Welcome to the inaugural edition of “Double Check!”. The first in a series of blog posts dedicated to helping you (and WGM) verify that the Helpdesk is working as it should. Most write-ups will focus on troubleshooting common Cerb4 issues; how to quickly pinpoint what’s wrong and how to correct it. But others such as today’s, serve a second role in helping WGM uncover bugs shortly after a major release like 4.2 .

Does that mean we let known bugs slip into the next version? No. We take care of documented issues before pushing the next update into SVN. Here, I’m more concerned with potential problems. Maybe during development we saw what looked like a broken feature, only to not be able to reproduce it in the next build, or fear what might happen to users who finally upgraded after avoiding it for several published builds.

So if I can foresee a change in the interface potentially breaking your workflow setup, I’ll use this space to warn you about it. If a new feature has a tendency to modify old practices, I’ll give you a heads up. And if we do discover any legitimate bugs, the comments will be a good place to find the official JIRA numbers and when the soonest patch comes out.

Mail Filtering, Mail Routing, Inbox Routing

Generally speaking, mail filtering, is one of the most critical aspects of maintaining your organization’s workflow; it controls every aspect of a ticket before it settles into your group’s mailbox where you can see it. If something as simple as a message going to the wrong group occurs, a ticket can be easily “lost” in the shuffle, costing you time, money and maybe even customers. All it takes is a broken mail routing rule to send your ticket to an unexpected group inbox with its own filters and planned workflow. Next thing you know you’re sending auto-responses to your clients with the wrong reply-to address, while the ticket is getting assigned to the wrong worker with the wrong due date.

So after a major Cerb4 upgrade, first things first, make sure you verify to the best of your abilities that all your mail rules migrated over.

In ‘helpdesk setup’,

• ‘Mail Filtering’ tab (Pre-Parser)
• ‘Mail Routing’ tab

and in ‘group setup’,

• ‘Inbox Routing’ tab

check that your criteria still holds up and matches on the correct sender addresses, subjects, or body content. Also make sure the ticket is still moved to the proper group and bucket, the assignment is to the right worker, and any custom fields are set to the proper value (e.g. Purchased a license? – Checkbox Y/N).

This is especially important for when WGM adds or tweaks the available filter criteria or the semantics change. For example in 4.2, the Pre-Parser replaced To:Group with To/Cc:Address, therefore your group selection cannot transfer over. Even though it’s unlikely there will be any negative consequences, accidentally blackholing mail from a legitimate client is never a good thing.

Also, another 4.2 change is the switch in the To/Cc: syntax. In previous versions the ‘Mail Routing’ tab accepted rules in a regular-expression format: “(support|help|contact)@*”, but now we’ve switched to a comma-delimited format: “support@*, help@*”. Note that the To/Cc: criteria is now available in all three mail filtering tools and uses this style. (Thanks to so many users who notified us of the problem!)

So always give the migrated rules a quick overview. Any other issues, let us know about it.

E-mail Notifications

The same principles from Mail Filtering applies to E-mail Notifications, especially now that they use same set of criteria in 4.2 . Because the interface changed dramatically, familiarize yourself with the new layout, and make sure your basic rules from before make sense with the fresh design. Most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but there a couple of rules in particular you may want to watch out for such as “replies to me”.

In 4.2, “replies to me” is no longer a dedicated rule and requires you to watch the ‘incoming message’ event with the ‘Assigned to: (me)’ criteria. So if it didn’t migrate over correctly, you can recreate the rule as seen in the screenshot.

Workspaces

When used properly customized workspaces (‘home’ menu) help ensure your workers never miss an important ticket. Workers can keep track of new tickets assigned to them, see any approaching task deadlines, and keep a close eye on their most valuable clients. Setting up the perfect workspaces takes just the right filters and can be a pain if your employees suddenly need to rebuild them — if a manager did the work originally then it’s even more of a hassle.

So after an upgrade, have at least your most mission-critical workers glance through their workspaces and see if anything looks out of the ordinary. Check if a low volume ticket list suddenly has 500+ tickets! Or if your workers are only required to watch one or two groups, make sure they don’t log in to a ticket list with several “Access Denied” errors.

Translations

Hopefully you can tell if this feature is broken without much hesitation. If your Helpdesk defaults back to English, first check ‘my account’ and see if “Language” is set to your preferred language. Yes? Move on to ‘helpdesk setup’ and check that the ‘Translations’ tab is still functional. Can you still filter on your translated language and see your modifications in the worklist? If the all of the above are true, there’s definitely a problem.

The 4.2 Upgrade

Yes, it’s true. I thought about writing this new series after we received several reports of minor issues with the 4.2 upgrade. If you look at the issues carefully and think about where the problems were occurring, you’ll soon realize that each of these Helpdesk features are naturally prone to buggy behavior. It’s unlikely that something as fundamental as the ‘reply’ button will suddenly stop working, but it’s extremely likely that changing the Mail Filtering interface could break existing mail rules. So while the following features were specifically affected by 4.2, the advice here is absolutely universal and I recommend you apply the same general checkups to every major upgrade from here on out.

See the comments below for known issues, status updates, and patch releases in version 4.2 .

-joegeck@wgm