We’ve strived to make your evaluation as painless as possible: no time limits, all the source code, and all the functionality running on your own hardware.  That much freedom is a risk on our part.  Occasionally we’ll talk to someone who loves the system but has fewer than three helpdesk workers and they feel a bit guilty that they didn’t need to buy anything.  First, there’s no need to feel guilty!  We want the free version to actually work as promised.  But if you’re one of those people, especially if you’re in an established company that routinely pays for software expenses when there’s a licensing “gun” pointed at your head, I’d like to ask you to sponsor our project entirely based on whether you find it useful.  We consider your contribution as a vote of confidence in what we’re doing; which enables us to keep forging ahead without having to weaken the project by pandering on roadmap functionality (doing things just because they’ll close a few stuck sales, opposed to doing things because they’ll improve the project for everyone).

Think of it this way: a $499 order contributes about 10 developer hours to the project (including wages, health benefits, space, and tools).  In exchange you’re getting over 6.5 years of software evolution, several decades of combined software and technology experience at your disposal, and a dedicated group of people on our end who are immersed in thinking about how much more you could be getting out of your helpdesk (which is surely more than just a never-ending pile of messages to write back to every morning).  We don’t look at sales as recouping the costs of getting to this point, we consider them as encouragement to keep marching forward.  That’s why we don’t think it makes much sense to hold major functionality hostage as a way of funding the project.

So that’s it for my plea for why you should support the project.  Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit out of it!  ;)  We’re not one of those companies that calls you 75 times just because you downloaded an app to take a look.  We really do mean ‘free’ when we say free version.

Thanks!

-Jeff@WGM

I installed Cerb4 and everything seems to be working, but the Helpdesk keeps telling me to delete the ‘install’ directory? What does this mean and how do I delete it?

I see this question come up every so often in our support inbox and thought it was finally time to officially address it. For those reading this before actually trying Cerb4, let me show you what all the fuss is about. On the last page of the Cerb4 installer you will see the following image:

If you ignore it, a second warning appears whenever you browse the ‘helpdesk setup’. Unfortunately this ugly warning will not go away until you actually do what it says.

So why are we constantly reminding you to delete this “potential security risk”? I’m sure there are a host of legitimate reasons, but a couple of obvious reasons come to mind. For one thing the ‘install’ folder contains a phpinfo file, giving sneaky individuals a possible entry point to grab information about your server. And second by removing this directory, it eliminates the possiblity of someone purposely or accidentally running the installer again — destroying your current setup.

Ironically the most confusing part of this whole message, is where to actually find this directory. It’s a lot simpler than you might think as there is nothing to do in the Cerb4 web interface. You simply need to delete the physical ‘install’ directory from inside the Cerb4 folder you downloaded and unzipped on your server.

Note that if you grabbed Cerb4 through Subversion, the directory will re-appear on future ‘SVN Update(s)’. It’s a bit of a pain but you will have to delete it again.

With the ‘install’ folder gone you should be a little safer and you can finally kiss those annoying pink messages goodbye.

-joegeck@wgm

Ever find yourself retyping the same responses over and over again? If you can generalize what you write without changing much, then chances are you can benefit from using E-mail Templates. With templates you can create reusable blocks of text that can be automatically inserted into any message you see fit.

You can of course save and reuse “thank you” messages, newsletters, and announcements, but one of my favorite uses for templates is call logging. With the right outline in place, your workers can capture all the right information in a standard layout. To create a call logging form, go to the mail section and click ‘log message’, ‘E-mail Templates’. and then ‘Create Template’.

Everything here should be fairly self-explanatory — by specifying a ‘folder’ you can categorize templates into use cases, and with placeholders you can automatically sub in values, such as your name and job title.

Once you save your template, it’s ready for use! From now on you can add this text into any message you compose with a couple of clicks. Just click ‘E-mail Templates’ and then click the name of your template, the text will be inserted into the message wherever you left the blinking cursor.

Pretty simple, no? However there are a couple caveats with E-mail Templates you should be aware of. One, templates are “shared” and can be used by any worker in your Helpdesk, i.e. there is no permission system. And two, “send mail”, “log message” and replies are three separate sets of templates, meaning templates created in one area are not saved in the other. If you frown on either behavior, there are two open JIRA issues you can vote on: CHD-828 and CHD-712.

So the next time you come up with a golden reply to a common question, go ahead and save it as a template — the benefits far outweigh the hassle. When used properly everyone has to do less typing, reducing spelling mistakes and embarrassing omissions, and perhaps more importantly saving company time. Even if you only use a template a couple of times, you can always delete it later. 

Got any templates you like to use? Share them with us in the comments.

-joegeck@wgm

When I designed the skeleton of Cerb4 about a year ago, I built it with the intention of flipping a switch for UTF-8 support at some point in the future.  Full UTF-8 support is still a tricky thing with PHP5 since it deals with everything internally as latin1/iso-8859-1 (Western Latin) encoded.  That means most functions aren’t multibyte friendly.  On top of that, MySQL also defaults to latin1 (though it’s easy to switch multibyte support on).

We had been planning to wait until PHP6 for multibyte languages since it will finally support them natively, but there has been a UTF-8 patch for Cerb4 floating around the forums which actually works quite well.  It cleanly builds off the placeholders I left in the code and mops up some lingering issues.

Earlier this week I had Dan@WGM and Mike@WGM take the patch and put it through the paces.  They made some improvements (a simple toggle for latin1 or utf8) and sent the new version to me.  I fixed some minor inconsistencies, and a templates issue that was corrupting multibyte display, and merged the patch into the official codebase.

That means with the next stable release we’ll *finally* have UTF-8 support.  I wrote up some preliminary instructions for converting an existing database to UTF-8.  You can take a peek, but please don’t follow along yet (unless you’re planning on running the daily development builds of Cerb4).

Special thanks to rogerger and LudovicLange from the community forums for their hard work and collaboration!  ;)  It’s great to have some outside eyeballs on the code.

-Jeff@WGM

(The text shown above was copied for testing purposes from The Kermit Project’s helpful UTF-8 Sampler)

The new Feedback Tracking plugin helps you capture the valuable praise and criticism that would otherwise be buried along with closed tickets (even worse, after only a single front-line worker reads it).  This feedback can be pooled into lists which share this insight with decision makers who may not normally be involved with reading helpdesk e-mail.

Some examples of overlooked value you can extract from helpdesk conversations:

• Cancels – Ask departing clients a quick question or two on their way out the door and track the interesting responses.  They usually have some valuable and candid feedback about what you could be doing better.
• Mindshare/Goodwill – Track referrals: how did people hear from you and what was said?  This helps you see if you’re getting your message out.
• Testimonials – Capture testimonials in a completely natural way.  You can look through this list to find comments to use in your marketing campaigns or to share on your website.  It’s also great to read these comments as a team to counterbalance the fact that customer service usually means dealing with problems most of the day.  Remind people what’s going right.
• Competition – Any time someone is providing their opinion on the contrast between you and your competition, track it!  This is how real people in the marketplace think and make decisions.

The Feedback Tracking plugin isn’t limited to just things you find on tickets; you can use it to track feedback from live chats, community forums, blogs, phone calls, etc.  You can track comments anonymously and you can save a link back to external resources (such as the full forum discussion from where you excerpted a quote).

There are also some nice usability-minded touches:

• You can highlight text from any ticket message, click ‘more’ (next to Reply) and ‘Capture Feedback’.  This will automatically fill in the quote (no copy & paste!).
• When you add a new feedback entry from a ticket a new comment will be added to the conversation automatically.  This summarizes the feedback you extracted to save other workers from the hassle of searching to see if something was already tracked yet.

Check out the screencast below to see the plugin in action.  (If your company network blocks YouTube I’ll try to get an alternative link up shortly)

-Jeff@WGM

Update: This post is based on the Fetch & Retrieve prior to version 4.3, please refer to the retooled carbon copy on the wiki.

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

“Fetch & Retrieve” — one of Cerb4’s more original names, not only has a nice ring to it, but is the perfect label for a very unique feature. Fetch & Retrieve is a tool for searching your organization’s existing pool of resources for answers, answers your workers can use when responding to customers. If you are a long time Cerberus Helpdesk user you are probably familiar with the basic concept already, but there is an important change.

One of the key differences to this edition of Cerb, is the expanded list of available resources that can be searched. Fetch & Retrieve has been improved to support many different types of web applications built outside the scope of the Helpdesk. Things like blogs, forums, wikis or any website where “documentation” important to your organization has been scattered about, can be effectively tapped into. The only criteria is the web software returns its search results in an RSS (XML) feed. While it may take a little bit of extra setup to add support for these external applications, the biggest advantage is you no longer need to copy all your important materials into Cerb4’s internal knowledgebase.

Now to make Fetch & Retrieve work, the only piece of information you need out of our existing web resources is a search adapter URL. These URLs usually take the form of your typical search query, fitted into an RSS feed. So here is a legitimate feed constructed, first, by doing a search on Google News for the term ‘Microsoft’, and then clicking the RSS button  .

http://news.google.com/news?output=rss&q=Microsoft

The only modifications you need to make this ready for Fetch & Retrieve, is to replace the search term ‘Microsoft’ with the generic term, ‘#find#’. The final useable URL would look like this:

http://news.google.com/news?output=rss&q=#find#

On the wiki page you can find a number of similar URLs to hook into some of the more common applications such as WordPress, vBulletin and MediaWiki. To start adding knowledge resources go to the ‘helpdesk setup’ page and click the ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ tab.

Once everything is configured, you can start using this searching capability as part of your daily routine. The next time a customer writes in, click the ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ button in your reply to search your information resources; any relevant text snippets and web links returned can be passed on to your customers. Just copy & paste anything useful you find.

When used properly, Fetch & Retrieve will give your workers answers to all but the most complex questions found in your Helpdesk. With the right setup in place, your workers can easily find important information that’s been piling up over the years, whether it’s spread out over your intranet or the internet at large. Don’t forget that this can help train your new workers as well — by giving them access to a wealth of knowledge documented throughout your organization’s history, they will be just as capable of responding to inquiring e-mails as your veterans.

A wise man once said, the more you know… the more you can answer.

-joegeck@wgm

Ever since we ditched our old storefront we’ve had people asking for an easier way to order with purchase orders and checks.  We’ve also been held up from offering discounts to resellers and repeat customers.

We have our hands full with several collaboration-based projects (like Cerb4) and we didn’t want to have to stop and build something.

We’ve been on the lookout for a ready-made ordering system that had the following benefits:

• Source code (but not necessarily free)
• Clean design (minimalistic, with templates to build out from)
• Coupons
• Resellers
• More payment options: Credit Card, PayPal, Check, Purchase Order, Wire, etc.
• Flexible product options
• Invoices and order history
• Electronic-delivery products
• Subscriptions support (On-Demand)

We finally found what we were looking for with CS-Cart.

Swing by the new Cerb4 shop and take a look around.  Leave feedback if there are more improvements you’d look to see.

-Jeff@WGM

In part 1 of this series, we discussed how E-mail Notifications actually “notify” you of new mail, from the comfort of your own e-mail program. Notifications fit nicely into your daily work habits — you get an e-mail when an important message hits the Helpdesk, and if you need to do more than just reply, you can log in to Cerb4. For a lot of our users this is more than enough to keep them happy, but what if I told you there is even more power behind E-mail Notifications?

These simple e-mails can be more than just a notifier, they can also be used by you to communicate back to the Helpdesk. As you know from our last time together, the Helpdesk will route your reply back to the customer and append it to the ongoing ticket conversation. However by replying to the message with a subject line command (or watcher command), you can trigger one of three actions on a ticket. In addition to sending your reply out to the customer, a [take] command will assign the ticket to yourself and a [close] command will close it. The [comment] command is unique in that it will turn the body of your reply into a ticket comment, in place of sending it to the customer.

Now seems like a good time to demonstrate subject line commands with a little tutorial. First off, there is no configuration you have to do in the Helpdesk beforehand, assuming you are currently getting notifications sent to your e-mail client, you are good to go. All you have to do is start a reply in your mail program and then edit the subject; you have two options on how you modify it, either:

1. Replace the entire subject with the command, e.g. “Can you close this ticket for me?” would become “[close]“.
2. Append the command to the end of the subject, e.g. “Assign this ticket to Joe” would become “Assign this ticket to Joe [take]“.

• Note: Adding a subject line command does NOT change the ticket’s original subject.

Once you click send, the reply will be routed to the customer and the ticket will be closed (1) or assigned (2) respectively. For the [comment] command observe the following pair of screenshots, where I’ve added “[comment]” to the end of the subject; notice the ticket comment appears in the Helpdesk just like if I had created it from the ‘Comments’ tab.

When used properly E-mail Notifications and subject line commands can be an absolute godsend for your organization. Workers who only need to respond to tickets every so often, will appreciate the flexibility at their finger tips — they can do all the Helpdesk basics from their regular mail program and avoid logging into Cerb4 most of the time.

A shining example of transparent software, staying out of your way, and working with what you already know.

-joegeck@wgm

Update: This post is based on the Mail Filtering tools prior to version 4.3, please refer to the retooled carbon copy on the wiki.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Automatically_filter_and_sort_your_mail_in_3_steps

You may be comfortable keeping your personal inbox a pigsty, but when you choose to deploy a helpdesk to share your organization’s mail, it’s best to have things in a logical order. Picking Cerb4 is definitely a step in the right direction as it can automatically filter and sort your mail exactly how you want it, unfortunately it’s not going to work without a little prep work on your part. To get things up and running, you need to configure three levels of filters that all incoming mail must pass through. By the time your mail gets through the gauntlet, unwanted mail will be blocked and the rest will be dropped off into groups & buckets (and assigned to workers if you wish).

Filter #1: Pre-Parser

You can think of the first gate as a doorman, stopping mail without the proper credentials from entering into the Helpdesk. Mail that fits your criteria does not become a ticket, is not written to the database, and is effectively removed from Cerb4’s jurisdiction. The most obvious use for the pre-parser is as a “spam catcher”. When used properly you can blackhole (or drop) spam from being converted into a ticket, saving you the trouble of reporting it later on. To configure the pre-parser click ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Pre-Parser’ tab, and then fill in the criteria.

Filter #2: Mail Parser

After you filtered out as much unwanted mail as possible, now you move on to the legitimate mail that is converted into actual tickets. The second gate, “mail parser”, is for routing mail into different group inboxes based on the recipient’s address — use patterns to match a specific address from your Helpdesk, and move mail into groups of your choosing. A priority is given to each routing rule to determine which one fires first in case a sender matches multiple times. Any leftover mail will be placed in the default Dispatch group, but you can change that as well. Click the ‘Mail Parser’ tab to start adding routing rules.

Filter #3: Inbox Filtering

At this point your mail is in the Helpdesk in the form of tickets, and has been pushed into groups waiting to be handled as each group sees fit. With “inbox filtering”, you can do just about anything you want to these tickets: move them to a bucket, assign them to a worker, etc. To configure the inbox filters click ‘group setup’, a group name, and the ‘Inbox Filtering’ tab, then fill in the same basic criteria from the pre-parser, and choose a couple of actions.

Over time as you get more mail look out for patterns and trends, and you can simply add new filters to constantly keep your incoming mail organized. If three filters are too much to configure up front, remember all of these filtering tools are optional; if you want to create a “spam catcher” with the pre-parser, and let the Helpdesk dump all your mail into the default Dispatch group, you can, if you want to divvy up all your mail into different groups, but let your workers move it by hand to different buckets, you can do that too.

Cerb4 can be a great way to filter and sort your mail automatically, just don’t expect it do it all for you out of the box.

-joegeck@wgm

The Time Tracking plugin has been a long time coming since it was voted up months ago as one of the top two feature requests in a community forum poll.  The development kept going to the back burner because we didn’t want to simply “hack” something together that mimicked Cerb3’s approach.  Our past approaches were uninspired.  We had to take this feature request and turn it into something we we would use — enthusiastically — ourselves.  We never actually used the older implementations (it was created on contract to someone else’s spec).

A couple months ago I posted a preview of the Time Tracking “timer” functionality, but we ended up stalling out shortly after that point because we needed to think a lot about where time tracking meets billing and usability.  We also needed to design how time entries would link to organizations (for integration with SLA and billing) without adding extra hoops to workers who didn’t need to be concerned with anything more than responding to people who wrote in.

At this point, I’m really happy with the workflow we have in place for Time Tracking in Cerb4; it fits into the nature rhythm of reading and responding to messages.  Workers aren’t saddled with extraneous steps, and managers are able to bill clients for the workers’ time without having to micromanage each entry.

We’re hoping to get the Time Tracking plugin in the next update; which we’d like to have ready by the later half of the month (Oct 2008).  This plugin will likely belong to a set of advanced functionality that will be free to all paying On-Site and On-Demand users.

Below you can find a video preview I put together to demonstrate the Time Tracking plugin in action.  It includes an audio commentary where I explain our thought process behind the implementation.  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

-Jeff@WGM