The introduction of Worker Notifications was a major improvement to Cerb4.  The purpose of the feature is to tell you in real-time about things like:

• Tickets assigned to you
• Tasks assigned to you
• Comments needing your attention
• Ticket notes needing your attention

Unfortunately, the dependability of these notifications (for both sender and receiver) is greatly diminished when they’re only shown when you log in and the Home->Notifications tab is displayed.  Workers shouldn’t be expected to habitually check their notifications — that defeats the point.

In the next update, the number of unread notifications will be shown in the top right of the interface:

This alert is shown on every page, and clicking it will take you to your list of unread notifications.

That should solve the issue of notifications being unintentionally neglected by active helpdesk workers.  The next issue is to make sure workers are aware of new notifications even when their browser is minimized or closed.  Currently we provide an RSS feed.

The worker notification system isn’t limited to just tickets, tasks, comments, and notes.  Here are some other improvements we have planned:

• In 4.3 we’re planning to expose worker notifications to the Web-API so you can receive real-time alerts in a variety of other ways: Windows system tray, iPhone with push notifications, dashboards, SMS, etc.
• In 4.3 we’re also planning to allow worker notifications to be created using the same filters as ‘watchers’ do in Preferences.  This means you could set up any number of flexible criteria to watch for and then generate a notification rather than an e-mail.  By separating notifications from e-mail you run less of a risk of ignoring them entirely while you work.
• For Mac OS X users, there’s a new Fluid.app plugin that will integrate notifications with your desktop using the Dock and Growl.
• We’ve designed the worker notification system so custom plugins can also send alerts about anything.  Administrators and managers could receive snapshot reports of Group activity.  Workers could receive alerts about overdue tasks or SLA metrics.
• Notifications could have an expiration so they’d be useful for short-lived alerts.
• Notifications could provide worker-to-worker private messages without requiring an additional feature.

Worker notifications should be another great, reusable tool in the Cerb4 toolkit.  We’d love to hear what else you feel they should be capable of doing.

-Jeff@WGM