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