We will be migrating Planio to a new data center on the weekend of March 14th and 15th, 2020. This change will help us further improve the performance and availability of all Planio services.
The migration window starts on Saturday, March 14 at 9:00 UTC and will last until Sunday, March 15, 22:00 UTC. Within that time frame, some or all services of your account might observe occasional unavailabilities as we transfer your data. All data is safe during the migration and will be transferred over fully encrypted channels to the new data center.
With the migration, we will update the IP range on which Planio servers operate. It will change from 82.98.82.0/24 (previous) to 116.202.71.64/27 (new). If you have configured any firewall or proxy rules in your organization, please make sure to adapt those beforehand. For most users, nothing needs to be changed on your end.
In any case, please note that we might occasionally have to further update the used IP ranges of our servers without prior notice. As such, please continue to avoid IP address based firewall rules for Planio in your organisation. If you require to set up firewall rules, please use hostnames instead.
If you are using Planio on a custom domain, the same applies. If you have used a CNAME in the past, nothing needs to be changed. Should you have used A records, please update them accordingly and re-evaluate if using a CNAME is possible now.
Customers who have concluded a Data Processing Agreement according to Art. 28 GDPR with Planio have already received an update by email to reflect this data center change. The new data center we are migrating to is located and operated in Germany as was our previous data center. As such, your Planio data will not change jurisdictions. Administrators can still sign the new agreement via Your Avatar → Customer Account → Data Processing Agreement if desired.
Should you have any questions related to the migration, as always please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Update: The move is complete and everything works as expected in the new data center. All Planio accounts are already up and running again. We will monitor the performance closely and will use the remaining time of this maintenance window for cleanups and smaller upgrades.
Many business emails come with quite a few images in their footer, like company logos, social network logos etc. When receiving such emails in Planio Helpdesk, these attachments would be added to the issue over and over again, quickly leading to a long list of attachments. Not only does this make it hard to find relevant attachments, it also takes up storage space in your Planio account that you might want to use otherwise.
In order to enable users to make use of the blacklist, add the Add attachments to blacklist permission to one of their roles. They may then, when editing an issue, click Edit attached files at the bottom of the form. This reveals a list of the currently attached files, each with a link to Blacklist it.
Blacklist attachments when editing an assue
Alternatively, you may click the Edit icon next to the attachments list while viewing an issue. This will lead to the Edit attachments form which features the new Blacklist links as well.
In either case, clicking the Blacklist link will, after a confirmation, remove the file from the issue and append it to the global attachments blacklist. From now on, the same file (as determined by a checksum over it's data, the name does not matter) will be ignored whenever it is part of an incoming email.
As an administrator you can access the global attachments blacklist in Administration → Attachments blacklist. The blacklist shows when and by whom a file was blacklisted, what issue it originally was attached to, and allows to remove entries from the blacklist. There is also a function to Delete all duplicates for each blacklisted file, which will go through all your existing issues and remove any files that are identical to the already blacklisted one. Note that this process cannot be reversed.
For many years, Planio has been using the Textile syntax for all issue descriptions, wiki pages, and all other formatted content.
The Markdown logo
However, some time has passed since the first days of Planio. Meanwhile Markdown has emerged as the more common de-facto standard for formatting text and it's in the process of being defined formally as a standard. For a while now, new Planio accounts are using Markdown and both formatting languages are fully supported.
In order to make our use of Markdown even more interoperable, we've now switched our parser to CommonMark. This means that if you're used to writing Markdown at GitHub, Stack Overflow, Discourse, and many more, you will feel right at home with Planio.
With that change, we're now introducing a free Markdown conversion service. If you started using Planio before we introduced Markdown and would like all your existing Textile content be converted to Markdown, please get in touch and we will coordinate a time slot to perform the automated conversion of your data.
In Planio, you can control for which events you'd like to receive notifications and on which ways you'd like to be notified, e.g. via email, or via mobile or desktop push notification.
Today, we're introducing a new way to control what you'd like to be notified about. Within your Avatar -> My account section, you can now enable a new setting called Also notify me about issues with a priority of high or higher.
Get nofified about high priority issues
This will essentially notify you about high priority issues regardless of whether they are assigned to you or whether you are watching or being otherwise involved in them. This will also work if you have selected to receive no notifications at all otherwise.
We believe this to be particularly useful for high level managers who are overseeing many projects but aren't directly involved in their day-to-day. It's also great for help desk scenarios where agents won't need email notifications for regular issues as they're working on them consistently following an orderly queue. Yet, high priority issues could now alert them even if they aren't currently logged on or are working on something else – if that's what's desired.
Users can now receive notifications about changes (that is, creation, modification and deletion) of files and folders in Planio Storage. The same settings in My Account, which control notifications about issue updates and so on, will also influence what changes in Storage users will be notified about.
For fine grained control, we also introduced the possibility to watch files and folders, which becomes relevant when a user has selected the "Only for things I watch or I'm involved in" setting in her notification preferences. The watch setting on folders is recursive, so all files and folders inside a watched folder are considered to be watched as well automatically.
Notification emails show which files and folders have changed.
To avoid flooding users' mailboxes with notifications, these are consolidated over a period of time. Emails only get sent out when no more changes happened for a certain period of time in order to group related changes in a single notification email.
The new Trashcan can be accessed through a link in the sidebar of the Storage app. It keeps hold of deleted files for 3 days, providing a safeguard against accidental deletion of files.
Files and folders in trash can be restored or permanently removed before this happens automatically. Administrators may choose to purge all files permanently in one go, while other users may only purge those files that they deleted themselves. Protected files and folders remain protected in Trash as well - they cannot be seen in the Trashcan view by users without the proper permissions.
Quick heads-up on a much-requested feature, the first of a couple improvements coming to the Gantt charts. The left column of Gantt charts containing the tree of projects, milestones, and issues is now resizable.
Resizing the left column of a Gantt chart
We hope you'll like using this feature while we continue working on Planio improvements!
From November 1st, 2019, Planio will no longer support logins via OpenID. If you have been using OpenID so far, please log in using your username and password instead, or use one of the supported OAuth providers (Google, Github, Bitbucket or LinkedIn). In case you do not have your password handy, click the Forgot password? link in the login form.
You can set up OAuth by navigating to your account settings. In order to further secure your account when logging in with username and password, you may enable two factor authentication in the same place.
Planio Agile has seen some improvements in the last few weeks. Heavy users of the Agile charts may already have noticed that the look of the charts themselves has improved.
What you might not have noticed yet is that it is now possible to save charts with a similar mechanism to saving issue queries or Agile boards. To make room for the list of your saved Agile charts in the sidebar, we have removed the list of standard charts from the sidebar and rolled them up under the Agile Charts link in the list of Issues navigation at the top of the sidebar.
Story points with predefined values
Another improvement for teams using predefined values for story points is a global setting for the values of story points. Via your avatar -> Administration -> Agile you can now define a list of values for Story points, from which your users can choose when editing an issue instead of entering arbitrary values.
Expanding the possibilities for exporting issue data has been a frequent request from our customers. You may now choose to get a ZIP archive that contains one detailed PDF for each issue when exporting a number of issues from the issue list. The PDF documents will contain all issue details and the full history including all comments. If you wish, you can also opt to include any files that are attached to the issues you are exporting.
Issues PDF export options
Another option is to place child issues in a folder under the folder of their parent issue. This way, your issue hierarchy will be reflected in the folder hierarchy inside the ZIP file.
Generating this kind of export may take a while, therefore Planio does all the heavy lifting in the background while you can continue with your work. You will receive an email with a download link once your export is ready.
Planio Storage is a Pro Feature that’s available for a small monthly fee in older Planio plans. Our new Platinum and Enterprise plans include Planio Storage for free. We’d be happy to create a tailored offer for you that includes Planio Storage.Simply get in touch!
Data center migration and change of IP address range
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Update: The move is complete and everything works as expected in the new data center. All Planio accounts are already up and running again. We will monitor the performance closely and will use the remaining time of this maintenance window for cleanups and smaller upgrades.
Update: Maintenance work has been completed successfully at 16:34 UTC today.