Category: Updates

Hello again!

We’re excited to announce a new version of AboveBot with some exciting new stuff!

Lightspeed to TextMagic

Finally after many, many months of testing the Lightspeed SRO to TextMagic notification agent is ready for use.

The LS2TM agent works similarly to the Zendesk agent, but rather than creating tickets and adding notes to them, sends text messages to clients like you would expect.

Being able to automatically notify your customers when a service order is complete or requires contact from them has some pretty obvious advantages, and has had good results in our test cases.

Setup instructions are in Documentation section of the AboveBot administration interface.

GSX Reservations to Hosted ICS File

Our work in the last few months has also produced an exciting (for us) agent that creates a constantly updated ICS file (iCalendar Calendar) that you can point a calendar application or other ICS reader at.

Because the service uses GSX, there might be a bit of setup involved for your company, but we can assist with the process.

Again, like the Lightspeed to TextMagic connector, the setup instructions can be found in the documentation section of the AboveBot setup.

GSX Reservations to Waitlist Me

In a similar vein, we have also paired GSX Reservations with Waitlist Me, which is a cloud-hosted waiting list.

This agent examines appointments and populates the reservations section in your site waiting list.

Template Templates

Templates now support inheritance, allowing you to create one ‘base’ template, and several ‘child’ templates that extend or replace sections in the base. This saves some time writing or updating things like hours or store contact information.

As always, we recommend testing any changes with your templates with a temporary status before making them live.

For more information see the jinja2 documentation on inheritance, or contact support.

Further Improvements and Fixes

While much focus this last three months was on polishing the new agents, we’ve been keeping up with making sure that the bot is as stable as it can be.

• General web interface visual improvements to stats, alerts and other little less visible places.
• Less reliance on the pair name itself in important areas.
• Better logging of Lightspeed connection issues in the web UI.
• Improved reporting of template errors.

In addition to finishing the new lightspeed -> textmagic and lightspeed -> SNS (simple notification) connectors, (more information will follow soon-ish), we’ve updated the web interface and added some new sections.

The default page is now a status page, that shows a brief overview of the bot’s general well-being.

It has a few columns which should probably have some hover-over text.

• A general assessment of condition.
• Last Success, or the last time an item was processed correctly.
• Last Failure, or the last time an item didn’t process for some reason.

The other area is “alerts”.

Alerts contains very simple logs detailing certain issues the bot has encountered.

And yes, the web-ui is a little ugly right now. Don’t look at it too hard. It’s self-conscious.

For the insides of the bot, we’ve been doing a bit more work in other key areas.

• Making a textmagic connector.
• Customer-facing (that’s you) logging infrastructure.
• Better error detection in lightspeed.
• Small bugfixes
• Zendesk API quota consumption reduction.
• Improving internal structures for more agent development.

We’re also working out some of the other internal concerns, specifically, creating reliable communication channels for our customers to reach us and ticket tracking, as well as preparing for actually launching the product.