Hub 1.3 release announcement

We are pleased to be able to announce the release of Hub version 1.3 which will be released to live customers on Wednesday 6th December. This version contains a number of new features, some of which change the menus and the way that the system works. We’ve explained all the major new features below for you.

Logout timers

Security is a key priority for us and a number of our customers requested greater control over how long someone could be logged in for without taking any actions (i.e. idle time). We have now implemented user inactivity timers to automatically log a user out after a set amount of time with no activity. These can be set at an organisation and user level. We’ll be setting the default to 4 hours for all users – we chose this because based on our research that’s longer than 95% of people spend idle on Hub in a given day, giving us a reasonable balance between security and convenience.
The timeout set at the organisational level is the maximum time that a user of that organisation is allowed to set their personal timer to. For example, if an organisation sets its timer to 4 hours, a user cannot set their own logout timer to be longer than this, though they can set it to be shorter.

Improved menus

After many conversations and feedback sessions with customers and several usability studies, we found that the menu layout didn’t always reflect what people expected in each menu. We’ve now changed the layouts so it’s more friendly and also gives us a more logical structure for adding more functionality in future.
All options related to Webstore can now be found under the Webstore section of the menu, including setting prices and catalogues for your resellers, and viewing current orders and baskets.

Settings related to the organisational structure, roles and users can still be found in Back Office.

All user specific pages such as Profile and Logout can now be found under the Account tab.

Some menu options may be marked as unavailable for specific users if they do not have permission to view them.

Quotes

In the screenshots above for the store menu you may have noticed a new entry called ‘Quotes’. Customers occasionally work with our sales team on larger projects with specific project discounts or more complex products like Session Border Controllers. If you do this, then you’ll now be able to see all the quotes that your account manager raises for you regardless of whether it contains items you’d normally buy through Hub. You won’t be able to modify the quote but the quote will include all shipping, billing, delivery and provisioning instructions.
If you’ve got the appropriate permission you’ll also be able to accept these quotes through Hub, ensuring that the order is placed immediately.

You can also supply a PO number when accepting the quote:

Messages

When you log in next, you’ll notice that we’ve added a new system messages section which we can use to notify you of important changes. This is the first step in creating a notification centre to provide you with a more manageable way of working with notifications in Hub. For important messages there is now a splash screen on login.

Usability improvements

We have made a number of small tweaks that we hope will make your experience that little bit better.
We’ve reduced the number of clicks to get to the checkout page. When adding an item to a basket, you now have an option to go to checkout immediately:

For admins we have duplicated the ‘add’ button at the top of list pages, to remove the need to scroll to the bottom of the page:

We have also simplified the workflows for changing password and modifying Multi-Factor Authentication settings.
We hope you like the changes we’ve made to Hub, and as ever if you have any queries or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us through your account manager!