We’ve received a network maintenance notice from one of our data centers (SoftLayer) for 1AM on Friday, July 31st.  The window is between 10-60 minutes and it will affect connectivity for a subset of Cerb4 On-Demand users.  This is part of ongoing network renovation at SoftLayer and the previous maintenance so far has been quick and painless.

Here’s a copy of the notice:

Date: 07/31/2009 (Friday)
Start time (PDT): 01:00:00 (1:00 AM)
End time (PDT): 02:00:00 (2:00 AM)
Services affected: Public network
Device: FAS02.SR01.SEA01
Location: Seattle, WA
Duration: 1 hour

===================================================
SoftLayer Engineers will be replacing the upstream front end
aggregate switch that provides connectivity to the rack level
switch to which your server is connected.

Customer Impact: During this maintenance, customer servers
will not be reachable on the public network. While the
maintenance window is set for an hour, we expect no longer
than 10 – 15 minutes of downtime.
===================================================

If you have any problems after this time frame with regard to connectivity, or if you have any questions regarding the maintenance at any point, please open a ticket in the customer portal.

We appreciate your patience during this work and welcome any feedback.

Thank you,

Network Engineering
Softlayer Technologies, Inc.

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4 (4.2.2) was released as a stable update on July 17th 2009 and contains 47+ improvements from community feedback.

There’s a great page on the wiki that covers the highlights for this release:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/4.2.2

The standard upgrade instructions apply:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Upgrading_to_Newer_Versions_of_Cerberus_Helpdesk_4.0

-Jeff@WGM

We’ll be using Facebook to release live updates and tips in the same way we use our @cerb4 Twitter account.  We’ve found Facebook to be much better at facilitating conversations; where Twitter is mostly sound bytes.

If you use Facebook and want to connect with other Cerb4 users, add yourself as a fan:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cerb4/118691379459

(We’re pretty late to the party!)

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4 is a great tool for responding to a flood of e-mail; but did you know that it’s also handy for proactively building relationships with your community?

In this video I explain how to use the Cerb4 “toolkit” mentality to import new opportunities from various community resources: prolific contacts, blog commenters, top forum posters, most-active contributors, etc.

There are several reasons you might want to do this:

• You want to offer Priority Support the people who would benefit from it most (the people who already request a lot of support, or groups of people who say they wish they received faster replies).
• You want to invite past customers back for a look at the recent improvements in your products and services.
• You want to follow up with leads who are evaluating you.
• … and countless other situations

Cerb4 – Opportunity Cookbook from Jeff Standen on Vimeo.

-Jeff@WGM

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been going through our address book to invite back thousands of former beta testers for fresh look at Cerb4’s progress.  At the same time, I’ve also been reaching out to several hundred of our most active (and vocal) community members to ask for their thoughts about the new Priority Support service; as well as asking them what other services they’d like us to provide to existing and happy Cerb4 users.

We’re learning a lot from all these new conversations.

Most people have no problem with our change to per-worker pricing.  We’ve been happy with the change as well.  Our “Starter License” and “Unlimited License” orders have been evenly distributed since we introduced them; and we no longer have any basis for concern that people might abuse our SmallBiz discount.

Our average initial order has been a Starter License (3 workers) with 2 additional workers — for a total of 5.  We’re constantly walking people through the ordering process to show them how to add the ‘additional worker’ option to their shopping cart and increase its quantity to 2.  To simplify things, we’ve bumped up the limit on Starter Licenses to 5 workers.  We’ve tweaked the price to reflect that change, along with a couple other things.

When talking to our most vocal users, so many of them told me that they didn’t see the value in Priority Support because our free level support was already “really fast and really good”.  Alright, that’s fair enough.  We’re not going to start dropping the ball on support just to encourage people to buy Priority Support plans.  Several organizations did take us up on the Priority offer and we’ve already started rushing to their aid ahead of everything else we’re doing.

We’ve decided to make a couple minor adjustments to our pricing; based on these conversations, and the fact we’d like to grow our team a bit, and the fact the one-time $99/199 pricing is untenable in the long run.

Here’s a summary of the changes with full disclosure (all prices are in $USD):

• Starter Licenses ($375/$188): These now include 5 workers. The commercial price is $375 and the SmallBiz/Edu price discounted price is 50% off ($187.50).  The commercial per-worker cost is $75 for 5 and it used to be $66.33 for 3.  If you do the math, it’s a total of $26 higher now. Our entry-level price was $99 (~50% of $199) and now it’s $187.50 — an increase of $88.50.  The discounted cost per worker is $37.50 for 5 and it used to be $33 for 3.
• Unlimited Licenses ($1200/$600): Unlimited licenses were previously priced at $999 for commercial users and they were discounted to $699 for SmallBiz/Edu.  Any license that grows to 15 workers is still converted to an unlimited license at no cost.  The commercial price is now $1200 and the discounted price is $600 — which is the result of consistently simplifying the discount to 50% off.  Commercial users will be paying $201 more and small companies pay $99 less.  Phrased another way, the cost is now $80/worker (for 15) commercially and $40/worker charitably.  We feel this is still very reasonable, considering we don’t charge for upgrades or support in the 4.x line.
• Additional Workers ($99/50): Additional worker licenses were previously priced at $75 for commercial users and discounted to $49 for SmallBiz/Edu.  They are now $99 and $49.50 (50% off) respectively.  If you do the per-worker math on Starter Licenses they offer a discount of $120/$60 for the first 5 workers; and if you do the per-worker math on Unlimited Licenses they offer a discount of $165/$82 over the cost of a Starter License and 10 additional worker licenses.

Any time we make a change to our pricing, we have people crawling out of the woodwork to say they were “just about to order before these crazy changes!”.  If that’s you, we’ll happily honor the previous pricing until the end of the month if it would have been cheaper for you.  Shoot us an e-mail and we’ll send you a coupon.

(And, hey, we had a couple people telling us we should multiply everything by 5 so their bosses would take us more seriously.  It almost makes me want to try the Radiohead model so the same people could hypocritically pay $5!  We’ll stick with trying to be accessible for most people.)

Keep that feedback coming!

-Jeff@WGM

We received notice from SoftLayer that there will be some private network maintenance this Saturday for a 1 hour window starting at 1AM Pacific Time.  The notice only affects a couple of our On-Demand resources.  In the past, private network maintenance has been about 50/50 in affecting public network connectivity.

Here’s a copy of the notice we received:

Date: 07/18/2009
Start time (PDT): 01:00:00
End time (PDT): 02:00:00
Services affected: Back End / Private network
Location: Seattle, WA
Duration: 1 hour
=====================================
SoftLayer Engineers will be replacing the upstream
back end / private aggregate switch that provides
connectivity to the rack level switch to which
your server is connected.

During this maintenance, customers will not have
access to back end / private services (DNS,
updates, update servers, NAS, iSCSI, etc). While
the maintenance window is set for 1 hour, we
expect no longer than 10 – 15 minutes of downtime.
=====================================

Update:

Employee Response – 2009-Jul-15 18:47 (GMT-0800) [Update 2]
Due to unforeseen issues, Softlayer Network Engineers replaced fas01.sr01.sea01 starting at 5:59pm PDT after the device suffered multiple crashes after opening this ticket to scheduling the maintenance. At 6:06pm PDT the replacement switch finished booting and all connectivity was restored to the backend network. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

- Network Engineering

-Jeff@WGM

It’s definitely recommended you use SVN to update your Helpdesk, but if you have no other choice there is an alternative. The next best (and possibly only) option is to download the zipped build of Cerb4 and replace your existing copy. While it sounds simple enough, you should take some precautions along the way.

Prepare

• First things first, make a backup of your current Cerb4 files and database just to be safe.
• Next, copy the database info from the top of framework.config.php which includes the name, user and password.

define('APP_DB_DRIVER','mysql');
define('APP_DB_HOST','localhost');
define('APP_DB_DATABASE','dbname');
define('APP_DB_USER','dbuser');
define('APP_DB_PASS','mypassword');
define('APP_DB_PCONNECT',false);

• Administrators are sometimes required to add IP addresses to the framework.config.php file, so they can finish an upgrade or run a cron. Therefore if you included any unique IPs that you need to hold onto in the AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS, copy those as well.

define('AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS', '127.0.0.1');

• Copy the entire Cerb4 storage/ directory, to save attachments and mail that hasn’t been parsed yet.

Finish

• After you’ve “backed everything up”, now you should be able to overlay the zipped files on top of your old install. Copy and paste the extracted files to the cerb4/ directory.
• Swap the information you copied from before into the new framework.config.php file.
• Replace the storage/ directory.
• And finally readjust the file permissions if necessary. As usual check your httpd.conf file for the appropriate ‘User’ and ‘Group’ settings to replace apache:apache.

cd cerb4/
chown -R apache:apache *
chmod -R 0774 storage/

That’s it! If all went well, load up the Helpdesk in your browser and you should be taken to the login screen. Or if this was a larger update, the “click here to finish the upgrade” screen first.

Run into any issues? Post here in the comments.

-joegeck@wgm & hildy@wgm

One more blog series for you guys that’s going to be very cool — I call it Unorthodox Workflows… I’ll use this space to recommend “alternative” configurations you can try for some unique benefits you may not be able to get otherwise. The problem is, for these ideas to work, we need to distort the typical Cerb4 concepts and terminology from the norm in a way that might not make sense. So for those brand new to Cerb4 I wouldn’t recommend reading this as your first introduction, stick with the Quick Start guide instead.

1 Worker for 1 Ticket

Our Helpdesk is primarily designed for single companies who generally trust their workers.

This isn’t an official motto of WGM, but you’ll often hear us refer to it when asked about the ticket privacy capabilities of Cerb4. Once in a while, a Cerb4 administrator wants to create a workflow where ticket ownership on a per-worker basis is essential. A couple very simple examples would be a company with a handful of independent contractors or one where temporary positions come and go. Since privacy concerns are usually important in these environments, the assigned worker is more than likely to be the one that sees each ticket through to its completion. The person in charge usually wants to go through all incoming mail and assign tickets before workers get a hold of them on their own. This company is less concerned with maintaining groups of people who can share support responsibilities, and more focused on getting the right clients to the right worker immediately.

If we want a setup where each worker should only care about the tickets assigned to them and nothing more, how can we accomplish it?

Next Worker?

Now you might be thinking “Next Worker” is the obvious answer. Kind of. “Next Worker” will assign a ticket out to an individual, but it will not lock the ticket completely from other workers in their group who want to see it. An unassigned worker can read the entire conversation and reply to the ticket, all they’ll get is a warning in the Helpdesk.

So really the better question is, can Cerb4 treat owned tickets like they’re private conversations? Is it possible for a worker to truly own an assigned ticket by making it inaccessible to other workers from mailing lists such as Overview, Workflow, Workspaces, and searches. That is, the only time this ticket becomes available to everyone else, is when the worker releases the ticket back to the Helpdesk (or assigns it to another worker).

As far as I know this is impossible to do with standard Cerb4 practices most people rely on. And any attempts I’ve seen in the past usually end with some crack in the workflow, where a ticket eventually is visible in some capacity to other workers. Even with the Permissions system in ‘helpdesk setup’, you can never fully lock down an assigned ticket like you might expect.

Workers == Groups

The current solution requires changing how we traditionally think about groups. Our documentation usually describes them as company departments comprised of a handful of employees. In fact, by default, the Helpdesk starts you off with a “Support” and “Sales” group you can modify to your liking.

One of the benefits of groups that we want to take advantage of, is the separation of tickets that naturally occurs. When a ticket belongs to a specific group, any worker not a member of that group cannot access the ticket (including Administrators). No matter where those workers find the group-owned tickets they cannot click into them, even from a targeted search or workspace. And for the record going directly to the ticket URL, cerb4/display/CTD-91635-833, won’t work either.

So what if we took these same benefits that groups offered and applied them to workers? To effectively create worker-owned tickets, we need to treat each group like it’s a worker. A design choice I’ll describe as a worker-group.

All you have to do is create one group exclusively for every one worker, where each worker is defined as the group Manager and is not a member of any other group. e.g.

• Group: John Smith (Q/A Temp)
• Group: Brian Davis (Programmer)
• Group: Jane Thompson (Accounting)

Then to capture the workflow as described earlier, we have the Helpdesk administrator be the sole member of the “Dispatch” group to go through any incoming mail and distribute it to the correct worker-group. This ensures that only the company head and responsible worker sees each ticket. A nice perk is if a temp worker ever leaves the company you can simply delete his group and move his tickets back to “Dispatch”, where you can have the boss redistribute the tickets again.

If you decide to operate your whole Helpdesk with this restricted workflow, it might help to also hide the “Next Worker” feature to avoid confusion and assigning tickets the “wrong way”. In the ‘Permissions’ tab inside ‘helpdesk setup’, create a new role for all your workers and turn off just [Tickets] Can assign tickets to other workers.

Assuming Worker addresses should be the Group reply-to addresses

There is one piece of advice I want to share, for what I predict might cause people some headaches. Don’t assume because this Helpdesk design is more worker-focused than group-focused, that you can simply open support tickets between worker-groups. Ironically the kind of companies that would even think about trying a worker-group design like this, would probably be most inclined for example to need the Q/A Temp opening tickets to the Programmer.

Adding to this confusion is the fact that the natural thing to do is set each worker’s private address as their group’s reply-to address, under “send replies as e-mail”.

Since every group has their own e-mail address why not open tickets like the customers do? Unfortunately you can easily confuse the Helpdesk by messaging other worker-groups.

For example, say Q/A wants to ask a Programmer a question. If John Smith starts a typical ticket conversation by composing a new message with ’send mail’ where,

• from = “John Smith (Q/A Temp)” group, and
• to = “brian.davis@example.com”.

1) The ticket will be released into the sender John Smith’s group by default. You’ll have to remember to find it in your ticket list and move it afterwards OR before you submit by changing the “would you like to move this conversation?” to Brian Davis’ group.

2) When Brian Davis tries to reply he’s set as the default requester, so you have to remember to edit that back and forth to the other worker each time you reply.

Bottom line. This unorthodox workflow I proposed is far from a recommendation, most companies should never even think about trying this setup. But for those who run organizations where it’s desirable for every worker to be solely responsible for each ticket, this might be something to experiment with. Make sure you heavily test a Cerb4 configuration like this to see how everything works, before you roll it out into production.

-joegeck@wgm

Hey guys,

We’ve been given about 45 minutes of warning that the datacenter (Softlayer) needs to perform maintenance on their power system.  This is going to affect one of our Cerb4 On-Demand machines tonight at midnight (Pacific Time) for about 20 minutes.  It will affect another Cerb2/Cerb3 On-Demand machine on Tuesday, July 7th at midnight (Pacific) for another 20 minute window.  This is an infrastructure issue and doesn’t involve hardware on our particular machines.

We apologize for the inconvenience.  We’ll be standing by to make sure everything comes back up properly for the affected clients A.S.A.P.

Thanks!
-Jeff@WGM

Update 1:22AM Pacific: The data center maintenance for the affected machine is complete.  The machine is doing a routine filesystem check (scheduled for the first reboot after each 6 months) and things should be back to normal.

Update 1:26AM Pacific: Everything is back to normal.