With many exciting new features and improvements, we’re incredibly excited to announce Rocket.Chat 3.13! We gathered the most important updates on this release and listed them below so you don’t miss a thing. Learn more about Rocket.Chat 3.13:

*If you wish to see the original release list, click here!

ENGINE VERSIONS

Node: 12.21.0
NPM: 6.14.8
MongoDB: 3.4, 3.6, 4.0
Apps-Engine: 1.24.0

NEW FEATURES

- APPS: Map description as a room value in Apps (#20811)

Add the description value of a room as a mapped value in the Apps-Engine. That way developers can get the description information from a room in their app.

- APPS: New event interfaces for pre/post user leaving a room (#20917)

Added events and errors that trigger when a user leaves a room. That way it can communicate with the Apps-Engine by the IPreRoomUserLeave and IPostRoomUserLeave event interfaces.

- Enterprise: Omnichannel On-Hold Queue (#20945)

About this feature

This feature has been introduced to deal with inactive chats. A chat is considered inactive if an Omnichannel End User (a.k.a. visitor) has not replied back to an agent in some time. These types of inactive chats become very important when an organisation has a limit set for Max Simultaneous Chats per agent which is defined by the setting shown below , as a big number of inactive chats would directly affect an agent's productivity.

Before this feature, we only had one option to deal with such inactive/abandoned chats - which was to auto close abandoned chats via the “Enable automatic closing of rooms abandoned by the visitor”, as shown below:

However, closing a chat isn't the best option in all cases. For example, let’s say an agent is assisting a customer to install a big software, which is likely to take more than 20-30 minutes to download. In these scenarios, closing a chat isn't the best approach, since even after the lengthy download the customer may still need assistance from the agent.

In this case, this chat would block the agent's queue until the customer is able to finish their time-consuming download. Due to the Max Simultaneous Chats per agent limit, the agent wouldn’t be able to use this extra time to help other customers, thus affecting his overall productivity.

So how does the On-Hold feature solve this problem?

With the On-Hold feature, an agent is now able to put a chat on-hold. On-Hold chats don’t count towards the maximum number of concurrent chats an agent can have. So, in the example above, the agent would be able to simply place the customer on-hold for some minutes until they download the software. And within the on-hold time, the agent would be able to serve other customers.

How can you place a chat on hold?
A chat can be placed on-hold in two ways:
Automatically place abandoned chats On-hold

With the option shown above, you can define a timer which will get started when a customer sends a message. If you don't receive any message from the customer within the chosen time, the chat will expire and will be considered to be abandoned.

You can also choose to automatically place an abandoned chat On Hold, as shown above.

Manually place a chat On Hold

As an admin, you can allow an agent to manually place a chat on-hold. To do so, you'll need to turn on the setting below:

The On Hold button is placed on the Room Header:

How can you resume a chat On Hold?
An On Hold chat can be resumed in two ways:

1. Automatically

If the Customer / Omnichannel End User sends a message to the On Hold chat, the On Hold chat will get automatically resumed.

2. Manually by agent

If an agent manually resumes the On Hold chat by clicking the Resume button in the bottom of a chat room:

What would happen if the agent already reached maximum chats, and an On-Hold chat gets resumed?

Based on how the chat was resumed, there are multiple cases and here’s how they would go down:

If an agent manually tries to resume the On Hold chat, he/she will get an error saying Maximum Simultaneous chat limit reached
If a customer replies back on an On Hold chat and the last serving agent has reached maximum capacity, this customer will be placed on the queue again from where based on the Routing Algorithm selected, the chat will get transferred to any available agent.

- Ability to hide 'Room topic changed' system messages (#21062 by @Tirieru)

- Add Omnichannel Live Chat Trigger option for when user opens the chat window (#20030 by @reda-alaoui)

This change adds a trigger conditioned by the opening of the live chat window by the visitor.

- Quick action buttons for Omnichannel (#21123)

Action buttons are now placed on the room header.

- Teams (#20966)

Now, instead of creating a channel for each and every company team, you can easily group users as a Team on Rocket.Chat. Teams empowers companies to save time spent manually adding users to the platform and much more:

Quickly onboard users with Auto-join channels
Instantly mention multiple team members
Easily handle teams’ privacy & permissions

See how easy it is to get started with Teams here.

IMPROVEMENTS

- Add spacing between elements in Profile Page (#20742 by @cyberShaw)

- Added modal-box for preview after recording audio. (#20370 by @Darshilp326)

After sending an audio message, a modal box will now pop up. That way, users can change the filename and add a custom description, just like they do with regular files.

- Adds toast after follow/unfollow messages and following icon for followed messages without threads. (#20025 by @RonLek)

Before this improvement, there was no alert on following/unfollowing a message previously. It was also impossible to make out a followed message with no threads from an unfollowed one.

With this improvement, an alert on the followed/unfollowed message is shown and there is a small bell icon displayed (similar to the ones for starred and pinned messages) when a message with no thread is followed.

- Back to threads list button on threads contextual bar (#20882)

- Better new channel popover (#21018)

- Grammatical typos in pull request template (#21115 by @sumukhah)

- Improve Apps permission modal (#21193)

Improve the UI of the Apps permission modal when installing an App that requires permissions.

New UI:

- Make debug logs of Apps configurable via Log_Level setting in the Admin panel (#21000 by @meomay503)

- Re-design Omnichannel Room Info Panel (#21199)

- Set description in create channel modal (#21132)

- Sort Users List In Case Insensitive Manner (#20790 by @aditya-mitra)

The users listed in the admin panel were sorted in a case-sensitive manner , where the capitals came first and then the small letters (like - A B C a b c). This Change fixes this by sorting the names in a case insensitive manner (now - A a B b C c).

- Add sanitizer to prevent XSS attacks (#558)

This PR solve a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability. Messages and composer are reading HTML code, so it's necessary a sanitizer to strip out everything that contains dangerous HTML.