For the majority of Cerb4’s development history we haven’t really been pushing people toward an upgrade; mainly because Cerb4 was evolving from scratch and we acknowledged that it did have a couple key things missing that people were used to in Cerb3.  We didn’t need to push it prematurely.  For many people, including most new users, the differences didn’t make Cerb4 unappealing.  Even with Cerb3 in mothballs, people have been free to hold off upgrading until they felt comfortable about it.  Development has taken everyone’s feedback into account during our frequent updates — even people who weren’t completely sold on the new ideas.  That has kept us accountable.

Today we’re over 2.5 years into Cerb4 development, and our paternal reluctance to let the project have its own identity has left us with a pile of over 10,000 contacts stretching back to the beta.  Those have been lost opportunities.  Meanwhile, through early adopters from Cerb3, word-of-mouth, and traffic from Google, we’ve had so many people telling us great things about their experiences with Cerb4 already.  It has been ready for primetime for a long time.

Very recently, we’ve started going back through our address book and contacting people who haven’t seen the incredible progress we’ve made since we first announced Cerb4.  We haven’t talked to some of these people for over 950 days.  That long ago we were far more idealistic than practical — group workflow didn’t make sense, we didn’t handle UTF-8 properly or have translations, we didn’t have the public Support Center functionality in place, we were trying to avoid a knowledgebase in favor of wikis, and so on.

If you’re one of those people, welcome back!  When you evaluate Cerb4, please look at it from the point of view of what you’re trying to accomplish.  There might be a newer (and better) way to do something now.  It’s not helpful if you just do a side-by-side comparison without considering that Cerb4 has a “toolkit” mentality.  You can now do some amazing things with custom fields, filters, searches, and workspaces.  Unlike past versions, there isn’t one “right” way to do things that you need to learn.  It’s very easy to mistake the lack of predefined workflow as gaps of missing functionality (SLA, etc).  Please don’t jump to that conclusion! :)

The best way to get familar with the new concepts is to run through the Quick Start guide with an Instant Evaluation: http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Quick_Start

If you can’t figure something out — ask!  You have these resources at your disposal: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2009/06/22/guide_to_community_resources/

-Jeff@WGM