Release Notes for all 2023 Q3 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).

2023 / 09 / 30

What's New

  1. New Unavailable Reason Groups feature

    • The new Unavailable Reason Groups feature can be used to restrict which unavailable reasons a user can choose from when moving to an Unavailable State in the Contact Center. Unavailable Reasons are known as Agent Statuses within Amazon Connect.
    • A new Unavailable Reasons Groups view is added to the Symbee Connect Administration Portal, accessed off the main Function Menu under the Contact Center Configuration section. This new view allows the creation of different Unavailable Reason Groups. Once each new Group is created, you can assign a subset of your Amazon Connect Agent Statuses as required to each group.
    • A new optional Unavailable Reasons Group setting is added to the User Template and User profile views under the Work State section of the Contact Center settings group. If not set, all configured Unavailable Reasons will be presented to the user (same as usual). If set, the user will only be presented with the list of Unavailable Reasons configured in the selected group.
    • The Symbee Connect User/Agent UI is updated to optionally limit the selectable Unavailable Reasons based on whether the new Unavailable Reasons Group setting is configured on the user's profile.

  2. New Wrap Manual Override feature

    • Enabling Wrap Manual Override allows an agent to manually select the Wrap state during an interaction even if they don't have wrap time normally configured in a situation where additional time is going to be needed to wrap-up the interaction. It also allows the auto-wrap timer to be cancelled in those situations.
    • Previously many customers provided an alternative Unavailable Reason (Agent State) for this kind of activity. Using Wrap Manual Override allows this additional time taken to be reported against the specific interaction being handled.
    • A new Wrap Manual Override Allowed setting is added to the User Template and User profile under the Interaction Handling section of the Contact Center settings group.
    • The new setting controls whether the user is allowed to manually select the Wrap state regardless of their Wrap Enabled and Timeout settings. When enabled, the user can choose to manually pend wrap during an interaction, and can also cancel during timed interaction auto-wrap. If manually selected, the interaction then remains in wrap until the user completes the interaction manually.

  3. Updates to Symbee Connect Customer Facing Webchat to support Connect / Lex Interactive Messages

    • The Symbee Connect customer-facing Webchat client, when configured to use Amazon Delivery, now supports Interactive Messages. Refer here for further details on setting up Interactive Messages within Connect and Lex.

    • Initially, the following Amazon Connect interactive message display templates are supported:

      • List Picker
      • Panel

    • Additional message display templates can be implemented as needed. Please contact support if you are looking to use additional different display message display templates.

  4. New Add/Delete Users API to support automated provisioning of users

    • The User Provisioning API allows you to programmatically create, query the existence of, and delete Users and Agents within Symbee Connect, and also within the backing Amazon Connect Instance.
    • This API is intended to facilitate automation of user provisioning flows, and therefore only has a limited set of functionality - namely, adding a user, deleting a user, and querying the existence of a user to check whether a user has already previously been provisioned or not.
    • For further details, please refer to the API documentation here.

  5. Symbee Connect User/Agent UI Pending Unavailable updated to use Amazon Connect Enqueue State

    • Previously, the Symbee Connect Pending Unavailable functionality was implemented with functionality available in the Symbee ACD as the Amazon Connect API's didn't support the pending unavailable concept.
    • Pending Unavailable functionality in the Symbee Connect User/Agent UI has now been updated to use the Amazon Connect Enqueue State API.
    • There is no change to the end user behavior.
    • When an agent is in a Pending Unavailable state, their Next State is now updated as such within Amazon Connect, where previously it would have shown as Symbee Non Voice Work, and any time clocked while in a Pending Unavailable state is now recorded against the current interaction being worked.

  6. Updates to fully support Amazon Connect instances with Multi-Party Calls and Enhanced Monitoring enabled

    • Symbee Connect now fully supports having the Multi-Party Calls and Enhanced Monitoring enabled in the Amazon Connect instance. See here for details on enabling this in your Amazon Connect instance, and also here regarding its behavior.
    • Certain aspects of conferencing and call handling in Symbee Connect have been redesigned to support up to 6 parties on a call that is now allowed by this feature.
    • No additional configuration changes are needed in your Symbee Connect environment to support this functionality, however do note the caveats in the Amazon Connect documentation related to the use of Contact Lens in the second link above.

  7. New Unmerge Party from Conference action is added to the Symbee Connect User/Agent UI

    • The In-Conference view in the User/Agent UI now has an additional action to allow a party in conference to be unmerged (pulled out) back out into a separate call outside the conference.

  8. Updated Click to Call functionality from Call History and Directory when in a call

    • Outbound calls to all third-parties during a primary call are now reflected in the users Recent Call History tool.
    • The click-to-call / click-to-call-back actions from the Directory Tool and Call History tool in the User/Agent UI have been updated and can be used during an existing call, at which point the Outbound Call request turns into an Add Party action on the existing call.

What's Fixed

  1. A fix for an issue occasionally experienced in the Symbee Connect User/Agent UI where an agent had to sometimes click the Close ('X') action button twice when ending Wrap to close out the interaction.

  2. A fix for an issue occasionally experienced when first arriving at the User Listing screen in the Symbee Connect Admin Portal after login, when your Connect instance has a very complex User Hierarchy configured, where the spinner continued to show and the user needed to refresh to get first access to the user list.

What Else

  1. The Symbee Connect User/Agent UI has been updated to use the latest release of the Amazon Connect Streams, Chat and Tasks API JavaScript libraries.

  2. The Symbee Connect User/Agent UI, and associated Amazon Connect integration has been updated in preparation for upcoming Google Chrome updates that will change how third-party cookies are handled.

    • The underlying Amazon Connect CCP uses third-party cookies for authentication.
    • As part of Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative, Google Chrome has announced plans to block third-party cookies (that is, cookies passed between two top level domains).
    • For additional related details from AWS Amazon Connect documentation, you can also refer to here.
    • The Symbee Connect updates in this release address these issues in preparation for this upcoming activity.

    • As Google Chrome updates related to this begin rolling out (see Google's Privacy Sandbox link above for approximate timelines), expect your users to start seeing the following during login. After granting access, they may re-receive this request for permissions every 30 days (interval is determined by Google Chrome, not in our control).

  3. All Symbee Connect CloudFormations that deploy Node.js Lambda have been updated to use Node.js version 18 in support of the AWS Lambda beginning of deprecation for Node.js 16 in Q1 2024.

  4. Internal updates in support of the upcoming Symbee Connect Business Intelligence product release.

  5. Updates for Stability and Reliability.

  6. Additional API throttling updates.

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

(Refer here for additional guidance on applying our CloudFormation updates).

  • Symbee Connect Integration CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

  • Hours of Operation CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

  • Amazon Chime CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

  • Amazon Chime CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18. S3 Bucket update to formally set the S3 Block public access setting.

  • Voicemail and Direct Dialing CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18. S3 Bucket update to formally set the S3 Block public access setting.

  • Email Channel CloudFormations (both VPC and non VPC attached)

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18. S3 Bucket update to formally set the S3 Block public access setting.

  • Interaction Search CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18. S3 Bucket update to formally set the S3 Block public access setting.

  • Optimize CloudFormation

    • S3 Bucket update to formally set the S3 Block public access setting.

  • Preview Dial CloudFormation

    • S3 Bucket update to formally set the S3 Block public access setting.

  • Data Feeds and Reporting CloudFormation

    • S3 Bucket update to formally set the S3 Block public access setting.

  • Clio CRM CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

  • Dynamics 365 CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

  • NetSuite CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

  • Salesforce CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

  • ServiceNow CloudFormation

    • Lambda updates for Node.js version 18.

2023 / 07 / 21

What's Fixed

  1. Update to the Symbee Connect Dynamics 365 CRM integration to force-reshow the User/Agent UI frame in the Microsoft Dynamics portal when CIF version 2 is being used, when Dynamics sometimes hides the Communications Framework UI frame.
  2. Update to the Symbee Connect Oracle NetSuite CRM integration to address an issue seen where an inbound call that is not accepted (goes to missed) is sometimes associating the Phone Call record in NetSuite with the incorrect Customer/Company/Contact record.

What Else

  1. Further Symbee Connect Email Channel performance improvements
  2. Email Channel security updates
  3. Monitoring updates.

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

(Refer here for additional guidance on applying our CloudFormation updates).

  • Email Channel CloudFormation
    • Security and performance updates.

2023 / 07 / 18

What's Fixed

  1. Update to the Symbee Connect User/Agent Email client to address an issue where outbound/reply delivery failures were sometimes not reported back to the user

What Else

  1. Supportability improvements related to the Symbee Connect Email Channel
  2. Capacity Expansion updates
  3. Internal Monitoring updates

2023 / 07 / 16

What's New

  1. Symbee Connect Microsoft Dynamics 365 Integration Updates
    • The Dynamics 365 Integration Fusion has been updated to support Dynamics Channel Integration Framework (CIF) version 2.0. Previously, only Dynamics CIF version 1.0 was supported.
  2. Symbee Connect Email Channel - Inbound Routing Rules Maintenance Updates
    • Email Inbound Routing Rules maintenance views in the Symbee Connect Admin Portal have been updated to include full validation of Regular Expressions (Regex) for rule criteria that is indicated to be a regular expression.

What's Fixed

​ N/A.

What Else

  1. Updates to all Symbee Connect Realtime Statistics feeds to accurately populate the oldest waiting task in queue statistics for Symbee Delivered skill queues of all channel types. This also includes accurate representation of "tasks in-flight" currently being delivered. This includes the User/Agent UI Realtime Stats view, Supervisor views, and the Symbee Connect Realtime Statistics API used by reporting tools.
  2. More efficient handling for playback of long-duration audio (call recording) and video (screen-recording) media files from the Symbee Connect Admin Portal Interaction Search view.
  3. Stability updates.

2023 / 07 / 08

What's New

  1. Symbee Connect Interaction Search updates

    • Support has been added for the following two new fields/columns in the Symbee Connect Admin Portal Interaction Search view (to view the new fields, click the Columns button in the toolbar on the top-right of the search results area):

      • Subject - contains the content of the Email subject line. Currently only relevant on interactions of TaskType: EMAIL
      • Last Email Action - only relevant on interactions of TaskType: EMAIL. Contains the last action performed on the email by the Agent - possible values are: Accepted, Reply, ReplyAll, Forward, Cancel, or Outbound Sent

    • Both of the new Subject and Email Last Action fields are searchable, sortable, can be used in filters, and are included in Interaction Search export CSV files.

    • Column visibility in the search results is updated to "remember" changes to which columns are displayed in the results for the duration of the admin user's logged in session.

  2. Symbee Connect Administration Portal - update to SAML Single-Sign-On

    • SAML-based Single Sign-On support in the Administration Portal has been relaxed to allow the Identity Provider (IdP) to authenticate the user via any method (previously, only Password-based authentication by the IdP was supported).

  3. Symbee Connect Email Channel - updated default Inbound Email Rules Processing Lambda

    • The default Inbound Email Rules Processing Lambda deployed via the Email Channel CloudFormation has been updated to add additional statistics and metrics CloudWatch log entries to support having a CloudWatch Dashboard show analysis of inbound email rule processing (for example: the number of inbound emails arriving, being matched by any of your rules, getting stopped, routed, or following the default non-rule match path).

What's Fixed

  1. Fixing rare issue where occasionally an Optimize Evaluation link emailed to an agent resulted in a blank screen when the agent clicked on the evaluation link.
  2. Updates to the Bulk Maintain User Settings view in the Administration Portal:
    • Fixing issue where the Auto-Accept checkbox wasn't getting pre-populated correctly
    • Updates to allow all columns to be searchable and sortable

What Else

  1. Updates to capture additional email address information for unsolicited outbound emails.
  2. Cleanup of email address information within Symbee Connect Interaction Search export CSV files.
  3. Admin Portal login password-expiry checking is now bypassed during a SAML Single-Sign-On based login via your IdP. The Password Reset Required screen will be displayed to the user during the next non-SSO based login.
  4. Change History entries for User adds are updated with additional detail to indicate the method of the user add (via CSV import file, via Template Apply, etc.)

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

(Refer here for additional guidance on applying our CloudFormation updates).

  • Interaction Search CloudFormation

    • The Interaction details collection Lambda is updated to support the additions of Email Subject and Email Last Action fields to the Symbee Connect Interaction Search
    • If you already have the Interaction Search CloudFormation installed, please download and perform an Update on this CloudFormation stack as soon as possible.

  • Email Channel CloudFormation

    • The Rules Processor Lambda implementation is updated per above.
    • This update is optional, and only needed if you want to receive the new additional CloudWatch logging for a Dashboard.