Today, after many moons of silence, we're proud to announce the first beta of Deskzilla 3.0, our new major version. Let's look at what makes it worth trying.

Support for Bugzilla 4.0

This version has been tested against the brand-new Bugzilla 4.0, and all the discovered incompatibilities have been fixed. The new default workflow is also fully supported. So if you are upgrading your Bugzilla installation, please upgrade Deskzilla as well; earlier versions will not work properly with Bugzilla 4.0.

New Features

There are plenty of them to try out:

• Deskzilla now remembers the bug table settings independently for each query.
• Now it's easy to find the bug you've just submitted or changed — Deskzilla keeps a list of recent bugs, available with a single keystroke.
• You can toggle background synchronization and reload Bugzilla configuration for individual connections. Use the new commands in the right-click menu. This can save you some time and network traffic.
• You can search for bugs that have no value in certain fields — there is now an "Is empty" option in the Query Builder.
• It is now possible to weave text searches into your persistent queries — there is a new type of search condition, aptly named "Text Search".

UI Improvements and Bug Fixes

Here are a few highlights:

• Deskzilla now loads and displays the full names of Bugzilla users.
• Some important background processes — connection initialization, downloading or uploading the current bug — now provide better visual feedback.
• If you have custom fields or options that depend on Products, Deskzilla could lose track of those dependencies; this is fixed now.

Indeed, there are too many of them to list; you can scan through the change log for details.

Rewritten Backend

Significant parts of Deskzilla have been rewritten from scratch for this release. Deskzilla 3.0 uses a new local database facility backed by SQLite. This is a big step in improving performance, as it removes the limit on the number of bugs that you can store effectively in your workspace.

Early Access License

We release only Deskzilla Pro this time, but you don't have to worry about licensing. This beta version is shipped with a fully functional Early Access Program (EAP) license, valid until July 1, 2011.

Upgrading to Deskzilla 3.0 Beta 1

The new local database format makes the upgrade procedure somewhat longer, though we've tried to keep it simple.

1. Upload all your local changes before upgrading.
2. As we always ask, back up your workspace.
3. You can install Deskzilla 3.0 over the older version.
4. On the first start Deskzilla will pick up your connections and queries, and re-initialize them.
5. The old local database will be left intact, so you can safely return to your older version at any time.
6. You will need to re-download the bugs by running your queries; the bugs will go to the new database this time.
7. If you use local tags, you will need to export them from the old database. You will find the standalone Tag Exporter in the etc\tagexporter folder of your Deskzilla installation. The Tag Importer is part of Deskzilla 3.0, found under Tools | Import Tags...

As always, we'd like to know your opinion. If you are experiencing a problem or need a feature, please raise an issue in our issue tracker.

Pavel Zvyagin
ALM Works Team

Links:

• Download Deskzilla
• Change log
• Discussion forum