Another blog post and the start of yet another series. Hidden Gems! will consist of short snippets with a simple goal — highlighting an overlooked piece of Cerb4 functionality that you can easily fit in to your existing workflow. These write-ups will be concise tutorials, with a couple of screenshots, on some of the lesser known options and will not be super in-depth on larger features. So you won’t find an explanation of what “workspaces” are, when all I’m trying to do is demo a custom worklist of overdue tickets. For that kind of general overview, you should refer to our other sources of more formal documentation.

The ‘Mask’ criteria

E-mail Notifications, often referred to as Watchers, were given a boost in 4.2 with the ‘mask’ criteria. By filtering on the ticket mask you can effectively create a “per ticket” watcher, extremely useful for any workers who need to monitor every aspect of an important conversation over its lifespan. No longer are you forced to watch an entire bucket of tickets just to catch the few you care about, or required to assign yourself the ticket to see the follow-up reply, you will be notified of whatever events you want on whichever ticket(s) you want. This is also a good alternative for 3.x users, who felt assigning multiple workers to the same ticket was the only way their staff could track the conversation and take appropriate action, but never got comfortable defining a single “Next Worker” in Cerb4.

So the next time there’s an important ticket, a couple of workers need to follow to completion, first determine the ticket mask.

Then have each worker configure a new E-mail Notification and copy that mask to the ticket criteria. Invested workers should subscribe to all four events so they can be notified of every new comment, reply, or if the ticket is assigned directly to them.

‘Mask’ criteria is just one of a few new mail criteria in 4.2, check out the rest for even more filtering possibilities.

-joegeck@wgm