Rogue Release Check-In

The information in this article is the intellectual property of xMatters and is intended only for use with xMatters products by xMatters customers and their employees. Further, this intellectual property is proprietary and must not be reused or resold.

Task Force X has now been live in production environments for four weeks, and we're very impressed with how rapidly our customers have been adopting the new features. We want to build on that momentum by telling you about some upcoming improvements, and to help you plan for the Rogue release coming in December.

On-Demand Deployment Process

We continue to keep an eye on cloud service trends, and an ear on customer requests. Based on last quarter's experience we are making some exciting changes to how we deploy new features and how we communicate deployments. A full description of our process can be found in the On-Demand Deployment Process & Early Access article - here are the relevant highlights:

• Functionality changes on our Admin and Developer tabs will be deployed as those features are ready. The idea is that changes on these tabs don't impact end users unless an administrator or developer decides to roll out the feature. So, we feel the decision is in the right hands by toggling on the changes sooner and allowing customers to decide when they want to use a given new feature on these tabs.
• We will now publish "support notes" approximately 72 hours before our deployments. These support notes briefly outline the changes made in each release. We'll start posting support notes to the Community for the 5.5.137 release. In late October, we'll also post scheduled maintenance notices to the xMatters On-Demand status page.

We hope these enhancements to our deployment process will better inform our customers about the xMatters service and potential changes. As always, we're focused on providing the best possible cloud service and experience and we'll continue to invest in our product and our processes.

Selected Rogue Highlights

Now that we have the flexibility to toggle on changes to the Admin and Developer tabs, we have some cool new features that can be accessed before the official Rogue release.

Communication plan permissions get granular
First up is a change in the Developer tab. Our Communication Plan Builder's drag-and-drop interface is simple enough to allow almost anybody to develop and build out a communication process. Still, we've heard that customers limit access to the development tools because there are no fine-grained access controls; developer access is either granted, or not.

In this release we've added new security options to lock down who can change the design of a communication plan. Here's a screenshot showing the new menu option in the Communication Plan Builder:

And, here's the selection screen showing that you can grant access permission to users, roles, or groups:

We've had a number of requests to use groups for defining permissions, and this is the first place we're doing it... thanks for the idea!

Here are a couple of key points about the rollout of this feature:

• Existing communication plans will be Accessible by All and can be restricted as necessary.
• New communication plans created after deployment 138 will by default only be accessible by the user that created the plan. That user can then grant additional access as necessary to support the security needs of their business.

Specify session timeout values
Speaking of security, we've also listened to our customers' Information Security teams that are requesting different timeout values for user web sessions. In deployment 137 we'll provide a new Admin tab setting that allows you to specify a timeout value between 5 and 60 minutes. To give you even more control, we also added the ability to specify whether that setting applies to all pages, or whether reporting pages are exempt from the setting (useful for users that keep a separate monitor open to a reporting screen to track event statuses):

Conference bridge mute/unmute all tweaked
In our Task Force X release we mentioned that the Conference report would grow a mute/unmute all button in the upcoming Rogue release. One small but useful update we're adding is that the button is now a toggle. This means that if the toggle is set to a 'mute all' state we'll mute any new attendees to the bridge when they join - a very useful conference management addition when you're managing large-scale conferences.

Go Rogue
We have a lot more cooking in our ovens, so be sure to follow the Rogue Development Highlights to get the latest updates.

xMatters REST API: New Online Documentation

We've just released a new version of the xMatters REST API documentation and you're definitely going to want to check it out. Not only does it have code samples in three languages - including samples tailored for the Integration Builder - the samples are dynamically updated when you enter your user name and host name. Now that's slick! Click the image below to embigify:

You can access xMatters REST API help here or from the Integrator menu of the online help.

Until the next update,

The xMatters On-Demand Team