Running parallel to the “Double Check!” series, I’d like to officially deem this tutorial as the second entry in a new series, called “New to Cerb4?”. The series will focus on long-time Cerb4 features that most of us take for granted by now, but where new users could benefit from just a short overview and a few steps to get started. So it will definitely be more topic-based than the walkthroughs we usually write on accomplishing a specific workflow. The first entry will be my last post on the differences between Mail Routing and Inbox Routing.

About Workspaces

Have you seen the About Workspaces tab? When you first log in to the Helpdesk it sits in your ‘home’ menu, to the right of the ‘Notifications’ tab. No. Well keep reading.

The ‘About Workspaces’ tab contains a brief tutorial on what these are, how to create them, and how then can be used to efficiently track important work throughout the day. And even though it’s a worthwhile read for all new workers, ironically it may not be there when you log in. If a Manager set up your account for you then they may have already created a workspace on your behalf. Because the tutorial is closed once a workspace is created, it will only reappear if you delete the last workspace.

So I’m going to use this space to help out new workers, who may be stuck without the workspace introduction. But rather than try and out do what our developers have already done with their tutorial, I’m going to duplicate the contents of the ‘About Workspaces’ tab right here. At the very end I will also cover an “alternative” approach to making new workspaces from scratch, versus the copying method described next.

Copying Workspaces

While you’re working in Cerb4 you’ll often find yourself jumping around between various lists and searches: tickets, tasks, opportunities, etc. With version 4.1 you can now group all those lists together as a “workspace” and see that information on the same screen. This is incredibly powerful when combined with the new custom field functionality; you can create temporary workspaces based on your daily projects, quickly build and save your worklists using searches, perform your duties, and then toss the workspace at the end of the day. You can also keep workspaces around permanently to build your own workflow.

Step 1:

Creating a new worklist is easy; just run a search with your desired filters as you normally would. When the results display you’ll see a ‘copy’ link in the blue header of the list. Click that link to copy the list to one of your workspaces. When copying a list you’re grabbing a copy of the settings for that list, not a copy of the current results, which ensures the list will always display the latest content when used on your workspace.

Step 2:

Once you click ‘copy’ you’ll be given the option to save the list to a new or existing workspace. You can also choose a more useful name. Once you’ve made your selections, click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Step 3:

Now you have a new workspace in your ‘home’ page. When you click the tab all your worklists will display on the same page. If you want to change the layout or filters of any list you can click the ‘customize’ link in the blue header and make your adjustments. You can change the order of the lists on your workspace by using the ‘reorder lists’ link in the top right of your tab.

Adding a Workspace manually

The alternative method I mentioned at the top of the post, is exactly what you might think it is, creating a new “empty” workspace where you customize the worklist afterwards. So instead of going to the appropriate section to organize tickets or tasks, running a multi-layered search, and copying the saved search to your workspace, we’ll do it in reverse.

Step 1:

To start, from the ‘home’ menu click the ‘Add Worklist’ button. Choose your worklist name, whether or not you want to add it to a new workspace (new tab), and most importantly what “type” of objects you want to watch. For this example, I’m going to recreate the “My Mail” worklist to track all open tickets assigned to me.

The objects equate to the different sections of the Helpdesk we told you to run a search from, so aside from the “obvious” ones mentioned above this will include contacts, time tracking and feedback entries.

Step 2:

At this point you have an “empty” shell which is looking at all relevant objects (or tickets in this case). Not the most useful worklist. So you need to filter this list down to a smaller subset, similar to running a search like in the first tutorial. Click ‘customize’ and start adding filters.

Now you have the “My Work” > “My Mail” worklist you see above in the step 3 screenshot. In the future use either method you feel more comfortable with to create new workspaces and worklists.

-joegeck@wgm