We’ve been a little quiet on the development front for the past couple weeks since we’ve been busy helping people upgrade from earlier versions of Cerberus Helpdesk to Cerb4.  During these migrations, we grew frustrated with the discontinuous tools we had provided to import tickets, contacts, and knowledgebase articles into the new version.  We took our frustrations as a blueprint and designed a new, consistent Import/Export (ImpEx) system to handle future migrations.  We also designed the system to be extensible, so third-party developers could quickly build on top of our work to create exporters from additional sources.

As of the latest Cerb4 stable release, you can now use the new ImpEx tools to import content into your helpdesk from pretty much anywhere.  The new tools introduce a universal XML format to import whole tickets at once (including meta, content, attachments, comments, and all).

This first release of the new ImpEx tools supports exporting directly from Cerb 2.7 or Cerb 3.6.  We’ll also be listening closely to community feedback to expand the roster of official exporters in subsequent updates.

User Docs

About the new ImpEx Tools:

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx

Exporting from Cerb2/Cerb3 to Cerb4:

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx:Cerb3Export

Developer Docs

Writing your own export driver:

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx:WritingDrivers

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx:OutputXML

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM