Happy 2010! We have a lot of confidence in our Devblocks platform as we enter the new year, and we’re working on a major upgrade which will power Cerb5. In the meantime, we have several new applications to release that use Devblocks, and they benefit greatly from the experience we’ve gained from working on Cerb4 over the past 3 years. When we use outside applications in conjunction with our helpdesk, we’re constantly wishing we had features like Cerb4’s customizable lists, workspaces, custom fields, peek, bulk update, permissions, and plugins. We hope to replicate some of Cerb4’s success by approaching these new projects with similar innovation and the same commercial open source mindset.

Our design goals for Cerb5 involve bolstering Devblocks, the web-API, documentation, and the plugin system. We’re trimming down the dependencies that we’ve used as scaffolding (e.g. ADODB), which will speed things up even more, and we’re exploring more optimization ideas. For major features, we’re working on e-mail broadcasting functionality (CRM) and far more flexible e-mail templates. Keep an eye on the project portal for a detailed list.

This month is also our project’s birthday!

We started working on Cerberus Helpdesk in January 2002, so Cerby is turning 8 years old this month. We owe our vitality to all of you! In celebration and gratitude, we’re discounting 5-pack Cerb4 licenses to $250 (33% off; a $125 savings) through January 31st 2010. That’s also nearly a 50% discount from purchasing 5 worker licenses individually. There’s no restriction on the number of discounted 5-packs you can order.

If you’ve been considering purchasing Cerb4, or expanding the number of workers using your existing helpdesk, here’s a link to the shop with the discounted price:
http://shop.webgroupmedia.com/cerb4-on-site.html

Thanks for being a part of the project!

- Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D, WebGroup Media LLC.

Hopefully this is the last one for a while, but once again I’ve retooled some older documentation on the wiki.

Running multiple independent companies through a single Helpdesk

There wasn’t a whole to change here, the screenshots were the only real thing dated, but I did change the example around to hopefully make it easier to digest (no more companies Alpha & Beta).

As usual ignore the old blog post, new Cerb4 users!

-joegeck@wgm

Regardless of their distinct appearance, sticky notes and comments serve the same general purpose — to leave notes behind for yourself or other workers. Either one can be used for a variety of purposes, whether it’s telling another worker to send an invoice right away or to simply jot down a phone number for later. So when do you use comments over sticky notes and vice versa?

Sticky notes should be used when you want to highlight, or “respond” in context, to a specific message (e-mail) in the conversation. Conversely a comment is for ticket-wide feedback that isn’t dependent on a particular message. Now keep in mind these are not hard & fast rules, but the few functional differences in behavior do complement my suggestions, and generally speaking it’ll make sense to use them appropriately.

Let’s start with sticky notes

To see how they work in practice, pick a sample ticket with multiple messages. By default (“read all” turned off), only the latest message will be expanded and the remaining ones will be collapsed with only the From:, To:, and Subject: showing.

Find a collapsed message, click ‘maximize’,

then click the ‘Sticky Note’ button to create a note.

Fill in the text field and save changes (we’ll discuss ‘Notify workers’ at the end).

As you can see, the sticky note is appended to the bottom of the message. Now try refreshing the ticket page. Notice how the sticky note expanded the message it’s attached to, so it “sticks out” from the crowd immediately.

I’ll give you an analogy for how to take advantage of sticky notes — sticky notes are very akin to Post-its®. A college student litters their textbook with Post-its to bookmark certain pages with study notes. When it comes time for midterms, they can skip through the book and review just those pages. Cerb4’s sticky notes work the same way, allowing you to jump past irrelevant messages and review just the important messages.

Here’s an obvious use case for sticky notes. Let’s say after a long and grueling sales pitch that lasted several e-mails, the customer finally writes in and wants the sales guy to call him and finish the deal, but he also has a few more general questions that anyone can answer. Ironically your sales guy just left for the rest of the afternoon and you don’t want to leave the customer’s other concerns hanging. What you can do is post a sticky note on the message as a heads-up to Tim in sales, “Call Mike @ 555-1212″, and then continue the conversation yourself. By the end of the day, after so many back & forth replies, the original sales e-mail has gotten buried near the bottom. However because you forced the message to stay expanded it will be instantly recognizable to your sales guy the next morning, and he can finish up closing the sale right away.

It’s worth highlighting that the disposable nature of scenarios like this are perfect for sticky notes. Now that the order is done, the sales team can delete the “call customer” note and the attached message will no longer be auto-expanded.

Next up… comments

Comments are created in the dedicated ‘Comments’ tab, seen to the right of the ‘Conversation’ tab. Much like sticky notes, jot down whatever information you want and save. All comments will appear in this tab in reverse chronological order, but are also shown in the ticket ‘Conversation’ tab as well. They will filter in chronologically with the appropriate flow of the surrounding messages, whether it’s newest to oldest or oldest to newest (“read all”).

Unlike sticky notes, comments are not attached to individual messages and will not expand any messages. So it’s usually a good idea to write comments when the information you’re recording does not pertain to a specific e-mail’s contents.

An obvious use case for comments would be storing a customer’s order number for quick reference, just in case another worker assigned to the ticket needs it down the road long after the original sales e-mail is no longer important. That way if workers don’t want to scroll through an extended ticket conversation, they can hop over to the ‘Comments’ tab and find the order number immediately.

Not that comments can’t be deleted, but I personally like to think they’re useful for storing more permanent information that lasts the life of the ticket. “Call Mike @ 555-1212″ is a temporary task well suited for sticky notes, but “Order #996″ makes a good comment since it’s for reference after the purchase has been completed.

Tips, Tricks, Gotchas, and Options

Please refer to the following screenshot for the next two bullet points.

• These two ‘Mail’ options are available in the ‘my account’, ‘General’ tab. As mentioned before comments are shown in the ‘Conversation’ tab. This is the default option, but can be turned off for each worker through “Show comments in the conversation”.
• The “read all” option sorts the conversation oldest to newest and auto-expands all messages, regardless of whether or not sticky notes are in use. While reading a ticket you can flip this option on temporarily with the ‘Read All’ button, or make it the preferred reading method on a per-worker basis via “Always use ‘read all’ mode (expand messages and sort chronologically)”.

Please refer to the following screenshot for the next four bullet points.

• Sticky notes can be deleted by anybody. Comments can only be deleted by who wrote it or the administrator.
• If you delete a worker, the Helpdesk will delete his or her name from all their sticky notes. Comments will not be affected. e.g. (Deleted Worker) vs. john@example.com .
• Adding multiple sticky notes to a message stacks them in chronological order, allowing you to read them in the order they were written.
• Time Tracking entries are shown via comments — if you don’t see the comment right away, try refreshing the page. Most people new to Cerb4 don’t get this, but remember a time tracking comment is like a picture of what was saved; they are a static piece of text separate from the actual time entry. In other words, deleting the comment in the ticket does not delete the actual time tracking data. Similarly, modifying a time entry in the ‘activity’ menu does not edit the ticket comment itself. If you plan to delete a time entry in ‘activity’ you probably want to go back to the ticket first and delete the comment.

Last screenshot and bullet point!

• Every ticket in Cerb4 has the option to “private message” another worker through either comments or sticky notes. So what you can do is leave a note on a ticket, and then choose to notify another worker. This is great because you don’t have to actually assign them the ticket — simply use it to get their attention, have them assist you, and keep the ticket for yourself to finish up. To use these “home” notifications when writing your message, click the ’Notify workers’ toggle, and select one or more Helpdesk workers. The notification they receive will appear in their ‘home’ area and consists of a copy of the message and a link back to the ticket.

-joegeck@wgm

In the ‘Workers’ tab of ‘helpdesk setup’, you’ll find that each worker has a ‘Disabled’ option. Is there any difference between disable and delete? Yes, a couple of which are very important to understand. This guide will help break it down for new Cerb4 users.

Disabled

• Time Tracking -> A worker. The description in the ‘Time Tracking’ tab of ‘activity’ is changed to a generic “A worker tracked # mins on activity Z”.

• Opportunities, Organizations, Tasks -> anonymous. Here I’m referring to the ‘Notes’ tab you see when clicking into an Organization or Opportunity. Task notes were added in 4.3.1 .

• Worker data is removed from reports. You can no longer see his or her statistics in reports like ‘Time Spent Per Worker’.

When to use

Deleting a worker is a good way to clean house in one swoop. Like I said there are a couple of exceptions where data integrity may be lost but generally speaking the actual content of past messages, comments, tasks, and notes, is kept. If you don’t care about keeping performance reports and don’t mind losing a couple of “who made this or that change”, then deleting a worker may be something to consider.

With that said, why delete workers at all and just disable them to be safe? Normally you would be right, go for the disable lever first. But you may need to go with delete in one important situation…

Disabled workers take up a license slot (upgrade your license or delete your workers)

Most people rightfully want to err on the cautious side and never delete a worker out of the system. However there is one scenario where you might want to take that route against your better judgement. Our worker-based licensing is priced around how many total workers you have registered in your Helpdesk, and unfortunately the total includes “disabled” workers. Thus it’s very easy to run out of free slots and the only way to effectively fix the problem is to go ahead and delete the worker OR to buy more workers for your license. If you can’t afford the upgrade cost than you will need to delete workers…sorry.

Note that if you can afford an Unlimited license, you will be able to disable workers and add new ones as often as you like.

-joegeck@wgm

I guess it’s spring cleaning on the wiki, because I fixed up yet another piece of documentation that was aging a bit. In fact it’s one of the oldest articles on the wiki:

• Automatically filter and sort your mail in 3 steps

So once again I brought this one up to speed for 4.3 — I changed some of the language, added new screenshots, and created more linkouts. Not as major of a revamp as the Knowledgebase or Fetch & Retrieve resources but still significant nonetheless.

As usual ignore the old blog post and for those new to Cerb4, I hope this helps.

-joegeck@wgm

Much like our Knowledgebase documentation, the Fetch & Retrieve resources were aging quite a bit and needed a face lift. So this afternoon I went ahead and overhauled the entire wiki page with updated screenshots and references. I believe there are really only two noteworthy changes since we talked about F&R last time:

1. The removal of the ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ button (i.e. search) from the reply window. Now it can only be accessed separately from the ‘research’ top-level menu.
2. A dedicated ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ module was added to the Support Center. That means you can put your search on the public site too if you’d like.

Now I will say that we have made it clear in other places that the Google Custom Search Engine (GSE) is the recommended alternative, and Fetch & Retrieve has been spiritually “demoted” and pushed to an optional plugin. The feature is not completely abandoned by any means, so hopefully the new documentation works for those still wanting to use it.

So again I just wanted to post that I’ve updated the wiki to be current with 4.3 and should be much more helpful for those new to Cerb4. Please refer to this for all your Fetch & Retrieve questions and ignore the old blog post. Here’s the new permanent URL.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Search_your_organization%27s_resources_using_Fetch_%26_Retrieve

-joegeck@wgm

We get questions all the time about how to use Cerb4, and whether x workflow can be done, or y configured in a certain way. The truth is, it’s very difficult to build a piece of software that meets everyone’s needs ‘out of the box’. To combat this, we’ve built the software with a ‘Toolkit’ mentality. We talk a lot about this toolkit mentality, and while it is a great feature it leaves a single pitfall – documentation! It’s difficult to apply the ‘regular’ type of documentation to a piece of software that can be used in so many different ways. That being said, ‘Cookbook’ is our attempt at such a feat! Instead of explaining each and every little thing (we like to leave that to our excellent Screen-by-Screen articles), we instead explain a way to accomplish specific workflows and patterns. These Cookbook recipes are not our attempt at the be-all-end-all style of documentation, instead we want to enable you to understand the software on your own to the point that you will be able to create your own workflows without needing our guidance at every step. Without further ado, I present to you our existing Cookbook recipes. We have several recipes currently, and we are working hard to add more. Our latest cookbook recipe covers setting up a worklist for Sent Mail. Keep checking back on the blog for more Cookbook news!

Saving a worklist’s “sort by column” preference is an interesting feature because while the concept has been around forever, technically it just came out officially with the 4.3 release. What do I mean exactly? Well the “sort by” preference has always been available in Cerb4 for those who were lucky enough to figure it out; often in the forums I would explain how it works for anyone asking. However there was a catch, I always had to preface my tutorial with it doesn’t work everywhere. Not only could you expect to see things like the Helpdesk reverting your Overview preferences between sessions (logins), other times Cerb4 wouldn’t even remember your setting when you clicked away from a tab.

Well the good news is the developers fixed the entire system in 4.3 and now this Hidden Gem! should work as advertised. And even though we simply fixed a bad “bug”, I like to think of it as a brand new feature that we can actively promote now for the first time… maybe ever!

Customize and Save

So here’s the deal. To save your “sort by” preference for THAT worklist, start by changing the sort order of one of your available columns. Just like traditional software, click the column name to change the up and down arrow to set either chronological or reverse chronological order.

The important part people forget, and why this is such a good “tip”, is the change is only temporary until you click ‘customize’ and save changes. Note you don’t have to make any other modifications, just save.

The next time you log in, the sort order should stay the same.

Multiple Steps: Adding a new column AND sorting by it

For the record, “sort by” is one of three preferences that now successfully hold in 4.3, the other two are Columns and Rows Per Page, which you can tweak in the ‘customize’ menu you passed through earlier. As you know already, only a default subset of columns are used for each worklist. So what happens if you want to expose a new column and then sort by it instead? Unfortunately there is no shortcut and you’ll have to make “customize” a two-step process.

Let’s pretend I want to add the ‘Due’ column to the “Waiting” list and sort those “reopen” dates in chronological order.

Click ‘customize’, add your new column to the active list, and save changes.

Then apply the correct “sort order” to the new column by clicking the ‘Due’ column. To show the tickets ready to reopen first, the arrow points up.

Finally click ‘customize’ again, and save changes once more.

Not the most intuitive solution, as I’ll admit I often forget to “customize” twice too. Just remember you always need to save after you set your sort order!

P.S. As you can tell by my introduction, we have obviously had a bad track record with this bug. So please post any new “dead spots” you may find in the comments, and we will check them out immediately. Thanks!

-joegeck@wgm

If you’ve been to the old Knowledgebase tutorials lately, either on the blog (part 1 and part 2), or the carbon copy placed on the wiki, then you’ll realize how your Helpdesk looks nothing like the images.

Despite all the confusion and questions we were getting about the old documentation and how to set up the Knowledgebase in versions 4.2+, I wanted to wait until 4.3 was released before updating the guide. The Support Center configuration page had a couple new module options (Everyone/Logged In/Disabled) that I wanted to account for. If I had tackled this project a couple of weeks ago I would have had to replace the screenshots yet again, as things were going to look differently in the near future.

So today I just wanted to post that I’ve updated the wiki to be current with 4.3 and should be much more helpful for those new to Cerb4. Here’s the new permanent URL. Please refer to this for all your Knowledgebase questions and ignore the old blog posts.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Using_the_Knowledgebase_to_share_resources_the_way_you_want

Thanks everyone for your patience and I hope the new guide serves you even better than before!

-joegeck@wgm

Our next entry in the Screen-by-Screen walkthroughs is going to be nice and short!

There really isn’t a whole lot of content in the ‘System’ tab and most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple of important sections detailing the current state of your Helpdesk worth visiting.

System Settings

Your IP address (127.0.0.1) is not authorized to update/debug this helpdesk (or run scheduler jobs). Your administrator needs to authorize your IP in Helpdesk Setup or in the framework.config.php file under AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS.

If it does, just go back to this section and add the IP address from the error message.

Storage Information

This is the one area of the ‘System’ tab you may need to browse regularly if you’re concerned about disk space. If you signed up for the on-demand hosted plan with us, we have three tiers primarily based around storage usage (5, 10, 15GB). I imagine shared hosting plans from other companies have a similar businesses plan, so use this information to your advantage.

When space becomes an issue, the easiest way to do some “spring cleaning” is to delete your old tickets and/or attachments. Remember attachments can be deleted separately without affecting their corresponding tickets from the ‘Attachments’ tab.

License Registration

Whether you went with a Community or Paid license, you’re going to register Cerb4 with whatever key we e-mail you. After you enter your license, the “free mode” information will be replaced with the name of the company and e-mail you registered with us, along with how many workers you’re allowed to have. Both can be handy if you ever need to contact us.

• e-mail address and license information from your order: Fairly obvious what we want here, except for maybe the serial key format. Make sure you include the BEGIN and END lines when copy & pasting.

That’s it! I told you it would be quick :D

Browse the entire series: Table of Contents, Previous: Scheduler tab .

-joegeck@wgm