[OPEN BETA] Announcing a new request list experience Open Beta with improved filtering, sorting and column management

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends

June 27, 2022

June 27, 2022

July 6, 2022

We are happy to announce an improved request list experience with better filtering, sorting and column management. This release is phase 1 in a series of releases to improve request management for end users. See also the feature documentation.

Why did we build it?

While for many end users with one or a few requests, managing their requests is doable with the current my activities page, there is a group of power end users that manage many more tickets, sometimes hundreds. These end users are typically managing tickets on behalf of a department or organization often as customers of a B2B vendor.

Managing hundreds of tickets has been painful for these end users and now we are taking the first step in upgrading the customer portal to enable ticket management at scale.

What is it?

With this first release of an improved request list in the Help Center we are adding 3 new combinable filtering options, the ability to sort more columns and the ability to show/hide columns.

Combinable filtering

We have added three new filters to “My requests” and “Requests I’m CC’ed on” so you can now filter you tickets on when they were created, where they were last updated and which organisation they are in.

Under “Organizational requests” we have added the ability to filter by when requests where created and when they where last updated in addition to the existing organization and status filter option.

What truly multiplies the value of these new filters is that they can be used in combination and you can set multiple values for the same filter to create an OR filtering condition. For example you can now filter on tickets within the Organization ABC OR Organization XYZ that has the startup Open and is updated in the last month.

Improved sorting

Now you can also sort your tickets by “Status” and “Created date” in addition to “Updated date” by clicking on the arrows above each column.

Manage columns

A completely new feature is that we are now allowing end users to show/hide the column they want to see. You can still filter on columns that are hidden and the sort order is maintained when you hide a column that is sorted by.

How do I start using it?

If you are using a Copenhagen standard theme, your theme will review the update before the end of the rollout period indicated at the top that will enable you to turn on this feature if you wish.

Here you can find a description of how you enable the new request list experience for Standard and Custom themes.

What does it mean it is in Open Beta?

That the feature is in Open Beta means that anyone can opt in to using the feature as described above, but the feature should be considered in a Beta phase where we are aware that it still has key limitations.

Known limitations

Look and feel Customization

The new request list is rendered as an encapsulated component, which means that it is not customisable as other advanced helpers by targeting the HTML. We have done this to allow for quick iteration of the feature without breaking any help centers. This comes with the limitation that the look and feel of the new request list experience is only customisable through theme settings where the component inherits colors from the settings the same way that the previous request list experience does in the Copenhagen theme.
We are working on enabling better look and feel customisation.
The good news on this is that to build the new request list experience we have allowed querying of the Requests API by end users. This means that anyone can now build a similar experience, a better one or a more custom one, exactly as they like using these APIs.

Combining multiple org filters

In the “Organisational requests” tab you cannot combine organisation filters to see tickets from more than one organisation in the same list.

API rate limiting

The new request list is rendered client side and uses public Zendesk REST APIs, mainly the Requests API, which means that it is currently subject to the account's rate limit. Our data shows that the majority of accounts and end users will never be affected by this, but we are intending to solve this limitation.

Custom ticket status support

The new request list does not yet support Custom Ticket Statuses (CTS) that is currently in EAP, but we will add support for CTS.

What’s next

This is just the first Beta release to improve the request list experience. Next step is that we will enable you to easily configure that your end users can see specific custom fields in the request list and allow end users to apply the new improved filtering, sorting and column management to those custom field columns. Stay tuned!

Want to learn more?

See the feature documentation.