One more blog series for you guys that’s going to be very cool — I call it Unorthodox Workflows… I’ll use this space to recommend “alternative” configurations you can try for some unique benefits you may not be able to get otherwise. The problem is, for these ideas to work, we need to distort the typical Cerb4 concepts and terminology from the norm in a way that might not make sense. So for those brand new to Cerb4 I wouldn’t recommend reading this as your first introduction, stick with the Quick Start guide instead.

1 Worker for 1 Ticket

Our Helpdesk is primarily designed for single companies who generally trust their workers.

This isn’t an official motto of WGM, but you’ll often hear us refer to it when asked about the ticket privacy capabilities of Cerb4. Once in a while, a Cerb4 administrator wants to create a workflow where ticket ownership on a per-worker basis is essential. A couple very simple examples would be a company with a handful of independent contractors or one where temporary positions come and go. Since privacy concerns are usually important in these environments, the assigned worker is more than likely to be the one that sees each ticket through to its completion. The person in charge usually wants to go through all incoming mail and assign tickets before workers get a hold of them on their own. This company is less concerned with maintaining groups of people who can share support responsibilities, and more focused on getting the right clients to the right worker immediately.

If we want a setup where each worker should only care about the tickets assigned to them and nothing more, how can we accomplish it?

Next Worker?

Now you might be thinking “Next Worker” is the obvious answer. Kind of. “Next Worker” will assign a ticket out to an individual, but it will not lock the ticket completely from other workers in their group who want to see it. An unassigned worker can read the entire conversation and reply to the ticket, all they’ll get is a warning in the Helpdesk.

So really the better question is, can Cerb4 treat owned tickets like they’re private conversations? Is it possible for a worker to truly own an assigned ticket by making it inaccessible to other workers from mailing lists such as Overview, Workflow, Workspaces, and searches. That is, the only time this ticket becomes available to everyone else, is when the worker releases the ticket back to the Helpdesk (or assigns it to another worker).

As far as I know this is impossible to do with standard Cerb4 practices most people rely on. And any attempts I’ve seen in the past usually end with some crack in the workflow, where a ticket eventually is visible in some capacity to other workers. Even with the Permissions system in ‘helpdesk setup’, you can never fully lock down an assigned ticket like you might expect.

Workers == Groups

The current solution requires changing how we traditionally think about groups. Our documentation usually describes them as company departments comprised of a handful of employees. In fact, by default, the Helpdesk starts you off with a “Support” and “Sales” group you can modify to your liking.

One of the benefits of groups that we want to take advantage of, is the separation of tickets that naturally occurs. When a ticket belongs to a specific group, any worker not a member of that group cannot access the ticket (including Administrators). No matter where those workers find the group-owned tickets they cannot click into them, even from a targeted search or workspace. And for the record going directly to the ticket URL, cerb4/display/CTD-91635-833, won’t work either.

So what if we took these same benefits that groups offered and applied them to workers? To effectively create worker-owned tickets, we need to treat each group like it’s a worker. A design choice I’ll describe as a worker-group.

All you have to do is create one group exclusively for every one worker, where each worker is defined as the group Manager and is not a member of any other group. e.g.

• Group: John Smith (Q/A Temp)
• Group: Brian Davis (Programmer)
• Group: Jane Thompson (Accounting)

Then to capture the workflow as described earlier, we have the Helpdesk administrator be the sole member of the “Dispatch” group to go through any incoming mail and distribute it to the correct worker-group. This ensures that only the company head and responsible worker sees each ticket. A nice perk is if a temp worker ever leaves the company you can simply delete his group and move his tickets back to “Dispatch”, where you can have the boss redistribute the tickets again.

If you decide to operate your whole Helpdesk with this restricted workflow, it might help to also hide the “Next Worker” feature to avoid confusion and assigning tickets the “wrong way”. In the ‘Permissions’ tab inside ‘helpdesk setup’, create a new role for all your workers and turn off just [Tickets] Can assign tickets to other workers.

Assuming Worker addresses should be the Group reply-to addresses

There is one piece of advice I want to share, for what I predict might cause people some headaches. Don’t assume because this Helpdesk design is more worker-focused than group-focused, that you can simply open support tickets between worker-groups. Ironically the kind of companies that would even think about trying a worker-group design like this, would probably be most inclined for example to need the Q/A Temp opening tickets to the Programmer.

Adding to this confusion is the fact that the natural thing to do is set each worker’s private address as their group’s reply-to address, under “send replies as e-mail”.

Since every group has their own e-mail address why not open tickets like the customers do? Unfortunately you can easily confuse the Helpdesk by messaging other worker-groups.

For example, say Q/A wants to ask a Programmer a question. If John Smith starts a typical ticket conversation by composing a new message with ’send mail’ where,

• from = “John Smith (Q/A Temp)” group, and
• to = “brian.davis@example.com”.

1) The ticket will be released into the sender John Smith’s group by default. You’ll have to remember to find it in your ticket list and move it afterwards OR before you submit by changing the “would you like to move this conversation?” to Brian Davis’ group.

2) When Brian Davis tries to reply he’s set as the default requester, so you have to remember to edit that back and forth to the other worker each time you reply.

Bottom line. This unorthodox workflow I proposed is far from a recommendation, most companies should never even think about trying this setup. But for those who run organizations where it’s desirable for every worker to be solely responsible for each ticket, this might be something to experiment with. Make sure you heavily test a Cerb4 configuration like this to see how everything works, before you roll it out into production.

-joegeck@wgm

Hey guys,

We’ve been given about 45 minutes of warning that the datacenter (Softlayer) needs to perform maintenance on their power system.  This is going to affect one of our Cerb4 On-Demand machines tonight at midnight (Pacific Time) for about 20 minutes.  It will affect another Cerb2/Cerb3 On-Demand machine on Tuesday, July 7th at midnight (Pacific) for another 20 minute window.  This is an infrastructure issue and doesn’t involve hardware on our particular machines.

We apologize for the inconvenience.  We’ll be standing by to make sure everything comes back up properly for the affected clients A.S.A.P.

Thanks!
-Jeff@WGM

Update 1:22AM Pacific: The data center maintenance for the affected machine is complete.  The machine is doing a routine filesystem check (scheduled for the first reboot after each 6 months) and things should be back to normal.

Update 1:26AM Pacific: Everything is back to normal.

I know it’s summer-time (in the Northern Hemisphere worldview, anyway) and you’d probably rather be relaxing.  I’m sure whether it’s hot outside or not you’d probably rather be relaxing.  What’s more relaxing than knowing Cerb4 has your back?  With everyone squeezing in their vacation, this is the perfect time to be sharing your e-mail workload in a web-based app.

Can’t this wait until September, you say?  Well sure… it could.  It could wait forever.  But you wouldn’t be doing yourself any favors.  How about this?

Deal #1: Buy a Starter License and get 2 extra worker accounts for free.  That’s 5 for the price of 3.

Still using a Community License?  Unlock the full potential of Cerb4 (worker permissions, time tracking, opportunity tracking) and give yourself a little extra growing room as a bonus.

Simply add a Starter License to your cart in the shop.

Deal #2: Buy an Unlimited License and get a year of Priority Support for free.

Get your entire team involved with an unlimited license.  Do you need to capture reports, receipts, leads, feedback, notifications or anything else through e-mail?  Cerb4 is a CRM toolkit and can do so much more than just fielding customer service and technical support questions.  A free year of Priority Support will let you jump to the front of the line any time you have questions or feedback.

Already have a Cerb4 license and interested in upgrading to unlimited?  Contact us and we’ll send you a coupon to discount the amount you’ve already paid.  You’ll also get a free year of Priority Support starting from the day of your upgrade.

Sound good?  Simply add an Unlimited License to your cart in the shop.

Remember, we license Cerb4 to your entire company when you purchase.  You’re not locked to a single helpdesk instance, or a single machine, or CPU, or IP address.  If you want to set up multiple helpdesks for different departments then you have our blessing.

Also remember, your Cerb4 license is perpetual and will never expire.  Maybe some day we’ll come to our senses and charge for upgrades, but if you buy now we’ll honor the promise of free Cerb4 upgrades to you forever for being with us in the beginning.

These offers are valid through July 10th, 2009.

Why’s Cerb4 so cheap?  Because we’re a company of developers creating the app we’ve always wanted.  We’re not selling Cerb4 to get rich; we’re selling licenses to fund ongoing development.  As I’ve said before, the biggest asset here is our experience and not the bits and bytes at a point in time.  We want to involve as many people as possible in our ongoing development process.  We have no problem with you using the app at no cost — it’s why we offer that option.  Your order says “I would like to see development continue.”

-Jeff@WGM

For the majority of Cerb4’s development history we haven’t really been pushing people toward an upgrade; mainly because Cerb4 was evolving from scratch and we acknowledged that it did have a couple key things missing that people were used to in Cerb3.  We didn’t need to push it prematurely.  For many people, including most new users, the differences didn’t make Cerb4 unappealing.  Even with Cerb3 in mothballs, people have been free to hold off upgrading until they felt comfortable about it.  Development has taken everyone’s feedback into account during our frequent updates — even people who weren’t completely sold on the new ideas.  That has kept us accountable.

Today we’re over 2.5 years into Cerb4 development, and our paternal reluctance to let the project have its own identity has left us with a pile of over 10,000 contacts stretching back to the beta.  Those have been lost opportunities.  Meanwhile, through early adopters from Cerb3, word-of-mouth, and traffic from Google, we’ve had so many people telling us great things about their experiences with Cerb4 already.  It has been ready for primetime for a long time.

Very recently, we’ve started going back through our address book and contacting people who haven’t seen the incredible progress we’ve made since we first announced Cerb4.  We haven’t talked to some of these people for over 950 days.  That long ago we were far more idealistic than practical — group workflow didn’t make sense, we didn’t handle UTF-8 properly or have translations, we didn’t have the public Support Center functionality in place, we were trying to avoid a knowledgebase in favor of wikis, and so on.

If you’re one of those people, welcome back!  When you evaluate Cerb4, please look at it from the point of view of what you’re trying to accomplish.  There might be a newer (and better) way to do something now.  It’s not helpful if you just do a side-by-side comparison without considering that Cerb4 has a “toolkit” mentality.  You can now do some amazing things with custom fields, filters, searches, and workspaces.  Unlike past versions, there isn’t one “right” way to do things that you need to learn.  It’s very easy to mistake the lack of predefined workflow as gaps of missing functionality (SLA, etc).  Please don’t jump to that conclusion! :)

The best way to get familar with the new concepts is to run through the Quick Start guide with an Instant Evaluation: http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Quick_Start

If you can’t figure something out — ask!  You have these resources at your disposal: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2009/06/22/guide_to_community_resources/

-Jeff@WGM

One common question that we’re asked nearly as often as “How the heck do you pronounce Cerberus?” is “How the heck do you guys expect to stay in business by sharing all the source code, giving away licenses, providing free support, and only charging people a one-time fee for a license they can use for several years?”

To be honest, we’ve never fully reconciled the conflicting principles that we inherited from both open source and capitalist philosophies.  We build software because we like building software.  We share so much because it’s the best way we’ve found to have a huge amount of great feedback to draw inspiration from.  It’s also the best way we’ve found to write reliable software (”more eyeballs find more bugs”).  Over 7 years later, we still get excited about new ideas because we’re still building something that we need just as much as everyone else.

There was surely a point in the history of the project where we could have done things differently and tried charging very large numbers to very large companies; yet we’ve always considered ourselves users of Cerb first and a business built around Cerb second.  While we likely would have made more money going the enterprise route, I doubt the project would be anywhere near as inspired or popular.  We want to build something for people who aren’t intimidated by innovation.

We recognized pretty early that the real value here is the experience we’re gaining from working with all of you while building this, rather than just slapping a price tag on the bits and bytes that come out of that collaboration.  Cerb4 is always going to have to evolve alongside the way people choose to communicate online.  The project is always going to need custodians that filter and refine feedback according to tightly-held values.  We’ve been well served by that philosophy so far, and we’re not at risk for becoming irrelevant just because you guys have all the source code.

I see plenty of software companies who are paranoid about letting people see the blueprints and guts of their apps because they don’t really understand where they’re creating lasting value.  People can always knock off a snapshot of your application at a given point in time, with or without the source code; but if your copycats are always dependent on your ideas and vision then you really have nothing to worry about.  You see huge companies hiding demos and screenshots of their applications because they understand the first half of that.  They fail to see that people want to ride along with an evolving project, with people they trust and enjoy collaborating with.

Cerb4 is a business investment, it’s not a $50 video game.  There’s no build-up to a final level with a big boss at the end, after which you uninstall and move on to something else.  We’re not selling something consumable.  Cerb4 becomes a member of your team, every day, pulling its own weight, helping your people communicate, improving in its small way whatever the founding purpose of your organization is.  You wouldn’t want a team member who couldn’t learn from past mistakes, so why would a cheap knockoff pose a threat?  A knockoff isn’t going to have any context for how a great application arrived at its conclusions.  They can’t show their intermediate work.  They’ll have a high propensity for repeating most mistakes which start with seemingly obvious answers.

Here is where capitalism creeps back in (as it should).  The inevitable flaw in our idealistic attitude about licensing is that someday the word-of-mouth referrals we get won’t continue to bring in enough new people to pay our existing team of people who are attending to our existing happy users.  That premise is already flawed to begin with because we should always be spending most of our time working with the people who are already on-board about the current direction of the project — not compromising our vision to appeal to a wider audience.

We want it both ways.  We don’t feel that charging more for licenses, or charging annual renewals for owned licenses, is providing any extra value to you guys.  However, we do need more ways to fund the project year-to-year from existing people who like working with us — people who want us to remain in business.  We’ve had an endearing chuckle over the occasional distraught call we’ll receive from someone who is genuinely concerned if we’ll be around next year — but, appreciation from us aside, we realize it’s a serious concern for many people who are investing in the project as a long-term decision (which we’d like to think is everyone).

So here’s our compromise.  A major way we can provide ongoing value to existing, happy Cerb4 users is to make sure we’re handling any issues or feedback as quickly as possible.  We do a lot of free support between Town Hall chat, our helpdesk, the forums, the blog, Twitter, etc.  While we don’t plan on cutting anyone off from free help, we’d like to offer a ‘Priority Support’ optional service to people who want assurances that their ideas and concerns will be answered the same business day we receive them.  Those people will jump to the front of the line everywhere that we interface with the community.  When we’re finished with the Priority issues then we’ll handle everything else.  We’ll make sure all Priority issues have responses before we leave at the end of the day; whether there are 15 or 150.

We started from the basis that anything we bring in on services for existing licenses from happy, willing, existing users is better than our one-time licenses which require so much attention on bringing in new business.  We are also conscious of the fact that if *everybody* is a priority then nobody is a priority.  So we established a price for the new level of support that we feel is sustainable to always have enough people trained on our end to help you out.  We also probably could have asked for a lot more if we felt like managing support contracts on a monthly basis, but we decided we wanted to cover people for an entire year to reduce the hassle on both sides.  We can offer a more pure price if we’re not factoring in the cost of chasing down invoices and expired credit cards every day.  When we’re asking for a lump sum for a service we have to keep things psychologically reasonable.

We arrived at a price of $399/yr for Priority Support for treating three (3) of your provided contacts as extra special; which is discounted to $199/yr for small businesses (under $250K USD revenues), educational institutions, registered non-profits, and open source projects.  Depending on who you are, that’s probably going to seem like too much or too little.  If you think it’s too much, don’t pay it!  You clearly don’t see the value in having our near-decade of experience on this project at your beck and call.  If you feel it’s way too cheap, then buy it and think of some things you’d like to sponsor from the development roadmap to get them done faster.  We don’t ask for donations, but we’re happy to accept financial “calls to action” on something you feel you need sooner than later.  We also ask for less on custom development requests if it’s something we can roll back into the project for everyone to benefit from.

Since this post is already wordy enough, you can find the full list of benefits for the Priority Support plan in the shop:
http://shop.webgroupmedia.com/cerb4-priority-support.html

If you can see the value in supporting the project in that way, in return for our rapt attention to what you’re hoping to accomplish using Cerb4, then please sign up for a year of Priority Support (it’s about $33 a month).

Before I retreat to 4.2.2 and 4.3 development again for a while, there’s one more service we’re now offering as a package deal of several smaller things we’ve done on a consulting basis.  We’re calling it the Cerb4 Tune-Up service, and you can find the full list of perks, once again, in the shop:
http://shop.webgroupmedia.com/tune-up.html

We’ve seen many people run into trouble during an upgrade over simple things that could have been avoided by just following the docs.  Unfortunately, this has given that group of people a general distrust of upgrading.  With the Cerb4 Tune-Up service we’ll be your wing-man during the upgrade, maintenance, and backup of your helpdesk.  For $75 USD, one time.

As an added perk, we felt it would be fair to give Priority Support people one free Tune-Up per quarter (i.e. once every 90 days).  That’s about the same pace that we’re planning major releases like 4.3 and 4.4 for the foreseeable future — so it works out pretty well.

The last time I posted a blog post like this, we had a number of people immediately ask if I was making a subtle cry for help during a recession.  I assure you, this isn’t a cry for help.  We’ve been here for 8 years.  We’re a lean bootstrapped company, with a well-respected project, with a decent flow of new interest in the project, with many On-Demand sites whirring away and paying monthly — and we’d have to do quite a lot wrong from this point to be in serious trouble.  I’d be less interested in the fact we’re asking existing, happy people to continue contributing and more interested in the fact we’re doing something worthwhile enough that you read this entire post. ;)

Thanks, as always, for adding your voice and thoughts to the project!

-Jeff@WGM

Another blog post and the start of yet another series. Hidden Gems! will consist of short snippets with a simple goal — highlighting an overlooked piece of Cerb4 functionality that you can easily fit in to your existing workflow. These write-ups will be concise tutorials, with a couple of screenshots, on some of the lesser known options and will not be super in-depth on larger features. So you won’t find an explanation of what “workspaces” are, when all I’m trying to do is demo a custom worklist of overdue tickets. For that kind of general overview, you should refer to our other sources of more formal documentation.

The ‘Mask’ criteria

E-mail Notifications, often referred to as Watchers, were given a boost in 4.2 with the ‘mask’ criteria. By filtering on the ticket mask you can effectively create a “per ticket” watcher, extremely useful for any workers who need to monitor every aspect of an important conversation over its lifespan. No longer are you forced to watch an entire bucket of tickets just to catch the few you care about, or required to assign yourself the ticket to see the follow-up reply, you will be notified of whatever events you want on whichever ticket(s) you want. This is also a good alternative for 3.x users, who felt assigning multiple workers to the same ticket was the only way their staff could track the conversation and take appropriate action, but never got comfortable defining a single “Next Worker” in Cerb4.

So the next time there’s an important ticket, a couple of workers need to follow to completion, first determine the ticket mask.

Then have each worker configure a new E-mail Notification and copy that mask to the ticket criteria. Invested workers should subscribe to all four events so they can be notified of every new comment, reply, or if the ticket is assigned directly to them.

‘Mask’ criteria is just one of a few new mail criteria in 4.2, check out the rest for even more filtering possibilities.

-joegeck@wgm

When you adopt Cerb4 you’re benefiting from the feedback of thousands of community members who came before you.  You also become a new voice in the community, encouraged to add your own opinions and experiences to the mix.  We get better feedback about where you would like to see the project go next; and you’ll have the confidence of knowing there’s a team of people working every day to make your online communications more efficient (while you focus on what you do best).  Your input is how we decide what our priorities are — so take advantage of it!

Blog

URL: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/
Volume: Low (a few posts a month)

The blog is our primary channel for sharing:

• New Releases
• Tips & Tricks
• Community Mailbag
• Highlighting New Resources
• Sneak Peeks of Upcoming Functionality

Twitter

URL: http://twitter.com/cerb4
Volume: Medium (a couple messages per day)

We use Twitter to share our daily goals and progress in real-time.  If you want to be among the first people to see things as they’re being built, and occasionally get a sneak peek not announced anywhere else, then sign up and follow us on Twitter.

The following WebGroup Media staffers also have active Twitter streams:

• Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D - @jstanden
• Darren Sugita, Operations - @dsugita
• Joe Geck, Quality Lead - @joegeck

Forums

URL: http://forums.cerb4.com/
Volume: Medium (a couple dozen posts per day, but no need to read everything)

The forums are the most collaborative of the community resources.  This is where the developers and users meet to discuss:

• General Questions
• Feature Requests
• Odd Behavior and Troubleshooting
• Developer Diaries (Progress Logs)

Wiki Documentation

URL: http://wiki.cerb4.com/
Volume: Low (a couple articles or edits per day)

The wiki is the closest thing we have to official documentation.  If you sign up for an account you’ll be able to add your tips, tricks, and experiences with the rest of the community.

You can watch wiki edits via RSS:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Special:Recentchanges (click ‘RSS’ at the bottom of the left sidebar)

And here’s the handbook of how to write in wiki markup:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents

Project Development Portal

URL: http://wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD
Volume: Low (a couple new issues per day)

This is the best place to file feature requests or bug reports.  We’ll accept feedback in any channel, but most of it ends up here.

Sign up for an account in the project portal to add your vote to issues you care about, or to receive updates when ‘watched’ issues have progress.

Support Center

URL: http://www.cerberusweb.com/support/

If you need to send us a direct e-mail, you can do so using our Support Center.  This is usually your best option if the topic of your conversation should remain private — for example, to resolve your issue you need to share some personal information about your helpdesk or configuration.  If you’re just asking general questions, you should try the Forums first, since another community member may have an answer for you quicker than an official developer.

Town Hall

URL: http://www.cerberusweb.com/chat

During the day, we almost always have at least one official member of the Cerb4 team in our Town Hall live chat room.  You can instant message using your browser without any special software.  Rather than being one-to-one, our conversations are open to everyone.  You can usually spot an official project member because their name ends with ‘@WGM’, such as Jeff@WGM.  Be forewarned that there’s no visible distinction between guests and developers.  You shouldn’t divulge any private information in Town Hall because anyone can read it.

Google Custom Search Engine

URL: http://tr.im/cerb4search

We have a lot of resources, huh?  Using the link above you can use our custom Google Search Engine to search through everything from a single place.  This should be your default starting point when you have questions or are troubleshooting.

Thanks for using Cerb!  If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’d love to hear what you think.

-Jeff@WGM

This post aims to cover the Permissions system. By the time you’re done reading, you should have an understanding on how to use the Permissions system in your own installation to lock down certain functionality on your Cerb4 Helpdesk.

Permissions Explained

Permissions are used to restrict the ability of certain workers to utilize certain functionality. Each set of permissions is saved into a ‘Role’, and workers are assigned that Role, which locks them down to those permissions. Roles are simply a group of permissions that can then be applied to workers. To get to the Permissions page, you need to have a paid On-site license or have a subscription to On-demand. You can buy one here.

Why Use Them?

So you’re probably thinking “That’s great and all, but what use would permissions be to me?” Permissions are great if:

• You want to prevent certain workers from accessing the address book, but you want them to be able to do everything else
• You want to prevent certain workers from being able to open tickets on behalf of customers
• You want to prevent certain workers from browsing research (due to confidential/private info)
• You want to prevent certain workers from assigning tickets, deleting tickets, etc

Once you have a paid license, simply click on ‘helpdesk setup’ then the ‘Permissions’ tab. Make sure Worker Permissions are enabled, as seen below.

Once you have enabled Worker Permissions, you will be able to create a new Role and edit existing Roles.

Creating a Role

Roles are simply groups of permissions which can be applied to any of the workers in your system. Any worker you select will be restricted to the permissions defined in this Role and any other roles they are assigned to, unless they are flagged as an administrator, in which case the permissions specified will be ignored and they will have access to everything. Roles are additive, so the permissions defined for any Roles a given worker are assigned to will be ‘added’ together.

Step 1:

The first step in creating a Role is to give it a name. This is pretty straightforward, just enter a name into the box.

Step 2:

The second step is to select the workers you wish to assign to this Role.

Step 3:

The third step is to select the actual permissions you wish to assign to this role.

Once you have selected the workers and permissions to associate with this role, simply hit ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom. That’s it, your role is saved, and any workers associated with this Role will now be restricted to those permissions.

-Scott@WGM

Running parallel to the “Double Check!” series, I’d like to officially deem this tutorial as the second entry in a new series, called “New to Cerb4?”. The series will focus on long-time Cerb4 features that most of us take for granted by now, but where new users could benefit from just a short overview and a few steps to get started. So it will definitely be more topic-based than the walkthroughs we usually write on accomplishing a specific workflow. The first entry will be my last post on the differences between Mail Routing and Inbox Routing.

About Workspaces

Have you seen the About Workspaces tab? When you first log in to the Helpdesk it sits in your ‘home’ menu, to the right of the ‘Notifications’ tab. No. Well keep reading.

The ‘About Workspaces’ tab contains a brief tutorial on what these are, how to create them, and how then can be used to efficiently track important work throughout the day. And even though it’s a worthwhile read for all new workers, ironically it may not be there when you log in. If a Manager set up your account for you then they may have already created a workspace on your behalf. Because the tutorial is closed once a workspace is created, it will only reappear if you delete the last workspace.

So I’m going to use this space to help out new workers, who may be stuck without the workspace introduction. But rather than try and out do what our developers have already done with their tutorial, I’m going to duplicate the contents of the ‘About Workspaces’ tab right here. At the very end I will also cover an “alternative” approach to making new workspaces from scratch, versus the copying method described next.

Copying Workspaces

While you’re working in Cerb4 you’ll often find yourself jumping around between various lists and searches: tickets, tasks, opportunities, etc. With version 4.1 you can now group all those lists together as a “workspace” and see that information on the same screen. This is incredibly powerful when combined with the new custom field functionality; you can create temporary workspaces based on your daily projects, quickly build and save your worklists using searches, perform your duties, and then toss the workspace at the end of the day. You can also keep workspaces around permanently to build your own workflow.

Step 1:

Creating a new worklist is easy; just run a search with your desired filters as you normally would. When the results display you’ll see a ‘copy’ link in the blue header of the list. Click that link to copy the list to one of your workspaces. When copying a list you’re grabbing a copy of the settings for that list, not a copy of the current results, which ensures the list will always display the latest content when used on your workspace.

Step 2:

Once you click ‘copy’ you’ll be given the option to save the list to a new or existing workspace. You can also choose a more useful name. Once you’ve made your selections, click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Step 3:

Now you have a new workspace in your ‘home’ page. When you click the tab all your worklists will display on the same page. If you want to change the layout or filters of any list you can click the ‘customize’ link in the blue header and make your adjustments. You can change the order of the lists on your workspace by using the ‘reorder lists’ link in the top right of your tab.

Adding a Workspace manually

The alternative method I mentioned at the top of the post, is exactly what you might think it is, creating a new “empty” workspace where you customize the worklist afterwards. So instead of going to the appropriate section to organize tickets or tasks, running a multi-layered search, and copying the saved search to your workspace, we’ll do it in reverse.

Step 1:

To start, from the ‘home’ menu click the ‘Add Worklist’ button. Choose your worklist name, whether or not you want to add it to a new workspace (new tab), and most importantly what “type” of objects you want to watch. For this example, I’m going to recreate the “My Mail” worklist to track all open tickets assigned to me.

The objects equate to the different sections of the Helpdesk we told you to run a search from, so aside from the “obvious” ones mentioned above this will include contacts, time tracking and feedback entries.

Step 2:

At this point you have an “empty” shell which is looking at all relevant objects (or tickets in this case). Not the most useful worklist. So you need to filter this list down to a smaller subset, similar to running a search like in the first tutorial. Click ‘customize’ and start adding filters.

Now you have the “My Work” > “My Mail” worklist you see above in the step 3 screenshot. In the future use either method you feel more comfortable with to create new workspaces and worklists.

-joegeck@wgm

The introduction of Worker Notifications was a major improvement to Cerb4.  The purpose of the feature is to tell you in real-time about things like:

• Tickets assigned to you
• Tasks assigned to you
• Comments needing your attention
• Ticket notes needing your attention

Unfortunately, the dependability of these notifications (for both sender and receiver) is greatly diminished when they’re only shown when you log in and the Home->Notifications tab is displayed.  Workers shouldn’t be expected to habitually check their notifications — that defeats the point.

In the next update, the number of unread notifications will be shown in the top right of the interface:

This alert is shown on every page, and clicking it will take you to your list of unread notifications.

That should solve the issue of notifications being unintentionally neglected by active helpdesk workers.  The next issue is to make sure workers are aware of new notifications even when their browser is minimized or closed.  Currently we provide an RSS feed.

The worker notification system isn’t limited to just tickets, tasks, comments, and notes.  Here are some other improvements we have planned:

• In 4.3 we’re planning to expose worker notifications to the Web-API so you can receive real-time alerts in a variety of other ways: Windows system tray, iPhone with push notifications, dashboards, SMS, etc.
• In 4.3 we’re also planning to allow worker notifications to be created using the same filters as ‘watchers’ do in Preferences.  This means you could set up any number of flexible criteria to watch for and then generate a notification rather than an e-mail.  By separating notifications from e-mail you run less of a risk of ignoring them entirely while you work.
• For Mac OS X users, there’s a new Fluid.app plugin that will integrate notifications with your desktop using the Dock and Growl.
• We’ve designed the worker notification system so custom plugins can also send alerts about anything.  Administrators and managers could receive snapshot reports of Group activity.  Workers could receive alerts about overdue tasks or SLA metrics.
• Notifications could have an expiration so they’d be useful for short-lived alerts.
• Notifications could provide worker-to-worker private messages without requiring an additional feature.

Worker notifications should be another great, reusable tool in the Cerb4 toolkit.  We’d love to hear what else you feel they should be capable of doing.

-Jeff@WGM