In an effort to keep better partity between the documentation and the latest development, here’s a Quick Start guide you can use to bring your team up to speed with version 4.1:

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Quick_Start

The next sections we add will deal with the major plugins: e-mail notifications, feedback capture, time tracking, and opportunity tracking.  We’ll also add a section on the Community Tools.

Let me know if there’s anything else you think we should cover.

Enjoy!
-Jeff@WGM

We finally had a chance to rebuild an instant evaluations feature on our website.  It’s something we offered in the past, but the stats we collected at the time showed a majority of evaluations never got to the point they actually had tickets in the system.  There was too much to set up first.  Our recent versions make it a lot easier to get things running from a fresh installation.

We’re going to give it another shot, because the shared online demo just gets too chaotic with everybody moving things around daily.  It’s a lot harder for new visitors to understand Cerb4 when they’re also trying to understand a lot of random content and arbitrary groups/buckets/etc.

It also didn’t help that the public demo was in lockdown so you couldn’t make major configuration changes to try things out.  That would make it really difficult for us to show off 4.1 features like custom fields, workspaces, and inbox filters; which all require access to configuration to custom-tailor a workflow.

Setting up the system to create installations on-the-fly was also helpful for pushing Cerb4 closer toward the “cloud” mentality for scaling.  We built in several new improvements to allow multiple installations to share a single copy of Cerb4, which should give another really good performance boost to our On-Demand service.  It’s useful to our development effort to have hundreds of concurrent copies of Cerb4 that we can optimize against; and while our existing On-Demand network is a constant source of performance data, it’s not a place we’re going to try out experimental improvements.

So, long story short, now anybody can get instant access to a private copy of Cerb4, hosted free on our network for 2 weeks, by visiting the following page on our website:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/tour/demo

The evaluation helpdesks are slightly different than our On-Demand trials, because the evaluation copies are never meant to handle real e-mail.  They won’t even try to deliver mail.  But with our ‘Simulator’ plugin (from Configuration) that shouldn’t be an issue since you can create an endless supply of incoming, realistic-enough mail.  And you can still reply to everything without worrying about test messages landing in real inboxes.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

With the release of Cerberus Helpdesk 4.1 today, and a pile of over 147 improvements inspired by your feedback delivered into your waiting arms, it’s finally time for me to vindicate a comment I made about a year ago.

Back in May 2008, I wrote a blog post justifying a price drop at the time by saying:

You’re probably thinking this lead-in sounds like a typical justification for raising prices, right? Well here’s the curve ball… we think we’ve been pricing Cerb4 too high based on its exciting future potential that (for the most part) only we can see right now.

On our end, we have a unique perspective of the Cerb4 rewrite.  It gave us an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over with a load of things we knew we wanted to do better.  E-mail has changed far less over the past few years than the tools and philosophies behind building fast and scalable apps for the web.  Back in 2002 we didn’t expect the project to grow to this point.  There was no vision or plan in place, and the code was working only because it was between being broken.  By 2006 it was getting difficult for us to make any changes to Cerb3 without breaking things, as we had bootstrapped the project since the early days by accepting nearly every feature request in exchange for a couple sales.

That’s why for almost the first two years of Cerb4, we spent the majority of our time sweating through the invisible engineering required to make future development easier — designing a system that *would* be changed daily from good feedback, and would be built to thrive in that environment — even when all that work didn’t translate into anything people could see or play with.  Everything was about future potential.  We could picture it, but we couldn’t keep asking you guys to close your eyes and imagine it.

I’d like to think today we no longer need to ask you guys to imagine it.  It took two years of hard work and soul-searching to build the platform and concepts of 4.0, and from that point it only took about 3 months to deliver the 147+ improvements in 4.1.  That total counts some huge leaps forward (e.g. workspaces, custom fields done right, worker-level permissions) as single improvements.  We could never have done that without the Cerb4 rewrite.  Beyond the speed of 4.1 development, the app is (almost paradoxically) *more* maintainable now than before the recent update.  That’s all the result of having a plan.

Alright, I can hear the grumblers in the back row muttering “Enough with the foreplay…” — OK… OK!

We’ve had a lot of success with the community-edition of Cerb4 introducing new people to the project.  That version limits people to 3 workers and blocks a couple non-essential features.  We’ve talked to so many people who would like to use the full app, but felt the jump from $0 to $499 was too steep; and we’ve agreed, but we still felt strongly against disabling anything important to create a cheaper version.

With the latest development we feel we’re finally at a point where we can reintroduce the per-worker licensing, in the interest of offering a more affordable entry-price (even more crucial in the present economy), with the ability to scale up the number of workers gradually as Cerb4 pays off.

In a nutshell:

• We’re still offering free licenses to qualifying charities and open source projects.
• Small businesses (below $250,000 USD per year revenue) and educational institutions can now purchase Cerb4 for $99 (total) for the first 3 workers, for all functionality, and $50 per additional worker up to 15.  After 15 workers a license will become unlimited.
• Everyone else can purchase Cerb4 for $199 (total) for the first 3 workers and $75 per additional worker up to 15.  Then the same thing happens, a 15 worker license becomes unlimited.
• Everyone who sponsored Cerb4 development up to this point by already buying a license has an unlimited license with no costs and no strings.  You may have to ping us for a new serial number, but we owe everything to you guys/gals for believing in us.  You kept the lights on so we could get to this point.  Thank you! Thank you!  Thank you!
• Starter Licenses (the first 3 workers) and additional worker licenses can now be purchased from our store.
• We’ve also reintroduced an Unlimited License in the store which has the benefit of being $100 cheaper to buy up front than to upgrade past 15 workers.  It also retains the above discount for small business and educational use.

Inevitably, these changes are going to be much cheaper for some people going forward and a little more expensive for others.  We’ll probably have some issues come back to the surface, like “unpaid helpdesk volunteers” or disabled worker accounts.  We’ll continue to err on the side of fairness.

Everything said, we feel the one-time cost per worker *is* fair given everything you’re getting in return at this point — but I’d like to make one thing abundantly clear: If you want to use Cerb4 and money is the only thing stopping you, pick up a phone or open your e-mail client and talk to us.  We’ll help you out.  We don’t see ourselves as selling bits that are already written; the current state of things is our resumé, and your purchase will fund development going forward (with whatever new innovations that brings).  If it was realistic, we’d just plop down a huge subjective tip jar and be done with it. :)  We’re obviously not economists, but our process has worked well enough for the past 7 years.  Thanks to you for that!

I’m preparing several new videos to walk through the latest changes.  I’ll also do another post here about the biggest improvements.  If you’re really eager, you can scroll through the full list of changes in the forums.  I’ve bolded the things I think you’ll find most interesting.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

About 15 minutes ago we picked up a monitoring alert on one of the Cerb4 On-Demand servers (Rearden.WGM).  We connected through the IPMI interface (remote console) and the machine is rebooting normally.  We’ll look at the cause of the reboot once it’s back online.  It’s currently running a filesystem check since it’s been a few months and we’re going to let it go ahead and finish that.  It should only take another 5 minutes, and I’ll post a status update.

Update 4:56PM PST: Everything came up normally.  We’re looking at the logs.  Performance might be impacted for 15 minutes while we cycle fresh backups.

Update 5:23PM PST: There’s nothing unusual in the logs, so if it happens again we’ll suspect hardware.  Last night’s backups have been shipped off-site a day early (as a precaution against backing up corruption) and we have fresh copy of everything on the local redundant storage.  Any inbound mail during the 15 minute reboot should be synced up over the next couple minutes as it’s re-delivered.

From: Cerb 4.1: Using workspaces, group filters and custom fields to auto-sort priority support

One thing I don’t understand is why this “Priority Support” example uses groups instead of buckets? Surely you can easily do the filtering (e.g. separate dashboards/workspaces) on buckets, but it seems to make more sense since the bucket is like a sub-folder of support, and these “Priority” customers are a sub-set of your total customer base who are requesting support at any time.

From what I can see buckets are somewhat neglected, and try as I might I’m finding it difficult to find a good use for them. I know that you try provide the tools rather than the use cases for them as such, but can you perhaps explain a bit about the sort of concepts you had in mind for buckets when they were developed?

-Damien (in the blog comments)

Hey Damien!

There’s no particular reason the example uses Groups over Buckets, it was just easier to illustrate.  On our production Cerb4 we use the groups “Development, Sales, Marketing, Corporate, Support Tier1-Tier3″; and buckets break down products or activities per group.  In development we collect “Wishlist” and “Bugs” as buckets, as well as replies to surveys about the roadmap, or people applying to beta test something.

I wouldn’t say buckets are neglected as a whole, though they were in this example.  Basically, we use buckets when everyone inside a group has a fairly equal chance of being able to handle the tickets within that group, and we use groups when different sets of people are involved; which is why we tier support 3 levels using groups (the developers get more involved as issues get more complex, and they aren’t interrupted with day-to-day questions on the front lines).

The problem with buckets is they’re just a single dimension.  If you decide to sort by product, language, skillset, timezone, normal/priority, or any similar metric, then you’re stuck looking at everything from one POV.  What this video was trying to show is you can use custom fields to add multiple dimensions (customer timezone+products+support level) and then use Workspaces to display lists that will always be a more fine-tuned workflow than the hardcoded Workflow tab will be.

With 4.1, buckets are actually more useful when you use them because their importance can be ordered within a group which affects how they display on Workflow/Overview.  Workflow also works entirely by flagging specific buckets as important (“buckets that are expected to be empty if we do our job right”) on that tab while hiding the rest on Overview.  That concept has been a huge boon for both on our live helpdesk and on my personal webmail.

You’re right that we try to provide tools for building workflow without endorsing a specific way of doing things, but we really should be providing more “How we use it” case study examples on the site and wiki.  There are probably plenty of tips in how I use Cerb4 differently for WGM or for my own personal e-mail that I take for granted.  When I get a couple minutes I’ll write a lot more about it.

Thanks!

-Jeff@WGM

There’s a lot of ground to cover with the new 4.1 improvements: custom fields, group inbox filters, and workspaces. I figured it was probably best explained with a realistic example in the video that made use of all the new functionality: A company that wants to sort support mail from paying customers into a Priority Support group, with the rest of the mail going to Support. Their customers can still all send mail to the same support@example.com address (from contact forms or anything).

The screencast is below.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4: Using workspaces, group filters and custom fields to auto-sort priority support from Jeff Standen on Vimeo.

After a longer-than-it-should-have-taken wait, one of the most requested features is now in the 4.1 release (due on Monday, Feb 16th 2009)… auto-refresh!  If you aren’t one of the people who has been banging on development’s castle gates about this, maybe you’ll find it useful anyway.  I sure wasn’t a big fan of the idea until I came up with a compromise that didn’t sacrifice usability (like reloading in the middle of trying to use the UI, or having to toggle it on/off constantly).

People asked for this so they could park Cerb4 in a separate monitor, or on a projector, and glance at it without needing to constantly interact with it.

As usual, we may wait on something that seems simple until we feel we can do it well, but we’re always proud of what we end up with that way.

Below is a video showing the new functionality in action.  I also haven’t finished up the video on the Workspaces changes yet, so this is a ‘peek’ at that in the truest sense.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4: Auto-Refresh from Jeff Standen on Vimeo.

We just published a new version of the ImpEx tools with the following improvements:

• UTF-8 encoding support for all export drivers
• Added a Kayako 3.x export driver
• Added an osTicket 1.6 export driver

You can grab the new ImpEx files here:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/downloads/Cerb4-ImpEx.zip

Updated instructions are here:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx:KayakoExport
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx:osTicketExport

-Jeff@WGM

Another long-time request has been the ability to mix different kinds of lists on workspaces (formerly ‘dashboards’).  I just added that functionality to the upcoming 4.1 release as well.

This is incredibly powerful when mixed with the new custom fields and mail filters.  You can create a workspace for an afternoon project — such as marketing — and mix lists of organizations, tasks, and opportunities on the same workspace tab; including filtering based on your custom fields and showing those fields as columns!  When you’re done you can simply toss the workspace.  That saves so much clicking around and swapping searches.

My head spins at the potential.

-Jeff@WGM

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow our real-time development updates where we’ve started posting links to screenshots, videos, and other interesting Cerb4 content as we work.

If you aren’t on Twitter, or you need another social networking profile like a bullet to the head, you can also grab the updates through RSS:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10430302.rss

The blog here will likely always be the main channel for talking about the project and sharing content.  Twitter just makes it easier to keep you guys in the loop with quick snippets between the more involved posts.

-Jeff@WGM