Planned improvements to the beta

Update Closed and Archived tickets please 👍

Both of the below would be really helpful

• Find the receiving organization in a merge by organization_id
• Update business rules that refer to the merging organization

Very excited about this feature - we have needed it desperately!  What is the timing for the GA release when the updates to closed tickets will be available?

Thank you so much for the feedback already folks! 

@mirek We're in the testing phase for updating Closed and Archived tickets so that should be in the near future. 

@denise11 Thanks so much for adding input there. I believe the lookup via organization_id shouldn't be too much of a lift. Business Rules will be harded.

@jamie15 At this stage I'm aiming to remove the beta label from the feature in Q1 next year, but we also plan to ship the improvements incrementally, so you won't have to wait until then.

Thanks again for the feedback, please keep it coming.

James

This is feedback for the Salesforce integration team - it would be superb if when merging a SF Account if it could trigger an event to use the Merge Org API (ideally via a configurable parameter, like the external_id) to keep SF and Zendesk aligned!

As for the features, updating the closed/archived tickets, handling custom fields (which may also handle tags indirectly) and Custom Objects/lookup fields are the biggest items that I would think are most important. 

Thanks Dan, really appreciate the feedback and suggestion. I've shared with @david97 for the Salesforce sync also. 

Just to second Dan's comment about the SFDC Integration.  For this and several other reasons we are looking to move away from the SFDC integration as it creates so much bad data into Zendesk.

@james75
Another vote for 

• Update business rules that refer to the merging organization

And just wanted to say about these two:

• Append tags, notes and details from the merging organization to the receiving organization 
• Move custom organization fields 

The logic should be to keep the ones on the receiving organization.  Please not duplicates.  And TBH I would prefer this to be configurable or an option in the UI/Wizard/API.  Most of the time I want the Receiving Organizations values ONLY and do not want the Merging Organization values.

Hey @jeff13

Do you have any examples on the kinds of scenarios where the SFDC integration is creating bad data in your Zendesk instance? 

We'll stand the best chance of getting Zendesk's attention on those items if we can describe the cause and effect relationship between the two systems.

@dan12 I have the same example as you.  My SFDC team merge's accounts in SFDC all the time and then I'm left with a vestigial org in Zendesk.

Hey Org Merge Community, 

I just wanted to share an update - we're aiming to add updating closed and archived tickets as part of an Org Merge into the Beta in early February. There will also be some UX improvements to streamline the multiple modal shown during the merge experience. 

I can't provide a more specific date than this, just due to the practicalities of releasing, but I will post an update to this community topic as soon as it's available.

Thanks,
James 

Thanks @jeff13 and @dan12

Addressing the topic of the SFDC integration, our first step will be to release a public API for org merge, this is in progress.  At the moment, the API is going through an internal engineering review process, and I expect we will be published before the end of the Q1.

Any updates to the Salesforce integration will need to occur after this, and be worked around their existing commitments and priorities.

I hope this helps.

James

I'd like to see the potential to set up automation to merge domains based on activity.

All of the under consideration items, especially the customer ORG fields, are important for my organization.

22nd Feb: Rollout completed

13th Feb: The rollout of closed and archived tickets has re-commenced, and should be completed by the end of the week.

6th Feb: Due to some errors on updating closed and archived tickets, we've paused the rollout. We expect to be complete the rollout approximately 1 week later than initially planned.

Hey Org Merge Community,

I'm extremely excited to share that we've released an improvement to the beta today that will update closed and archived tickets as part of an org merge. 

This is only available in Pod 26 (How to learn which pod I'm on) at the moment, but we will be rolling this out to all accounts by the end of next week.

Should we run into an critical errors we may need to pause this rollout, but I will keep this community updated with the status of the rollout.

Thanks very much for all your feedback on the beta thus far, and your patience while we developed this.

James

Hello Org Merge Community,

Just a small post that Updates to Closed and Archived tickets in an Org Merge is now available in the Beta on all pods and all accounts. I hope this is helpful

Our next major improvement to the Beta will be a public API to create org merges.

Cheers,
James

Hey Org Merge community, 

I'm pleased to share that we have just released our public API's for organization merge.

I created a specific post on the launch of our APIs which details the changes.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
James

Hi James, can you confirm when are we getting merge org option in general availability from Beta ?

Hey @darshan11 , should be in the next month. 

The public API's is the last major feature release prior to moving this feature into General Availability. There are some behind the scenes work we are continuing to do to ensure performance with expect load increases, but I do anticipate a GA announcement soon.

Hope this helps,

James

@james75 we are starting to test out organization merging and are running into some issues around the updated at timestamp on closed tickets that have gone through the merge.  We run ticket retention workflows 2 years after the last update on a ticket and this is resetting the clock on tickets that are included in the org merge.  In addition, we would like to avoid pulling these tickets to the top of lists that use the updated at as a sort option (including the requests page in our help center). Is your team looking at options that would allow for closed tickets to retain timestamps around ticket closure?

In addition, we'd like some sort of event to fire that we could use to notify an external service that a merge has happened.  This may be something that is already available, but it's coming up in our discussions around our ticket retention workflows. 

Hey @dan28 apologies for the delayed reply here – I've moved teams internally in Zendesk and handed over running of this Beta to @tim39, so I'm tagging him in.

I will say you are the first to raised the “Updated at” issue, but maybe there is a sensible product improvement here that would be a setting to retain original timestamps in closed tickets. I don't know how challenging that would be technically as the setting of those timestamps are centralised services to ensure they work consistently and accurately all the time, but it certainly investigatable. 

Regarding a pushing of an event to an external service - what methods are you using today to listen to changes? This would help us identify where we need such a notification. 

Thanks,

James

Thanks @james75  and hi @tim39! 

I think the straightforward solution would that “updated at” doesn't change, but there would be another attribute to capture the “closed at” and/or “solved at” timestamp.  We can already use “solved_at” when writing via the ticket import API, but this attribute isn't one of the currently listed ticket properties that is returned to us.  Updated at is the closest we have to seeing when a ticket is closed, but with closed tickets opening up to more editing scenarios, we cannot rely on that timestamp and need something a bit more conclusive for when a ticket is closed out.  
 

As for events, we are using webhook events at the moment for a few workflows, and that is where we'd want to see an additional merge event that we could use to see which org was merged into another.  We could potentially monitor the Deleted event and a custom field/tag event - but it's not guaranteed that the receiving org would see an update that we could use to distinguish it as having been done via a merge.  Our use case at the moment would be around the ticket retention solution we have today where we'd want to see a merge and potentially capture the related tickets for a scheduled deletion.  If we gain the ability to modify closed tickets via API, we'd assess stamping the closed ticket with an attribute at that time that we could use absent a solution like gaining access to a closed_at/solved_at attribute.

Hey @dan28 !  I just wanted to chime in on this subject.  You can actually access the information you're looking for on a ticket via the metrics side load and looking for the property “solved_at”.  

For example:
api/v2/tickets/<ticketId>.json?include=metrics

For reference sake: https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/ticketing/using-the-zendesk-api/side_loading/