Before we bit off a huge multi-month chunk of work in the last release with UTF-8, Translations, and Time Tracking, we had a pretty good cadence going with stable, feedback-rich releases flying out the door every couple weeks.  Our project is built around incremental improvements based on your feedback; and queuing things up until a release is “marketable” is a needless distraction.

Build 809 is a welcome return to more frequent updates, with over 60 improvements coming only two weeks after the previous release.  This update has a couple great new features, but it was primarily focused on cleaning up a lot of the reported usability issues that came up during the functionality spree the past couple months.

Since I realize the average person among you probably enjoys reading sprawling developer notes as much as cleaning two weeks worth of dishes, here are the highlights:

Turn your team into a well-oiled machine with Global Worker Notifications:
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/11/25/turn-your-team-into-a-well-oiled-machine-with-global-notifications/

Recover Disk Space with the Attachments Cleanup Tool:
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/11/25/sneak-peek-attachments-cleanup/

For the adventurous, here’s the complete list of fixes and improvements:
http://forum.cerb4.com/showthread.php?t=1491

If nothing else, the fact most of this update is subtle improvements is proof that unglamorous bugs and usability snags do actually get fixed.  Keep the feedback coming!

Here’s how to update your Cerb4 On-Site helpdesk to the latest version:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Upgrading_to_Newer_Versions_of_Cerberus_Helpdesk_4.0

If you have a Cerb4 On-Demand helpdesk, we’ll be performing upgrades this holiday weekend.  If you can’t wait, send us a quick e-mail and we’ll update you ASAP.

Why be the last to know when something gets better?  Subscribe to the blog for a stream of tips, sneak peeks, advisories, and community discussion.

And finally, as always, thanks for being a part of the project!
- Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D, WebGroup Media LLC.

We’ve had a lot of great feature requests for all kinds of notification events in Cerb4.  I agree that two of the big things Cerb4 can do better are (#1) notifications for everything and (#2) making it easier to pull more work without having to dig and step on toes.  This post is going to focus on #1.

There are a lot of feature requests that don’t specifically say they should belong to a notification system, but they really make the most sense in that context.  A good example of that is the requests we get for “SLA reminders” or “task reminders”.  It wouldn’t make good design sense to invent yet another way to send you e-mail from the helpdesk, and yet another way to configure them.  You’d need a new helpdesk just to manage the flood of status update junk your helpdesk was sending to you (and maybe that’s fine for our competition, but it’s not a situation I want to be responsible for).

Consequently, in providing a better notification system the main thing I knew we didn’t want to do was simply send all these status updates through e-mail.  I started to elaborate in depth here, but my thoughts ballooned into another post in their own right.  The short version is that Cerb4 tries to reduce your e-mail workload instead of mindlessly piling on even more.  When you don’t separate your routine e-mail from events that need your immediate attention, you can end up becoming desensitized to the very process that you’re counting on to get your attention when it actually matters. (Either that or you become a very distracted individual!)

Because of this philosophy of trusting your notifications to be meaningful and having the intended party react in a timely fashion, we designed a new, global notification system for workers that can be easily reused by every part of Cerb4 (including plugins we and the community haven’t dreamed up yet).

The “Notifications” tab shows up in the “home” area, and it’s now the default landing page when you and your team log in to your helpdesk.  This helps ensure that, in the worst case of missing every ping, someone is at least seeing things that need their personal attention the very next time they log in.  If all goes as planned, now the longest something will go unnoticed is a workday or a lunch break.  We’ve noticed through our own use of the task system that the longest something can be overlooked when it requires worker proactivity to check (clicking into an off-the-beaten-path page) is far longer than we’d like to admit.  I have a feeling we’re not alone there.

This new global notification list also has a consolidated RSS feed, which saved us from the unhealthy trend where you’d need 10+ different RSS feeds to keep your eye on new tickets, assignments, tasks, opportunities, etc.  With the single notification feed you’ll automatically start to receive notifications from new functionality that takes advantage of the system.

There were a lot of things we could hook into the new notification system right away, but we decided to start with the most common events that were being mishandled.  We’ll likely be taking more advantage of the new system with each successive update.

The events currently taking advantage of the new system are:

• New Ticket Assignments
• New Task Assignments
• New Ticket Comments
• New Ticket Sticky Notes

The highly-useful thing about comment and sticky note notifications is that the worker leaving the original note can choose any number of other workers to notify about it.  Our focus on usability mandated that we have a shortcut button for the ticket owner when choosing who to notify, of course!  There’s no reason you should have to dig for that every time you leave a comment.

In the very near future, we’re planning to add global notification support for:

• Task Reminders (approaching due date; over due date)
• Ticket Reminders (according to SLA)
• Forum Explorer Assignments
• Helpdesk-wide Announcements
• Server Monitoring Events (high load, no ping)
• … and wherever else it makes sense.  Your ideas here are welcome, as always!

Another nice usability aspect of the new notifications is that they’re marked as “read” when you click the link to acknowledge them.  This means your list of notifications is always showing you something new, and you never need to click back to remove old items so new ones show up.  If you want to keep old notifications around until you explicitly delete them, use an external RSS reader that provides a history (which they all pretty much do).

While I’m completely sold on the consolidated RSS feed for staying on top of things that need my attention, I realize that there will always be people who want e-mail notifications because it makes it easier to send updates to mobile phones, etc.  In the next update I plan to add a per-worker option for sending notifications (or digests of several notifications) to e-mail.

The Global Worker Notifications list in the helpdesk: (click to zoom)

How the RSS feed looks on your desktop: (click to zoom)

Here’s you leaving me a sticky note on a ticket that needs my attention: (click to zoom)

It’s hard to miss new notifications when you have a decent, dedicated RSS reader that gives you visual cues on your desktop:

Enjoy!
-Jeff@WGM

Ever since Cerb4 was a secret wink shared between me and my keyboard I’ve had this nagging feeling that notifications sent in e-mail about new e-mail seemed rather silly.  I originally tried to get away with only providing RSS notifications in the beta versions, but the community was quick (and right) to defend the existence of “e-mail about e-mail”.

The main distinction between notifications and watchers is in how they really fill two completely different needs:

• Watcher functionality, which consists of automatically sending copies of incoming or outgoing mail to separate addresses, is especially useful for managerial oversight, quality control, training, archiving/backups, or synchronization.  In these situations the copied e-mail isn’t primarily prompting someone to visit the helpdesk because there’s new mail.  It’s just more efficient for these activities to deal with a stream of e-mail to another mailbox (especially with something like oversight) than it is to click into every single ticket from a search or report.  In these situations a full copy of each e-mail message is the most useful content to deal with, opposed to a line of text saying “There is a new message!”.
• Notifications, on the other hand, are specifically intended to “ping” a worker to return to the helpdesk because there is new content that needs their attention.  This is the situation where I have usability and ideological problems with “new e-mail about new e-mail”.  RSS, while less familiar to your average user than e-mail, is specifically designed to syndicate events like a news feed.  A huge benefit of RSS is that it’s in a different context than e-mail, and you can also receive updates about non-email events at the same time.  You aren’t mixing up these RSS “pings” with your typical e-mail; nor are they contributing to the e-mail overload that Cerb4 is supposed to be taking off your shoulders in the first place.  While I’ll likely do another write-up with RSS tips, I consider the most important tip to have two different tools for reading blogs by RSS and receiving status updates by RSS.  For blogs I use Google Reader and for status updates I use Vienna (MacOSX) or FeedDemon (Windows).  When you’re working you don’t want a notification ping every few seconds because you’re watching 300 blogs.  You don’t want to learn to ignore the notifications completely (another reason to separate notifications from e-mail).

There is a subset of the community that uses the watcher functionality to circumvent the browser-interface and reply from handheld devices or traditional e-mail clients like Outlook.  That’s fine.  We designed the system so that was possible; the headers are proxied (in other words, your personal e-mail address is rewritten so the client receives your replies from the helpdesk and your direct contact information is protected) — but that’s not the main reason the watcher functionality exists.

A quick digression: a lot of the confusion between both situations comes from the fact we lump our original watcher functionality in with a plugin called “E-mail Notifications”.  The purist in me likes to pretend that e-mail notifications still don’t exist.  We really should rename that specific functionality back to “watchers”.

Food for thought!

-Jeff@WGM

Every once in a while we’ll get a simple-enough question where we have no choice but to provide an embarrassing answer.  The lack of an attachment cleanup tool was one such situation where we’ve had to tell people that Cerb4 didn’t provide an easy way to remove bloated attachments from tickets.  This is especially embarrassing when the inquiring person is an On-Demand customer who knows we’re billing them for storage.  Oops!  (We’re not evil enough to have done that on purpose!)

Thankfully, as of Build 809 we can now just give people the reasonable answer: “It’s simple!  Go into Helpdesk Setup and click on the Attachments tab.”

Like all lists in Cerb4, you’re able to customize the columns and filters for the attachments list.  This makes it incredibly easy to find attachments by size, age, file extension, mime type, or whether you received or sent the file.

The ability to filter by outgoing attachments is especially useful if your team is in the habit of sending out duplicates for large PDF files, ZIP files, etc.  There’s no reason you need to keep those things in the database once your mail is sent.  In the future we’d like to provide an attachments library for that situation where frequently used attachments would only be linked (and not copied) when reused, but this at least allows you to recover your disk space in the meantime.

Another situation where you can recover disk space wasted by attachments is in getting rid of old “original_message.html” files.  These are added when a message provided HTML content.  Cerb4 will convert these messages into plain text and provide you an HTML attachment to view the original message.  Once you’ve handled a ticket there’s usually no reason you’d want to go back to these tickets and view the HTML.  A search for these files turned up tens of thousands of matches in our live helpdesk.

Sometime in the very near future we’ll add a bulk deletion option, since it’s tedious when you’re trying to clear out thousands of rows in batches of 100.  We had a lot of other things on our plate this release and figured a good solution, while less than a perfect solution, was better than no solution.  If you sort your results by the largest files first then you’ll recover the most space in the fewest moves.

Here’s a screenshot of the attachments cleanup tool: (click to zoom)

Enjoy!
-Jeff@WGM

Is there any way for us to monitor if the parser is encountering errors on incoming e-mail?
-a Cerb4 user

Hey there!

The main reason we added the ?loglevel=3 parameter to the /cron URLs is so it will suppress any unnecessary output when running the scheduler. It should only print errors to the screen (where something like ?loglevel=6 would print more debug/trace information). Traditionally, cronjobs will e-mail any resulting output to an administrator.

In the past we had people redirect output to /dev/null since the cronjob was noisy. We no longer suggest that since it does make sense to be notified if there were any problems parsing (which should be really rare, we audit the parser heavily).

As for a monitoring solution like Cacti or Nagios, we don’t capture every PHP error in Cerb4 since a lot of that could happen before our code has a chance to run or exit cleanly. I suppose you could have something like Nagios tail the PHP error_log, but you’d probably get a lot of pointless notifications. The most dependable notification would likely be the e-mail from the cronjob returning any output. When all goes well it should be silent on ?loglevel=3.

-Jeff@WGM

Update: This post is based on the Knowledgebase prior to version 4.2, please refer to the retooled carbon copy on the wiki.

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

If you’ve been using Cerb4 for a while, you know there’s more to it than just sharing e-mail responsibilities; the software prides itself on being a suite of collaboration tools. And while most of these features, like the tasks system and the feedback plugin, are fairly self-explanatory, one of the more complex tools to grasp is the Knowledgebase. Compared to everything else, the Knowledgebase requires a bit more understanding to use it to its full potential.

At its core, the KB is a collection of informative “articles” your workers create inside the Helpdesk, as a way to keep “documentation” relevant to your organization available for reference. When used properly, it can serve as a collaborative resource for both your workers and your users to search through when they need to find information — you might think of it as a FAQ of sorts.

If you’ve read my earlier write-up detailing the Fetch & Retrieve tool, the Knowledgebase will sound very familiar, almost too similar perhaps. Both serve the same general purpose as an information resource, both are used for retrieving documentation collected and updated by your organization, and both allow you to search and grab text right from your reply box. But that’s where the similarities end; it’s the few differences that makes the KB valuable in its own right, and worth using in addition to F&R.

• Unlike F&R which “taps” into existing outside resources such as blogs, wikis and forums, the KB is a single resource created and maintained internally within the Helpdesk. All of your workers can edit and develop new KB articles, so if you don’t want workers making changes to your external resources, you can let them generate content for the KB instead.
• All or portions of the KB can be opened to the public at large. With the public KB in place, your users can go to a single search portal and find any relevant information without bothering your staff with e-mails. By locking out portions of the KB, users can only see the information you want them to see, while at the same time, workers can maintain a “private” section of the KB for your organization’s own internal use.

With those details out of the way, getting the KB production-ready requires two stages of configuration corresponding to the two use cases just mentioned. The first half consists of creating your KB articles and prepping it for your workers to use within the Helpdesk. The second half is directed at deploying your KB to a public directory, which users can access outside of the Helpdesk.

Since explaining the entire process is difficult to do in one reasonably sized write-up, I’m going to only cover the first half here. By the end of this article you should have an internal KB setup for your workers to use (we’ll save launching the public KB for another time).

So the first thing you have to do before anything else is create your basic topics, or categories, to house your KB articles. Categories are loosely structured in a tree-like hierarchy, with a parent having multiple children (I say loosely because the KB can have more than one root). In this case the roots are referred to as top-level categories, where all other categories spawn from. To start click ‘helpdesk setup’ then the ‘Knowledgebase’ tab and add your first couple of categories.

Categories can be anything you want to help organize your KB articles into logical groupings. I’ve created two generic top-level categories here: “Private (Internal)” and “Public (external)”, to make it clear that one category will be for internal use and the other will be opened to the public. In real life, the “private” category might be the name of the software your workers are training to use, while the “public” category could be the name of a product you sell to your customers.

Once you create the top-level categories you have a couple of choices; you can either create subcategories or start creating the actual KB articles. In both cases you need to move on to the Knowledgebase section by clicking ‘kb’ in the main menu, and then clicking into one of your top-level categories. Clicking the ‘Add Article’ button will bring up an “editing” window where you can fill in all the details of your new KB article.

Here you create a title, pick which category or categories it belongs to, and write down the content of the article in html or plain text. Once you save, the article will appear in your ‘Articles’ list at the bottom.

At this point the KB has all the basics down and is ready for use. From this section, your workers can of course browse the KB tree and look up information, however they can also search the KB while they’re answering tickets. As you write your replies you will see a button named ‘Knowledgebase’; click the button, pick a category if you wish, and then start a search. The titles of any relevant articles will appear and clicking one will open a pop-up window with the contents of that article. From here you are free to copy and paste any information you find useful into your reply.

As you can see, when used in conjunction with replies the KB works very similar to F&R — workers can refer to it whenever they need to look up any information. The next major application of the KB is letting your users explore categories of your choosing, outside of the Helpdesk. We’ll cover that in part 2.

-joegeck@wgm

For the past several months we’ve asked the Cerb4 community what big features they’d like us to work on next, and we repeatedly heard the same two requests: time tracking and translations.

We’re proud today to announce several new major features:

• Time Tracking – track how your workers spend time by organization and activity.
• Feedback Tracking – capture valuable customer feedback from conversations and share it with the appropriate team: testimonials, criticism, competitive comparisons, mindshare, etc.
• UTF-8 / Translations – now you can send and receive mail with international character sets. You can also translate the helpdesk interface into most languages.
• Translation Editor – create or share language packs from right inside the app. The highly-usable translation editor allows you to see the result of your translations in real-time. It supports incremental translations (quickly finding new text from plugins or upgrades).
• Spam Analysis – if you’ve ever wondered how Cerb4′s anti-spam system makes decisions you can enable the Spam Analysis plugin and click the new tab while displaying any ticket.
• Home and Activity – ‘Home’ provides an easier way to keep track of your assignments: tickets, tasks, forums, etc. ‘Activity’ groups together feedback, tasks, time tracking, and forum explorer to reduce clutter. Both areas are plugin-ready.

You can read through the appropriate blog entries for more in-depth explanations:

• Sneak Peek: Sender Management
  
• Sneak Peek: Time Tracking
  
• Sneak Peek: Feedback Tracking
  
• Sneak Peek: UTF-8 / Localization
  

Be sure to subscribe to the blog for a stream of tips, sneak peeks, advisories, and community discussion.

You can find the full list of changes for this release in the forums:
http://forum.cerb4.com/showthread.php?t=1423

Thanks for being a part of the project!

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

Can you tell me more about your CRM plugin?
-a curious Cerb4 customer

Sure!

At the moment the CRM plugin allows you to find ‘opportunities’ (leads) from helpdesk conversations and track them separate from tickets.  The nice thing about that is you can import leads from anywhere (as simple as e-mail addresses or with all their contact info), and then you can see what historical conversations you’ve had with those people.  For example, if I have a beta form on our website for a new project, I could import any signups as opportunities in the helpdesk, and then I could quickly tell which of them we know something about from past tickets.

Ultimately we’d like to use the plugin to do product management and associate products/services with customers.  Then each time someone writes in I’d know what our current relationship with them is.  I’d also be able to track custom fields along with the product/service.  For example, I’d be able to track a few notes about your Cerb4 configuration so we don’t ask you the same questions over and over each time you write in for support.  It’s bad for business if every time you write in we act like it’s the first time we’ve heard of you.

CRM for us right now is still more about what we can do than what we’ve already done; but as the latest released just showed, now that we have a really solid e-mail component at the heart of Cerb4 we can start to do some really interesting things on top of it.  Feedback capturing and time tracking are just the beginning of that mindset.