Zammad 3.4 has been released on 15th June 2020 and brings long awaited functionality beside of two security fixes. We strongly encourage users to update their existing installations.
1. Security advisories
For the records, these are the two security issues that have been addressed:
- Unverified Customer can self-assign to unauthorized Organization (https://zammad.com/news/security-advisory-zaa-2020-12)
- Authorization issue allows Customer to see internal Ticket information (https://zammad.com/news/security-advisory-zaa-2020-13)
Both issues have been rated medium.
2.Changes
You can always find the changelog (3.3 to 3.4) here
2.1. S/MIME (sponsored feature)
Yes, you read right. Zammad finally supports S/MIME! 
This feature has been sponsored by Barzahlen/viacash (a.k.a. Cash Payment Solutions GmbH) and allows you to encrypt and sign your mails from now on!
The integration is super straight forward and allows both, using self signed certificates or public certificated (from a CA of your choice). Please note that, to provide you maximum control possible, Zammad does not use system CA stacks which required you to provide CA certificates if you want to trust those certificates completely.
You can find the complete setup process described on our admin documentation.
Because your agents will use this functionality instead of administrators, the “how to work with that feature” can be found on our user documentation.
2.2. Google oAuth
Back in 2019 Google announced to disable basic authentication support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP within 2020. Because of COVID-19 this has been re-scheduled to 2021 - still, we didn’t want to park this topic into a garage.
From now on you’ll find a google dedicated channel within the admin menu.
Please note that this channel, because of the technical backgrounds, functions differently from the “normal” email channel. Postmaster Filters, signatures and mail settings however are global settings which contain the exact same information in both, mail and google channel.
The google channel does work for both gmail and g-suite users!
Please note that there’s currently no direct migration path. We didn’t want administrators to feel that they have to move just now. Within the next versions we will provide a “migrate now” button if you configured a sole gmail channel (we will check for incoming and outgoing server to recognize such channels).
Right now you’ll need to remove the email channel and mail addresses in question to add it as google channel. More information on this topic in general can be found on our admin documentation.
Side note regarding oauth and Microsoft 365
Please note that, as of now, the integration for xauth doesn’t seem to be fully integrated with Microsoft services at this moment. For this reason we currently can’t provide a channel solution for the upcoming Microsoft changes.
However, we will regulary keep on trying to achieve this and release a functionality to address this issue as soon Microsoft is ready.
2.3. Better communication with ServiceNow (sponsored feature)
This feature has been sponsored by Adfinis!
ServiceNow is an ITSM solution with email integration (like Zammad).
In the past, the two services didn’t play well together: ServiceNow strips crucial email headers from outgoing messages, so Zammad couldn’t tell the difference between a follow-up and a new ticket. This meant that Zammad’s only choice was to create a new ticket for every single email from ServiceNow.
This functionality does work out of the box and doesn’t have any settings to fiddle with. It just works. 
2.4. Improvement on search taskbars
During release to 3.4 we encountered a potential deadlock and thus performance issue for taskbars that only affect “search taskbars”. Earlier Zammad 3.4 (commit 65376a8197c4dc72e3d35ef07604f4e1810de4ac from 17th June at 6pm MEZ) several agents having a search taskbar opened could cause update tries by Zammad that wouldn’t work as it was busy updating all taskbars already.
On instances witrh 50 users and more this could cause 25 seconds and more delay upon such requests which were a huuugee impact on such instances. We thus backported this to 3.4 stable to address this issue asap.
You can find more information on issue 3087
2.5. Did someone say check_mk?
Yeah, right - we already can talk with check_mk.
However, what we didn’t support up to now was the possibilty to provide further additional attributes if required. With this you could pre set custom objects on your ticket if you’d like!
As check_mk currently is not documented (apart from the UI), you’ll find more information on this topic within admin menu → integrations → check_mk .
We will update the documentation to this topic as soon as possible.
This will also mean that we will remove the usuage documentation from the check_mk integration page.
This will remove redundant information. 
3. Technical notes
Please note the following information.
3.1 Ruby version change
With Zammad 3.4 we’re raising the ruby version to 2.6.5.
If you’re not a source code user this information is not important for you, however, if you are - please ensure to provide the fitting ruby environment before hand.
3.2 Elasticsearch support
Heads up regarding elasticsearch!
Zammad 3.4 officially drops Elasticsearch 2.x-5.5! While it still might work, we strongly encourage to upgrade your Elasticsearch version.
Please note that you’ll have to follow upgrade pathes for ES - you can find them in their documentation.
Our documentation from now on holds information on which elasticsearch version is supported by which Zammad version. With this we hope to help administrators to see possible issues.
3.3 Ubuntu 20.4 LTS support
Starting with Zammad 3.4 we’re now also offering packages for Ubuntu 20.4 LTS!
3.4 EOL warning (Debian)
Another heads up for administrators.
With the next release we will drop Debian 8 support as it has reached end of life on 30th June 2020! Ensure to upgrade your Zammad host to a new Debian version before Zammad 3.5 - other wise you’ll no longer receive stable updates and thus run into deprecated Zammad versions.
(This will at some point affect develop packages already, in case you use develop)
You can find update instructions on our documentation. If you’d rather migrate to a new host, our documentation for backup and restore will help you.
3.5 anything else…? 
Side note for Univention users
We’re currently working on releasing Zammad 3.4.0-4 for Univention app. This may take upt o 14 days depending on us and verification process on side of univention.
Apart from that - no! That’s really it.
When upgrading from Zammad 3.3 to Zammad 3.4 there’s no Elasticsearch reindex required.
4. Help us help you
Previously, every release notes post in the community was provided with additional information about exceptions, stumbling blocks, etc. This was because the information should not only be duplicate information to our news page.
However, this delayed the publication of this information via this board . The most relevant information about the release itself was (and still will be) always available on Zammad.com.
Now we want to combine the power of the two release notes and put the best of both into one great post.
This is where you get on board!
I personally think that a release post on this board with one line saying “Yo, Zammad x.x is out - enjoy!” is no benefit for you guys. As we want to improve the release news on our page, this will only result in ineffective posts after this news posting. In our opinion, the community should address specific questions about a release and its features but not the content of the release itself.
That’s why I’d like to open a poll which is valid for the next 4 weeks (1st August 2020) allowing you to choose between “no update post” or “update post with one line”:
For those who’d like some background on this:
Creating this announcement takes a lot of time. Please don’t get us wrong - this is time we like to provide to our community. But: This causes duplicate information. And this leads to unnecessary confusion and requires a lot of time to keep track for everyone involved.
This is time that’s missing helping you guys on this board, other tasks for the community in general and doing stuff for the sake of Zammad as software directly.
We would rather do it once, fully stocked and more structured.
Now we are looking forward to your feedback and hope those information helps you to understand our direction.
Happy hacking!!