“Mail Routing” is to “Inbox Routing” as “Company workflow” is to “Department workflow”, as ”Group Inboxes” are to “Buckets”, and as ”Administrators” are to “Group Managers”.

Analogies. If you ever took the United States SAT, than you should remember those from the verbal section. Surprisingly this word game works well in explaining the “natural distinction” (that should exist) between each of these two concepts. So today I’ll be using this analogy to illustrate the fundamental difference between Mail Routing and Inbox Routing.

You may remember my blog article from last year on the subject of mail filtering, where I explained how you can use the Helpdesk to filter mail in three stages before it settles into your ticket lists. To reiterate:

• Mail Filtering (Pre-Parser) in ’helpdesk setup’, removes unwanted mail.
• Mail Routing (Mail Parser) in ‘helpdesk setup’, collects all the remaining incoming mail and divides it up.
• Inbox Routing (Group Inbox Filtering) in ‘group setup’, collects their own group’s mail.

We will only focus on the latter two today. Now if your first experience with Cerb4 is version 4.2, you’ll notice the interfaces all look similar with the same basic (peek)-style windows and criteria layout. So is there a difference? Yes. And if you’re upgrading from a previous version you may wonder if there is still a difference? Again, yes. Other than a handful of new criteria for you to filter with, the core distinctions remain and the practical use of all three is the same.

Distinction #1: Company workflow (group inboxes) vs. Department workflow (buckets & assignments)

Mail Routing, as opposed to Inbox Routing, is designed to push mail into each group’s INBOX. In fact, observe how you can only specify an inbox and not buckets. Then it’s up to each group’s Inbox Routing to place mail into individual buckets, where they can also perform additional actions like setting the ticket status and assigning it to a worker. (see screenshot)

The Cerb4 workflow you often hear about, is really a team of people defining a consistent method of assigning tickets to the right workers with the right data, and placing them into the appropriate “work-focused” buckets. You can do whatever you want with buckets (even ignoring them altogether) but one possible bucket configuration is to label them, for lack of a better word, by their kind. From the Quick Start guide, here’s an example set of groups and buckets:

• Billing: receipts, refunds
• Corporate: execs, partners, biz-dev
• Development: bugs, feature requests, feedback
• I.T.: logs, alerts, abuse
• Marketing: surveys, newsletters
• Sales: leads
• Support: technical, account issues

In general the idea is to give the groups more sway over their own workflow, so they can decide how to manage their tickets completely independent of each other. So the Mail Routing is done by the helpdesk-level staff to get tickets to the right teams, while the group-level employees can take care of the rest with Inbox Routing.

Distinction #2: Administrators vs. Group Managers

Mail Routing and Inbox Routing cater to a different worker-type in your Helpdesk. Administrators can (and should) be in control of ‘helpdesk setup’, while Group Managers should control their ‘group setup’. Since Mail Routing is a global helpdesk setting, this means an Admin is in charge. And because Inbox Routing is an individual group setting, this puts a Manager in charge. Note that Admins can always override a Manager and tweak ALL mail filters.

Distinction #3: Global ticket fields vs. Group ticket fields

Ticket fields are used to hold any additional data about your tickets you want, and how you create them is totally up to you. You can set ticket fields at the Mail Routing and Inbox Routing levels, but even though you can set global ticket fields from both, you can only set group ticket fields in Inbox Routing. Each group can configure its own ticket fields which only it has access to, to hold onto whatever extra information they feel is important. Once again giving groups the chance to organize their mail the way they want to.

-joegeck@wgm