It would be nice to be able to search Cerb4’s own help system from within cerb4, in a nice obvious place. I’m often wondering how to configure this or that thing …

I answered this post in the forums the other day, and while it didn’t turn out to be quite what he was looking for, it’s a good Hidden Gem! for just about everyone else. I recommended one of the newer features in Cerb4, the Google Custom Search Engines plugin (GSE), which allows you to create a single search point across all your company’s existing web resources. Even if you are not interested in using the Google Search for your own documentation you may still want to use it as a “built-in” help system for Cerb4, configuring the plugin to work with WebGroup Media’s (WGM) sites so you can search the Cerb4 wikis, blog, and roadmap with a couple of clicks. Since it operates much like the real Google website, it’s very simple to use and will NOT clutter your copy of Cerb4 with a bunch of WGM-specific search tools. In other words, don’t expect this feature to be tightly integrated with the Helpdesk like the internal Knowledgebase is. A good thing for most users I’d imagine.

Setup and Use

The beauty of this “tip” is you really don’t have to do anything special to make it work with the WGM stuff. This is because Cerb4 is already rigged to use OUR company as the setup example!

Go to ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Features & Plugins’ tab, and enable “Google Custom Search Engines”.

Then click over to the new ‘Google Custom Search‘ tab and simply add a new search by copy and pasting the example link you see for the URL field.

And that’s it for configuration! A breeze right :)

So now you can search our documentation anytime you want from two places inside Cerb4. One search box is available in ‘research’ under the ‘Google Custom Search‘ tab.

The other is from any ticket reply — you should see a button next to the ‘E-Mail Templates’ and ‘Insert Signature’ buttons.

So to give it a quick test try searching for a topic, such as ‘watchers’, and you should see a new browser window open with a list of hits. If you need to filter the results by resource (e.g. ‘Forums’), just click the corresponding links.

Other ways to access the Google Search

If you don’t want to bother setting this up at all, WGM’s Google search can still be accessed from the web. Bookmark this shortened URL:

http://tr.im/cerb4search

And one more thing. If you actually want to use the search feature with your own company resources like it was designed to, see the Google Custom Search Engines page on the wiki for more information.

-joegeck@wgm