This week’s HostBill release brings a fresh wave of improvements to help you manage your business more efficiently and securely. From enhancements in contact management, staff permissions and custom automation tasks to updates in Disposable Email Blocker, Staff Sales and other modules – check what’s new!

Admin area updates

In HostBill each client can have multiple client contacts assigned. Client contacts are connected to the main client profile and usually have limited set of permissions. There are two types of profiles connected to the main account: Contact – client contact registered by the client and Guest – already registered email address, invited by client to become the client contact (/Guest). Both can be assigned by either clients themselves from client panel or staff members from admin area. Now, admins have the ability to change the parent client of a contact using “More actions” button in the contact details section.

Each staff member and staff team can be granted different permissions / ACL connected to various areas: affiliates, billing, support, provisioning, system configuration, security and other miscellaneous. Among other ACLs there is an “Edit client profile” permission but now we also added a new privilege which is required for admins in order to Change client group.

Speaking about contact and ACLs, now you can grant client contacts full control for services and domains, even if the client does not have any active services or domains, providing clearer and more secure permissions management.

When configuring products, HostBill gives you an option to automatically send emails to you customers upon certain evens related to given products/services. Now we refreshed and improved this section, changing its name to “Messages” instead of “Emails” and giving you the opportunity to send a mobile message for “Account created” event directly within product settings to keep customers in the loop via SMS. You can now customize the message and make it unique and dedicated to a specific product or service!

Another new feature for admins is the ability to manually mark a cancellation request as processed from account or domain details. When the cancelation request is placed you can now: cancel the account, mark as processed, delete request or edit it.

Custom automation tasks is one of the most powerful HostBilll features as it makes the automation highly flexible and help you adapt automation options to your needs and to each product/service/account individually. New custom automation task allows to remove discount X days/hours/minutes before account due date or after account create, invoice paid or account upgrade/downgrade.

Modules updates

The Disposable Email Blocker automatically polls (using cron) disposable email domains from configured URL and adds them to Settings -> Security -> Banned Emails. The module now supports auto-creating filters for ticket imports originating from disposable email domains, helping you keep spam and junk out of your helpdesk. New options have also been added to use your filter list to block signups, further strengthening your client validation and anti-abuse strategy.

The Staff Sales module allows you to track sales of each staff member in your team. You can assign certain customers to staff member and have them receive % from each customer order. You can also have all your staff sales team (selected staff members) receive default commission from each new purchase of certain products.  In module configuration you can choose how to handle account termination: whether or not or add negative commission (or only when there is a cancellation request).

In User API plugin we’ve added support for adding attachments to tickets, giving developers greater flexibility and power when integrating external systems with HostBill’s ticketing.

For Cloud Monitoring when creating a check, you can now assign a custom name, making it easier to identify and manage multiple checks.