I finished the installer and logged in, now what?

When you first encounter the Cerb4 Overview screen you may be a little confused on where to go next. The first thing you’ll want to do is probably read the “Welcome to Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0!” ticket. That will at least give you an idea of what groups are, and explain how to change the defaults. More importantly it’s a good way to get customer support from us right away, simply reply to the message.

Unfortunately the hand-holding from us stops there. And at this point you’re left with a copy of Cerb4 that’s not quite production-ready. You may have noticed that you have none of your organization’s e-mail downloaded to the Helpdesk.

In the past we had a more “thorough” installer that forced you to configure everything up front, including POP3/IMAP accounts. Needless to say there’s a number of reasons why this didn’t work out, one being, the installer expected our customers to immediately understand how Cerb4 works. Imagine downloading a trial copy but before you get to see it in action you’re forced to create mail accounts, workers, groups, passwords and permissions. Definitely not the ideal way to present our software for new users!

With that history lesson out of the way, what you really need to know is that until you configure at least one mail server, you are not going to be getting e-mail. To add a POP3 or IMAP account to download mail from, go to ‘helpdesk setup’ and click ‘Mail Servers’. Fill in the details and wait for a success message.

That gets you half way to grabbing your mail, but there’s still one important step. Unfortunately, Cerb4 will not download e-mail on its own without a little help from an external cron. It’s not the easiest concept to explain in layman’s terms so bear with me. Basically you need to create a scheduled task, that runs on your server every couple of minutes, to “ping” a web page. In the ‘Scheduler’ tab, you’ll see what I’m referring to.

See that link next to ‘Advanced’, you’ll want to copy whatever that URL is and create one of these scheduled tasks. There are very detailed directions for doing this on both Linux and Windows servers that you can follow.

Once that is set up, you’re golden!

However since this is your first time importing new mail, feel free to speed up the process by lowering the minutes of the ‘Scheduled Jobs’.

• ‘POP3/IMAP E-Mail Importing’ changes how often Cerb4 downloads new messages.
• ‘Inbound E-Mail Processing’ changes how often it converts them into tickets the Helpdesk understands.

Note that it’s not necessary to do this, your mail will eventually get to the Helpdesk anyway. After the first big import is done you may want to raise the minutes back up to a reasonable level. Why waste computer cycles checking for mail faster than you actually get it.

Side note: You may wonder why earlier we didn’t go with the “Simple” scheduler option, and chose the “Advanced” scheduled task method instead. It says it will automatically run in a browser window right? To clarify you could do that, but there’s one caveat. You have to always remember to keep that page open in your browser whenever somebody is using Cerb4. Otherwise you will not get any new e-mail no matter how long you stare at the ‘mail’ screen. By doing it the “Advanced” way, mail will be fetched automatically in the background — you won’t have to think about keeping a window open at all :)

If you added a mail server and configured a scheduled task, you should now have a live production-ready Cerb4, receiving new e-mail at regular intervals. Next you may want to look into sorting this truckload of new mail! So create some groups & buckets for it all and then check out a couple of videos to help you organize things.

Good luck!

-joegeck@wgm