLs to be configured to support SAML SSO federated Connect Instances, so Call Recordings can be played back in Salesforce when the Connect Instance is SAML enabled