4.2 is released! 106+ improvements. Put them to work!
Community, Open Letter June 2nd, 2009
posted by Jeff StandenWe’re happy to announce that the 4.2 release has been pushed into the ‘stable’ branch and is ready for production use. This update includes over 106 improvements from community feedback and contains a fairly balanced mix of new functionality and bug fixes. Most of the new functionality elegantly evolves the concepts we’ve already been building in 4.x so far (e.g. Support Center, Mail Filters, E-mail Notifications) rather than being fundamental changes.
We’ve taken several concepts that provide a huge level of workflow flexibility and implemented their most popular feedback. At the same time, we’ve reused some of these popular concepts to improve the rest of Cerb4 in a consistent way. For example, after the success of Group Inbox Filters, we’ve brought that same criteria-based flexibility to Pre-Parser Filtering, Mail Routing, and E-mail Notifications. We’ve also added new criteria, like date/time checks and message content scanning.
With those simple changes (conceptually, anyway) you can now do so much more. Consider this: you can now set up an e-mail notification to alert your cellphone when tickets are opened in a specific Group (e.g. “Emergency”) — after-hours — and *only* if the sender’s organization has a ‘Priority Support’ custom field set. You can configure that on a single screen… in a single rule.
You can also use the same kind of filtering to prevent tickets from being opened at all (from Pre-Parser Filtering) based on custom fields you’ve set on the sender or their organization. This means you could essentially ‘gate’ your entire helpdesk like earlier versions of Cerberus Helpdesk (and only allow tickets to be created from whitelisted companies who have a contract).
Our goal with 4.x has been providing a “build your own workflow” CRM toolkit. This is another huge jump in that direction.
We’ve also made many improvements to the Support Center, which had been fairly neglected in 4.x so far. The most interesting changes with the Support Center involve the inherent plugin-based nature of Devblocks (which sits at the center of Cerb4). You’re no longer limited to the few things we’ve built-in (ticket history, knowledgebase, etc); you can easily develop plugins to integrate and display things like server status, billing history, owned licenses, live chat, etc. Increasingly more apps and services are providing web-based APIs… we’ll be fostering several mini-projects (with open source code, of course) for popular integration combinations. There’s no reason Cerb4 should also be a billing system, but that doesn’t mean your Support Center can’t display billing history (by e-mail address or a client ID custom field).
The adventurous or deeply curious can find the full 4.2 changelog in the forums here:
http://forums.cerb4.com/showthread.php?t=1889
The condensed and summarized version of 4.2 highlights can be found here:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/4.2
We’ve expanded the wiki documentation to cover the recent Support Center improvements. This also includes several snippets you can quickly copy & paste to change your Support Center color scheme (along with previews of what it will look like):
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Support_Center
And for those wondering where Fetch & Retrive went, here’s the wiki documentation about its successor — the Google Custom Search plugin. Read through the page to see why we’ve made this change (this is simpler and better, and doesn’t require any custom code):
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Plugin:Google_Custom_Search
When we first re-introduced the Instant Evaluations for 4.x, we removed the 14 day free trial from our On-Demand service with the rationale that the Instant Evals offered the same thing. We’ve found that a lot of people would still like to be able to test with live e-mail and no upfront cost, so we’ve added back the 14 day free trial to our On-Demand service. If you run into any trouble installing Cerb4, you can sign up for a free trial from the Cerb4 website. We’ll handle the technical side for you (backups, scaling, upgrades), and you can focus on your business — unless, of course, your business is server management (in which case we feel your pain!).
We’ll probably do another milestone or two inside the 4.2 branch as the inevitable small things come up from thousands of people hammering on it. Then it’s onward to 4.3, which at this point looks like many Web-API improvements, mobile interface improvements, better control of Support Center users from the worker GUI, and other popular feedback.
If you don’t already follow the Cerb4 blog or Twitter, please do! Your timely feedback during on-going development makes a huge difference (we try to keep the noise to a minimum in these channels):
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/
http://twitter.com/cerb4
If you’d like to be even more involved during development:
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD
http://github.com/wgm/cerb4
Thanks for using Cerb4! We’ve heard so many interesting stories of how the app is being put to use. Keep that feedback coming. :)
-Jeff@WGM
12 Comments to “4.2 is released! 106+ improvements. Put them to work!”
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Hi Jeff,
thanks for the update. We are still using 3.6.
I was wondering if you can tell me what features of 3.6 are still missing in 4.2.
It seems quite good from reading here, but I just wondered if something comes to your mind which might be a show-stopper.
Do you have any upgrade docs for 3.6 -> 4.2 available?
Thanks
Philipp
Hi,
Does 4.2 include the same Pre/Post Parser Mail Rules (email content filtering) provided in 3.6?
In particular, does 4.2 likewise allow one to create Pre/Post-Parse Rules to filter by incoming body text?
Examples:
If email body contains “Closeme” Change Status to “Closed”
If email body contains “PAID” Forward To billing manager
Etc.
I must continue to run both 3.6 until this is option is re-included into 4.2. It was a major step back for 4.0 when this was not included.
I suspect email content filtering remains AWOL in 4.2 (?)
Thanks,
Jim
You mean the old Fetch & Retrieve is just GONE? No option to enable it if we dislike the Google offering? Seriously?
F&R was my favorite feature… the one thing that pulled me away from Kayako. I’m not about to pay Google (either via fees or ads) for a basic resource collective search, so if F&R is truly gone… well, I guess I am too.
@Steven
We have the older F&R code pulled into a plugin, but the plugin isn’t in the release. The existing settings haven’t been deleted from the DB. If there’s enough interest in keeping F&R as an option then it’s something we can do. It likely won’t be our default again, since the requirement to set up those custom search+RSS drivers caused a lot of people to never be able to use it.
@Jim
Post-Parser rules in Cerb4 are the ‘Group Inbox’ filters. Pre-Parse, Mail Routing, E-mail Notifications and Group Inbox filters can scan message body content in 4.2.
That’d be cool, Jeff… I can handle it not being the default, but please do keep it available for those who don’t want to feed at yet another Google trough. Google has enough of my business as it is .
Thanks!
@Philipp
Hey! The Support Center was the common thing people had issues with between 3.x and 4.x. That gap should be closed now. Feature-wise I can’t think of anything that we hear that often anymore — perhaps the fact 4.x doesn’t support Workstation (but now it has a proper Web-API to create new things like it).
The steps for upgrading from 3.6 to 4.2 are here:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/ImpEx:Cerb3Export
The process is easier than it looks, but it’s not as simple as running /upgrade.php in 3.6 — the code and databases are entirely different (for good reason!). If you need help with that, write in, we’d be happy to help get you upgraded.
@Steven
Fair enough! I’ll aim to get the F&R optional plugin in the next minor milestone update for 4.2 — which may be pretty quick depending on the little issues that pop up. The Google alternative can be disabled entirely, so that shouldn’t be a problem. If you don’t critically need anything from 4.2, and missing F&R would be a big issue, then hold off a week or so on the update.
Vote+Watch this issue for the F&R plugin:
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-1242
I think the big thing for F&R is it could connect to a “unpublished” KB as in no external access. I do not mind google but we have a lot of internal documentation that we want to have at the fingertips (the old provide the top results from F&R in 3.x was better though :) when working on a ticket. I think a lot of places will have internal only documentation they want there help desk people to have easy access to, bringing back suggestions as part of an on hover / on click popup would be nice as well (and not as expensive since it could be a dynamic call rather than every the old on every ticket view).
@Silas I agree about the internal resources. The Fetch & Retrieve plugin for 4.2 is ready to go for Monday:
http://www.quicksnapper.com/jstanden/image/cerb4-fetch-amp-retrive-config
http://www.quicksnapper.com/jstanden/image/cerb4-fetch-amp-retrieve-support-center-module
Just to officially provide an announcement.
IMPLEMENTED — Add back Fetch&Retrieve as an optional plugin in 4.2
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-1242
Fetch & Retrieve is back in! Updating to the 4.2.1 version, now available in stable SVN, will add F&R support back as a plugin. The screenshots Jeff@WGM posted before are the best indicators of what to expect, but here’s a couple of notes from me along with a quote from the changelog.
As Jeff@WGM has mentioned this is now a plugin, which you can enable in ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Features & Plugins’ tab, “Cerberus Helpdesk: Fetch & Retrieve”. This works a little differently now as F&R has its own tabs in setup and research. Configuration is done from the ‘helpdesk setup’ tab, while searches can be done from the ‘research’ menu at the top.
You can also add F&R to the Support Center, just like you do with the KB module. In the ‘helpdesk setup’, ‘Community Portals’ tab, enable “F&R” and choose which topics to expose. A new main menu called ‘Search Resources’ will appear on the public portal, and allow your customers to run a search. The results appear and behave just like the internal Helpdesk F&R search does.
Quote:
* [Fetch & Retrieve] Added back Fetch & Retrieve (F&R) as an optional plugin. It adds a Configuration tab for creating topics and resources. It adds a Research tab for searching resources. It adds a Support Center module for allowing website visitors to search topics you specify in your Support Center profile. When enabled in the SC, you can also send customers to URLs like /support/resources/search?q=search+terms. If you had F&R enabled previously then your existing settings will be used.
For the rest of the changelog see this post from today:
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2009/06/09/4_2_1_minor_fixes/
[...] I will say that we have made it clear in other places that the Google Custom Search Engine (GSE) is the recommended alternative, and Fetch & Retrieve [...]