The Beetil Blog
Blog » Hidden Notes and a Wee Little Facelift.
We’ve been pretty the past few weeks here at Beetil Towers, and have just unleashed some real Beetil goodies.
Improved UI
As part of this release that has been building up for a few weeks now, one of the big changes you’re likely to notice is that we’ve re-designed the notes section. It’s subtle, but we think it really helps further clarify each section of an incident, problem, change and release.
Hidden Notes
The other change that you may not be so quick to notice is the “Hide comments from Customers”
Any incident or message you have opened up to your customers will now have a “Hide from customer” checkbox against each comment field.
Ticking this checkbox will mean your comment won’t be visible on the customer portal or present in any email notification sent to your customers. These comments are still visible internally but appear faded out with the word “hidden” tiled on the left hand side of the comment, making it very clear that the comment is hidden from the customer in the portal.
At the moment you can only make comments hidden from the customer. The symptom and resolution will always show in the customer portal.
What about emails? What exactly gets sent to the customer when you select “Notify Customer”? When you have made a comment hidden they will not see that comment, but they will see all the other updates you’ve made (e.g. changing the title, resolution due date, updating symptom/resolution etc) in their email.
In the screenshot above, our customer “David Gahan” would have received an email detailing all the updates I have made to the incident, but it will not show him the hidden comment I added, nor will he be able to see it on the customer portal.
If the only change you’ve made is added a hidden comment, then no email would have been sent to the customer regardless of the fact you’ve selected “Notify Customer” as all the changes you’ve made are hidden from the customer.
If you reply to an incident or message via email, the new comment will ALWAYS be visible to the customer, so please take care with what you put into Beetil. The last thing you want is to be caught slamming the customer, or handing out admin password to systems. Sometimes there’s some stuff that’s just better kept offline 
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch. As usual suggestions are more than welcome. If you need to send an SOS to support you can catch us on the normal channels at support@beetil.com, +64 4 8949110, or catch us around the Campfire.
June 28th, 2010
This is great guys.
Always liked the ability to hide the whole incident from a customer however, being able to hide comments gives you so much more flexibility.