Release Notes for all 2024 Q2 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).

2024 / 06 / 14

What's New

Symbee Connect User/Agent UI Quick Tools enhancements
- Quick Tools on the User/Agent Toolbar (enabled through the Symbee Connect User profiles/templates) provide simple customizable tools on the toolbar to quickly open often-used URL's / web sites
- A Quick Tool URL can now contain embedded tokens that get dynamically replaced with properties related to the specific user. The following tokens are supported:
  - {UserId} - gets replaced with the user's Symbee Connect / Amazon Connect primary user identifier (the User ID the user signs in with)
  - {UserName} - gets replaced with the textual name configured for the user
  - {UserExtension} - gets replaced with the user's configured phone extension (the value of their Extension Number setting within the Dialing group, in the Voice Channel section of the User profile)
  - {UserDirectDial} - gets replaced with the user's configured direct-dial number (the value of their Direct Dial Number setting within the Dialing group, in the Voice Channel section of the User profile)
- A Quick Tool URL can now be configured to launch as a pop-out window rather than the default behavior of the URL being opened into a full new window/tab.
  - Configure the URL for the Quick tool in the Quick Tools group of the General section of the User profile.
  - You can optionally precede the configured URL with a Width and Height followed by a pipe (|). For example: "300x600|https://your.quicktool.url/..."
  - When adding a predefined size for the Quick tool URL as above, the Quick tool will be popped out to a new window beside the Symbee Connect User/Agent UI.
Symbee Connect Customer-facing WebChat Endpoints allow Sound/Audio Notifications to be enabled
- A new Customer Notification Sounds Enabled setting is added to the Chat Client UI Customization section of the WebChat Endpoints configuration screen in the Symbee Connect Administration Portal.
- When enabled, audio notification tones are played on the customer side, for agent connected and new message events.
- The new setting is disabled by default but can be enabled at any time. Enabling this setting helps allowing the customer to be more responsive once an agent is connected if the customer had to wait in queue, when the webchat endpoint is configured as a pop-out window and may have been hidden/minimized.
Symbee Connect Customer-facing WebChat Endpoint configurable Pre-Chat Form enhancements
- A new Picklist value type (a drop-down selection list) has been added as an option when configuring custom form fields on the pre-chat form shown to the customer prior to starting a chat. When set to Picklist you configure what options the customer is allowed to pick from.
- The existing String value type on custom form fields now has configurable minimum and maximum input length settings to support limiting the expected input from the customer to be within a specified length range.
- Settings are updated in the Additional Customer Form Items section of the WebChat Endpoints configuration screen of the Symbee Connect Administration Portal to support these updates.

What's Fixed

The Symbee Connect Skill Queue assignment view in the Administration Portal is updated to address a security role issue where access was sometimes being denied when updating user skill assignment (when the user's role had the permission to do so).

What Else

Chat Typing Notifications are added to the Symbee Connect User/Agent UI and Customer-facing WebChat UI for Amazon-delivered webchats (typing notifications were already present for Symbee-delivered webchats).
For Amazon-delivered webchats using the Symbee Connect Customer-facing WebChat UI, the value of the Initial Question pre-chat form field (when enabled) is now also added as an Amazon Connect Contact Attribute (named InitialQuestion). The Initial Question text is still sent as the first message in the conversation, but can now also be accessed as a Contact Attribute available in Connect Contact Flows.
Symbee Connect Customer-facing WebChat Endpoint performance updates.
Symbee Connect Admin Portal Interaction Search screen updates to better handle the various 'incomplete results displayed, refine your search' scenarios.
Symbee Connect Interaction Search performance updates.

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) Pre-defined Dashboard updates

The following SCBI pre-defined Dashboards (or related QuickSight Datasets) have received updates since the last release. To deploy updates to the Dashboards in your Amazon QuickSight environment, see here: Deploy the Managed/Pre-defined Amazon QuickSight Dashboards

Many of the "CFAN" (Calculated Fields at the Analysis layer) calculated fields in the QuickSight SCBI pre-defined Dashboards have had slight name changes for consistency and quicker/easier understanding of the value type being returned by the calculated field (count, sum, average, min, max, etc.)
A set of 4 "CFDS" (Calculated Fields at the Dataset layer) calculated fields (named: cfds_queue_interval...) are added to the CTR and ITR based SCBI datasets to allow easier creation of interval based dashboards if you want to display/analyze interaction volume based on intervals that use the time that interactions start queuing. (Existing calculated fields were already provided for intervals using interaction start time, interaction disconnect time, and connected-to-agent time, but not queuing start time).

All Queue and Routing-Profile focused Contact/Interaction dashboards are updated to have their Interval-level statistics use DisconnectedTimestamp rather than InitiationTimestamp:

The interval scope of contacts/interactions on Queue and Routing Profile based dashboards is updated to follow the same behavior as Amazon Connect out-the-box views in the Amazon Connect console (which is, for queue-level views, to report on interactions that disconnected in the window rather than interactions that started in the window).
The following dashboards are updated to reflect this
- Amazon Connect Queue related:
  - Current Day Queue Contacts Activity
  - Historical Queue Contacts Activity
  - Current Day Queue Agent Contacts Activity
  - Historical Queue Agent Contacts Activity
- Amazon Connect Agent Queue related:
  - Current Day Agent Queue Contacts Activity
  - Historical Agent Queue Contacts Activity
- Integrated Queue related:
  - Current Day Queue Interaction Activity
  - Current Day Queue Agent Interaction Activity
  - Current Day Queue Email Interaction Activity
  - Current Day Queue Preview_Progressive Interaction Activity
  - Historical Queue Interaction Activity
  - Historical Queue Agent Interaction Activity
  - Historical Queue Email Interaction Activity
  - Historical Queue Preview_Progressive Interaction Activity
- Integrated Agent Queue related:
  - Current Day Agent Queue Interaction Activity
  - Historical Agent Queue Interaction Activity
- Real-Time related:
  - Queue Interval Real-time

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

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

Symbee Connect Integration CloudFormation (the "Install this first" CloudFormation)
- CloudFormation updates to add a recovery option to allow recovery of the ownership/auto-rotation of the SYMBEE_CONNECT_API_KEY SecretsManager secret.

2024 / 05 / 25

What's New

Symbee Connect Flow Control Tables - New multi-row retrieval Operations
- New operations are added to the Symbee Connect Flow Control Lambda used in Amazon Connect to access your Flow Control Table data from Contact Flows, to allow for use-cases where you need to retrieve multiple flow table rows matching a condition at the same time, rather than the details of just a single specified row.
- Two new operations are added: GetFlowTableRows and GetFlowTableRowsForConnect - see documentation here for details on these new operations.
- A Flow Controls CloudFormation download and Update is required to be able to use these new updates.

What's Fixed

An update to the Symbee Connect User/Agent UI to address (an obscure) race condition that caused rare cases where an inbound voice call did not receive the correct number of Wrap (After Contact Work) seconds (when configured for timed auto-wrap).

What Else

Minor UI updates to the Symbee Connect Administration Portal for better usability.

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

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

Flow Controls CloudFormation
- The Flow Points Lambda used in Connect Contact Flows is updated to add the two new GetFlowTableRows and GetFlowTableRowsForConnect operations noted above.

2024 / 05 / 16

What's New

Symbee Connect Standard Email Channel - route inbound email to last responding agent
- New feature allows you to optionally set default routing of inbound emails associated with a previous conversation back to the same agent that last responded to the email conversation (or for an unsolicited outbound email, the originating agent).
- An optional new Email Return To Preferred Agent setting is added within the Inbound Email Routing section on each Standard Email Configuration within the Symbee Connect Administration Portal.
- For details on the characteristics and behavior of this feature, refer to the documentation section here: Email Preferred Agent (or Return to Agent) Routing.
New fully-customizable Roles Based Access is added to the Symbee Connect Administration Portal
- Previously, access permissions for administration users was governed by six predefined roles (Administrator, Operator, Supervisor, Reporter, Optimize Administrator, and Evaluator) but the makeup of those roles was not configurable.
- This is replaced with a new set of Security Roles screens, accessed from the Company menu (the left button on the top navigation bar), and selecting Administration Users from the drop-down menu.
- By default the same six roles previously available are preconfigured (Administrator being the highest level, and providing access to everything).
- With the exception of the Administrator role, all other roles are fully customizable and can be modified, renamed, duplicated to provide additional or different roles, or can be completely deleted to meet your access control requirements.
- Administration Users can now be assigned with either one or multiple roles. When a user is assigned multiple security roles, the user is allowed to see and do the super-set of all functions and actions configured on each assigned role.
- For further details, refer to the documentation section here: Administration User Security Roles.
Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) - Multi-level Embedded Dashboard Access
- The QuickSight Real-time Dashboards option within the main Function Menu of the Symbee Connect Administration Portal is updated to support a dynamic list of QuickSight Dashboards offered to the user for opening embedded within the Administration Portal.
- Previously the list of dashboards available to open was all dashboards in your QuickSight instance. The new behavior limits the list to only those the QuickSight User (configured in the Default Embedding QuickSight User setting at your Company Environment level) currently has access to.
- The Default Embedding QuickSight User can then be overridden at a Symbee Connect Security Role level, to allow different groups of administration users to be limited to open different sets of QuickSight dashboards.

What's Fixed

Symbee Connect User / Agent UI updates to address an edge case race-condition where an agent could unintentionally end up being left in the Non Voice Work agent status (when configured for Omnichannel) when attempting to pend unavailable.

What Else

Update to the SCBI QuickSight Reports Deployment in the Symbee Connect Administration Portal, to reduce the number of SPICE Dataset refreshes invoked in QuickSight when multiple Dashboards that use the same set of Datasets are selected for install or update.
Update to Symbee Connect Flow Control Points to increase the allowed length of a Flow Point value (to 2000 characters).
Performance updates in the User/Agent UI to reduce the number of Amazon Connect agent state changes performed in normal use-cases.
Symbee Connect Interaction Search scalability updates.
Security updates.

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

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

Interaction Search CloudFormation
- Updated to implement a new version-2 setup for DynamoDB for higher scalability

2024 / 04 / 23

What Else

Update to work-around Google Chrome bug introduced in Chrome version 124 causing STACK_OVERFLOW errors. This impacted the ability for users to make outbound phone calls from the Symbee Connect User/Agent UI due to the Chrome bug causing a STACK_OVERFLOW issue in the Channel Selector dropdown box.

2024 / 04 / 06

What's Fixed

Symbee Connect Email Channel updates:
- Update to ensure Subject is always populated on Interaction Trace Records for inbound Emails that are delivered and accepted by agents, but do not result in an outbound response back to the customer.
- Update is to ensure the Email Subject line for this scenario is searchable in the Interaction Search view of the Symbee Connect Administration Portal.

What Else

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) performance and efficiency updates to Background Query runner tasks used to populate the User Names and Routing Profile reference tables. (An SCBI CloudFormation download and Update is required to receive this fix)

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) Pre-defined Dashboard updates

Performance and efficiency updates are made to all the QuickSight Datasets that support all the pre-defined SCBI Dashboards. Notes:
- Updates are made to reduce the amount of S3 data scanned by Athena when data is being requested from QuickSight.
- Various predefined SCBI Dashboards have been republished to receive these updates (no material changes are made to the data or metrics displayed on the Dashboards, but a re-publish was needed to activate the respective QuickSight Dataset performance enhancements noted above).
- To receive these updates, select and update all predefined dashboards listed in the QuickSight Reports Deployment view of your Symbee Connect Administration Portal that have an Updates Available status noted after performing a discovery.

Feature Integration CloudFormation Updates available

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

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence with QuickSight CloudFormation
- Performance/efficiency updates to Background Query runner tasks used to populate the User Names and Routing Profile reference tables.