What’s New in TOPdesk: our September and October updates

A few long-awaited features found their way into TOPdesk this September and October. Discover how to track extensive changes via your Task Board, personalize your automated actions, simply paste images in incidents soon, and much more.

Task board: track your extensive changes without losing the overview

Coordinating extensive changes means keeping track of multiple activities across different stages. We’re happy to share that extensive changes are now shown on the new Task Board, so you can monitor everything you're responsible for without switching overviews.

The updated Task Board displays the extensive changes you manage alongside your other tasks. You’ll see:

• A clear overview of all extensive changes, including how much time is left until the planned implementation date.
• Direct links to underlying activities within each extensive change. Click on the extensive change to open the preview panel. You’ll find a list of all activities on the General tab. This way, you get immediate input on how the change is progressing, and if action is needed to realize the planned implementation date.
  

Extensive changes on TOPdesk Mobile

In addition to the Task Board of TOPdesk’s desktop version, we made the same improvements to TOPdesk Mobile. So, if you’re always on the move, you'll stay up to date on all extensive changes you manage.

For more information about extensive changes on TOPdesk Mobile, see our documentation portal.

Self-Service Portal: a new look for Knowledge Items and Service pages

Three important Self-Service Portal pages have received a fresh look: the Service page, the Knowledge Base overview page, and the Knowledge Item card.

We applied our updated design standards to these pages, with which we pay extra attention to accessibility and responsiveness. You might have noticed that all flows linked to a Service page are now listed under Further options. Showing a header text for each section helps with making the page more accessible for every user.

On the Knowledge Item card, you’ll find similar changes. Knowledge Items that are under the opened Item in your Knowledge Base’s structure are listed in the Further actions section. Also, you can easily find your way back to a Service page with the new navigation banner on top.

You might also notice that the button to copy the URL of a Knowledge Item has been removed. Instead, simply copy the URL from the URL bar of your browser to share a direct link to the item.

And finally, the Knowledge base overview page for the SSP updated in a similar way. The various branches of your Knowledge base, now also known as folders, are shown in blocks instead of columns. To avoid some blocks becoming too large, they show a maximum of 10 items.

One TOPdesk User: more bulk linking criteria and new API account card

As part of our One TOPdesk User project, we released two important additions to Supporting Files.

More ways to match operators and persons

In the previous update, we introduced the bulk linking wizard to help you link Operator cards to Person cards. It automatically matches cards based on their login name, making it easier for you to prepare for the One TOPdesk User milestones. Now, we’ve expanded the matching criteria to five TOPdesk fields:

• Email address
• Employee number
• Network login name
• Mainframe
• Login name

To match your Operator and Person cards, simply pick the field that has the same value on both cards.

Remember the milestones

Keep these important dates for the One TOPdesk User project in mind:

• From 1 November 2025: New Operator cards must be linked to a Person card.
• Mid-February 2026: All Operator cards must be linked to a Person card. After this date, any unlinked Operator cards will get linked to an automatically generated Person card, which could lead to duplicate cards and a loss of incident history.

A new way of managing API accounts

With the important changes of the One TOPdesk User project in mind, and to improve the general usability of API accounts, we introduced the new API account card. Before, API accounts were regular Operator cards that were marked to be used specifically for automations and integrations. You can’t use them to log in to the Operator section interface: you only use them to access your TOPdesk via API requests. A benefit of these API accounts is that they don’t use operator licences, even when they extensive permissions.

Because it often makes no sense to link an API account to a Person card, and the button to manually create an Operator card was recently removed, we added a new API Account button to the Supporting Files module page. This way, you can still create an API account easily without linking it to a person.

On the new API account card, you’ll find a few important differences to the regular Operator card:

• The TOPdesk Login section only contains a Login Name field, but not a field for a password. Since authentication is only done via an application password, the regular password has no value for API accounts.
• An Application passwords section. For regular Operator cards, you still find this in My Settings. This move means that you, as the application manager, don’t need to log out and log in all the time to add new application passwords to an API account.

All Operator cards that were already marked as API accounts are automatically converted to a new API Account card. Existing application passwords are moved to the new ‘Application passwords’ section.

If you want to manually change a regular Operator card to an API Account card, you need to create a new API Account card. Keep in mind that you will have to create new application passwords on this card, and therefore also must update these in your automations and integrations.

For an extensive read about this new API Account card in TOPdesk, see knowledge item KI 18706 on My TOPdesk.

Coming soon to Incident Management: copy and paste images into your incidents

The saying ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ might be a little overused, but it definitely holds true for service requests. While explaining your problem with words might add to the confusion within your service team, a picture often gives plenty of clues for how to solve a problem.

In October, we started the release of a long-awaited change for Incident Management: the ability to add inline images to Incident card conversations by simply pasting them.

Pasting images is part of the updated Rich Text editor in Incident Management. With this release, the new editor and the ability to paste images directly into your message is available for the Operator section. The new editor was first released for TOPdesk test environments mid-October. The feature is rolling out to production environments over the coming weeks. When this part of the release is done, the feature is made ready for the Incident card on the Self-Service Portal.

Update your automated actions

Once the new editor is available in your environment, TOPdesk will use an updated Incident Management API. As a result, you might need to make some changes to your actions and integrations. This specifically concerns actions that request progress trail entries with images via the API.

For more information about the changes in the Incident Management API and how to update your actions, see KI 18044 on My TOPdesk. In KI 18723, you’ll find more details about this functionality.

Automated Actions: Create more personal and informative notifications

In Automated Actions, basically all relevant information is accessible as long as you request it first with an HTTP step. We’ve made more fields readily available so your actions, like email actions, need fewer steps to request data from your TOPdesk environment.

• To make your emails more personal, you might prefer to refer to someone by their first name. The First name field is now directly available for linked Operator and Person cards. For example, you can now add the first name of assigned persons on an Asset card via the ‘Insert value’ menu.
  
• The names and email addresses of related Branch, Location, Operator, Operator group, Person, Person group, Supplier, Budget holder, and Service window cards can now be used in Automated Actions.

Get ready for NIS 2 with better logging

In 2024, the EU set up the NIS 2 directive to improve the cybersecurity infrastructure across its member states. While legislation per country is still taking shape, we had a look at what will be expected from software suppliers.

We found that especially the logging capabilities needed a few tweaks to better align with upcoming NIS 2 regulations. This led to a few additions to what is actually logged in TOPdesk log files. TOPdesk now logs more information about changes in permission groups, operator groups, operators, filter configurations, and authentication settings.

How EU member states turn NIS 2 directives into legislation is currently still partly unclear. Therefore, we expect to make more changes to TOPdesk in the future.

For more detailed information about changes made to our logging with regards to NIS 2, see knowledge item KI 18637 on My TOPdesk.

Other updates

• Responsible data management: We’ve updated both the anonymization and file removal settings:
  • Both settings pages received a new look. Overall, the pages are became cleaner, and easier to navigate. Each card type now has a drop-down list with default values to choose from, but it still includes the option to fill in a custom value.
  • The default anonymization mode is now set to ‘anonymize’ for all modules.
  • The new default retention period for anonymization is 6 months. For file removal it’s set to 1 year.
• Client certificate support: You can now use a client certificate as the authentication method for Supporting Files imports (Entra ID as source), Asset Management imports (Intune as source), and for sending emails from TOPdesk.
• Supporting files imports: Various attributes are now available for the Supporting Files import, helping you to migrate from Customized Imports to Supporting Files imports:
  • externalID and importID. These are Active Directory fields that are only available to TOPdesk’s import and therefore can’t be changed in TOPdesk manually. This guarantees that they will not be altered.
  • objectSid. This field specifies the security identifier (SID) of a user in an Active Directory, which is a unique value.
  • Group memberships can now be imported when you use Microsoft Entra ID as your source, helping you to use Entra ID as a source for linking persons to person groups. Do so by mapping the ‘memberOfGroups’ field to a field in TOPdesk. In addition, mapping this new field helps you to make any missing person groups based on their name in your source.