Introduction

Pixtel helps to capture, share and manage files. Images captured can be edited using drawing and image manipulation tools before sharing. Pixtel helps in easy sharing of images to multiple cloud platforms and applications such as Google Drive, One Drive, Word, PowerPoint, Jira, etc. One important feature in all these integrations is that users can configure multiple accounts with any of the providers. For example, users can have 3 Google drive accounts, one for personal use, one or more for business use, and another one for school. While working on captures for business, a business account can be used to upload and share annotated files. This is one of the major strengths of Pixtel unlike many other tools in the market. This document covers the different share options available in the application. Share interface can be opened either from Menu Window→Share or Click on Share Toggle button icon, , in the middle of the left side menu. The Share Option Interface will open on the left as shown below. It can be closed by clicking on the icon again.

Share Integrations

By default, the current image opened in the tab is selected as the image for sharing. Multiple images can be shared by switching the main display to Grid View, by clicking on the Grid View toggle button icon . Grid view displays thumbnails of all opened tabs. Any number of images can be selected from the grid view and can be shared together. If any of the images have annotations, they get flattened onto the image before sharing. This flattening happens with the temporary in-memory images, the original image with annotations is not impacted. See the following grid view with some selected image thumbnails for sharing.

Sharing integrations are grouped into

Cloud Upload: All integrations that enable uploading images to cloud drives such as Google Drive, cloud applications such as OneNote and EverNote, and cloud storage in the future is part of this section. This can be minimized by clicking on the header.
Export: All integrations that export images into document formats such as Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Applications: All application integrations for sharing images.
Social Media: All social media applications for sharing images such as YouTube and Vimeo.

There is a format checkbox at the bottom of the share fly-out. Checking this box helps to share files in native PI (Pix) file format which retains all the annotations along with the image intact. These files can be imported into another Pixtel and annotations can be manipulated as required. This is very useful for collaborative work.

Cloud Upload

Easy, fast and secure way of sharing images with multiple cloud platforms. Pixtel has been integrated with widely used cloud platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, and cloud applications, OneNote and EverNote. A user account is authenticated to add account information in Pixtel. After authentication, all the folders on the cloud drive are displayed in an explorer view. Multiple accounts can be added and user accounts will be cached in Pixtel to avoid future login. Users can remove their account anytime; this deletes the local user profile. All the files chosen for upload will be available and selection or deselection among files is also possible.

Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, and Dropbox

The user interface and interaction for Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, and Dropbox are more or less the same except how they allow user authentication. In the following, Google drive integration is detailed as a reference. When clicked on google drive integration icon, , the following Google Drive window opens up with selected documents populated in the upload control on the right.

Click Add to log into Google Drive account and add it to the application. A separate browser window opens for a user to login to their account.
Choose an account from account selection combo box
Click Select to choose an account.
On clicking Refresh, folders will be refreshed (optional)
To remove any user account from application click Remove.
Pixtel files are located in Pixtel directory. New sub-folders can be created by right clicking on the directory and specifying the folder name. Any folder can be selected for upload. If no folder is selected, files are uploaded to root folder, Pixtel.
Click Add Files to add any additional files from the local directory. They can be any documents.
Click Upload to complete the file uploads.

As the files are being uploaded, upload status is shown with a progress bar as shown below:

OneDrive, Box, and Dropbox also follow a similar approach. They all open up IE browser for user authentication. If uploads are taking a long time, they can be canceled using the Cancel button. In addition to captured images, video and audio files can be uploaded as well. Large files take a while to upload. Depending on the bandwidth, users can consider uploading files directly using respective desktop clients. For example, you can install DropBox client on the desktop and drag and drop files into dropbox folders. These local clients help to upload the files in the background.

OneNote (Online)

OneNote Online lets you take notes and organize note pages in a web browser. OneNote and EverNote are the two most popular note-taking applications with millions of active users. Users can create new pages through Pixtel and attach images to that page. All sections and pages are listed under each division respectively. Users can also provide a page description in the description field.

OneNote Window

Click Add to log in to Microsoft account, if no user is logged in. A dialogue box opens where users can log in to their account.
If a user has previously logged on, choose an account from the drop-down.
Click Select to choose an account.
On clicking Refresh, sections and pages will be refreshed.
To remove any user account from the application, click Remove.
Under Notebook’s, choose the notebook associated with an account. All the sections and pages related to the selected notebook will be displayed.
To create a new page check the box adjacent to Create a New Page.
User can add a description to an image in Description box.
Selected Images the tab has all images chosen for upload.
Click Upload to complete image upload.
Cancel will cancel the active uploads and Close closes the window.

Evernote (Online)

Evernote online is similar to OneNote and helps users to select Notebooks and attach images to select notes. New note pages can be created directly from the application. On the left side, instead of Sections and Pages as in OneNote, EverNote has Notebooks and Notes objects. Other than that, the rest of the functionality is similar to OneNote functionality.

Office Export

Office Export helps to create professional-looking documents in Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats exporting images, image titles, and descriptions.

Word

Pixtel generates the nicely-styled word document with few clicks, exporting all selected images formatted with titles and descriptions. The main export window is presented below:

Choose Export option like Word or Powerpoint or Excel from the drop-down.
If there are no available documents then click Create New to create a new document
Provide document title
All the available documents opened in MS Word are displayed in Available Documents. Any of these documents can be selected for adding images to the document at a specified location.
In the settings tab, see the middle section in the above window, User can add/remove Name, Border and Image Scaling.
Selected Images section has all images chosen for export.
Page orientation can be selected for new documents. Location can be selected if an existing document is selected.
Click Export to generate a word document with all the images. See the sample word document.
The export window can be closed clicking on the close button.

Exported word document looks like the following. By default, all word styles set are applied to titles and image headers.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint export provides exporting images into nice-looking presentations with out of the box Powerpoint templates. When the PowerPoint share option is selected, the following dialog window opens.

In PowerPoint settings tab, different options are available for Layout, Size, and Template. See the following presentation generated from the above settings:

Excel

Excel export supports exporting images to a single worksheet or export each image to a different worksheet. Excel export is very helpful in case of exporting tax documents, financial statements, etc. where a screenshot is required as a proof with calculations in the excel spreadsheet. See the excel export window:

Exported excel document is presented below:

Applications

Application integration helps to interact with applications from Pixtel directly without requiring to switch between applications to share images. A set of three integrations are included in Pixtel. These are Email, FTP and Jira. Email integration helps to send an email with image attachments. FTP integration allows uploading documents to a selected FTP site. Jira integration is an important integration provided in the application. Jira integration allows users to create and update issues directly from the application without requiring to go back and forth with Jira application in the browser. This greatly improves the productivity of Product Management, and Development and QA engineers when dealing with a large number of product/project screenshots.

Mail

There are different providers for email integration. Users can choose the desired provider and fill in the necessary credentials to log in to their account. Recipients' address can be entered or chosen from suggestions in drop down which comes from the saved contact list. By default, using a template, email subject and message gets generated along with a list of images to be attached. These templates can be edited in the User Preferences→ Integrations interface.

Email interface options are explained below:

Select an account from the drop-down and click Select button
Click Add button to log in to an email account.
1. Add New Account a window opens, shown below, a new Window for selecting Provider (e.g. Google, Yahoo, etc.), entering Display Name, Email Address, and Password.
2. Click on Authenticate which validates the credentials or opens a separate browser for OAuth2 providers to authenticate.
3. Click Save to save the details.
Click Edit to modify previously saved email details
Click Remove to remove any user account
Enter recipient accounts in To, Cc and fill the Subject and Message
Click Add Files to add any additional files from the directory. They need not be image files.
Click Send to send email with the file attachments.

Note that some email providers reject large attachments. Please make sure the total size of attachments is less than the limit. Both Google and Office365 support OAuth2 and 2-step authentication.

FTP

FTP integration facilitates uploading files to an FTP server. All the folders that have permissions show up on the left. Choose a folder and share the images. FTP window is presented below:

Click Add to open the FTP Connection window. Enter FTP server details and click "Connect" button. Click “Cancel” button to close the connection window.
If the user has previously logged on, choose an account from dropdown.
Click “Select” to choose an account.
On clicking “Refresh”, folders will be refreshed.
To remove a user account click “Remove”.
All the folders in the box will be displayed.
Click “Add Files” to add any additional files from the directory.
Click “Upload” to FTP images.

Jira

Jira is used for issue tracking and project management. Images and captures in Pixtel can be used to create a Jira issue or update an existing issue. Jira accounts are authenticated and saved in the application for future login. With multiple accounts, users can make one account as primary. Project names are filtered before creating or updating an issue. A link to the issue appears at the bottom which can be opened in the web browser. Jira integration significantly improves productivity especially for the users who use it for managing issues with image attachments. In order for Jira integration to work, Jira should be accessible and the Rest API should not be disabled. Integration supports API key based authentication that requires user id and API key. Other custom forms of authentications are not supported.

On clicking the Jira integration button in the share panel, Jira Account Manager window opens up as shown below:

This window shows the list of Jira Accounts already configured. Click on Connect button to connect to Jira account for creating and updating issues. Click on Add/Update buttons to add/update a new account or update an account. Remove helps to remove an already registered account. Before adding a new account, please add a new API token in your Jira Cloud account settings online at https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens . Once you create a new API token, copy the token and paste it in API token field (3).

In the Jira account settings form, a user has to fill Account Name (1) or select from the drop-down if already saved. Enter Jira Server URL , Username (2), and API Token (3). Click on Authenticate button (5) to connect and validate the account.
Click Authenticate (5), it will check connection status & the message will be displayed. Loads Project Names where user can select any project from the drop-down.
After the connection is successful, Select the projects that you can to include. Drop down button lists all available projects. Once the required projects are added, click Save Metadata (6), it saves the user details and loads project metadata.

Jira Issue form contains two tabs: Create Issue and Update Issue. The 'Create Issue' form helps to create a new issue and to attach all images. the 'Update Issue' form helps to search for an issue and attach images with comments. All attachments are added to the issues in the background as the upload speeds vary with Jira server. Sometimes, it takes a long time to upload.

Create Issue:

See below, Jira Create Issue - Advanced Form:

Create Issue - Advanced Form

Create Issue using Advanced form:

Advanced form and Simple form are available, toggle button switches between two forms.
Choose from available Projects and Issue type in drop down and click Select.
Depending upon the project data Jira field tab opens and the user has to fill the required fields.
Click Default field config to enter default values for the tabs. This is a very important feature which helps to configure defaults and re-use them without requiring to enter them again
Click Create to create an issue.

Create Issue using Simple form:

Create Issue - Simple Form

Toggle the button to the simple form.
Most commonly used Jira fields like Summary, Description, Issue Type etc...are available to Create an issue. This form is the same for all projects irrespective of metadata. Select the project.
Click on Create button to create the issue

Once a ticket is created, a dialogue window appears with the ticket number. Created time and a link to open the Jira ticket are available in the bottom status bar.

Create Issue Message Window

Status Bar with Message

Sometimes, issue cannot be created using simple form due to mandatory fields. In that case, please use the advanced form to create the instance.

Update Issue:

In the 'Update Issue' form, the user can Search for issues by Project, Status, Issue Type, Issue Id, Reporter and by any text present in the project.
Filters present in the project can be applied in Filters
From the search result, the user can select a particular issue from the Issues drop-down list and click Select.
Click Update button to update the selected issue

Update Form

Configure Default Values

Jira integration provides a way to configure default values for the create form fields. In most of the projects, there are several fields that tend to have common values for a project and an issue type. For example, component and environment field values. Sometimes, the user may need to fill-in 30-40 field values to create an issue. Most of them are repetitive and have common values across issues. By default value settings, creating new issues becomes a lot easier.

Default values can be configured by selecting Advanced Create Issue mode and selecting the Default Field Config checkbox in the bottom as shown below.

Default Value Configuration

Identify the field value that needs to be saved as default after checking the 'Default Field Config' checkbox. A set of default configuration buttons show up next to each of the fields. By selecting the type of setting from the drop-down, shown above, click on the gear icon to save the default value. Next time, when an issue is created, those fields that have default values get prefilled. This greatly improves productivity, reducing the form of filling time while creating an issue.

Social Media

Pixtel provides integrations to social media applications such as YouTube and Vimeo. Similar to other integrations, these help to post videos on YouTube and Vimeo.

YouTube

YouTube is a popular social media application used by millions of users for posting videos. This integration helps to upload the video content to a YouTube channel and make it available for public access. Recorded videos can be selected and seamlessly uploaded to your YouTube account. Please make sure you follow copyright laws for uploading video content.

If the user has previously logged on, choose an account from the drop-down account list and click “Select”.
Click “Add” to log in and add a YouTube account. A dialogue box opens to authenticate the user. This is similar to Google Drive account selection. You need to give upload permissions to enable Video uploads to your YouTube account.
To remove any user account, select the account and click “Remove”.
Click “Add Files” to add any additional files from a directory.
Click “Upload” to upload videos to your YouTube channel.

Please note that large files take time to upload. You may want to consider dragging and dropping files into your YouTube upload interface directly.

Vimeo

Vimeo is another popular social media application used by millions of users for posting and publishing videos. This integration helps to upload the video content to a Vimeo channel and make it available for public access. Recorded videos can be selected and seamlessly uploaded to your Vimeo account. Please make sure you follow copyright laws for uploading video content.

If the user has previously logged on, choose an account from the drop-down account list and click “Select”.
Click “Add” to log in and add a Vimeo account. A dialogue box opens to authenticate the user. This is similar to Google Drive account selection. You need to give upload permissions to enable Video uploads to your YouTube account.
To remove any user account, select the account and click “Remove”.
Click “Add Files” to add any additional files from a directory.
Click “Upload” to upload videos to your Vimeo channel.

Please note that large files take time to upload. You may want to consider dragging and dropping files into your Vimeo upload interface directly.

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