If you’ve been following our latest development, you know that in 4.2.3 we finally added a way for administrators to manage the system’s Watchers. As an admin you can create new watchers for all your workers OR modify, disable, or delete any watchers they have already configured. But did you realize that you can also prevent these same workers from making any changes on their own, by locking them out with permissions?

If you’re in the process of putting Cerb4 into production, you might want to take this concept a bit further and pre-configure all the watchers in your copy ahead of time. That way your staff doesn’t have to bother learning how set up works, and can just reap the benefits of getting e-mail notifications sent to their inboxes.

• First make sure you have the actual ‘Watchers’ plugin enabled.

The next step is to go ahead and disable the ‘Watchers’ permission for all your workers. This is one of my favorite Hidden Gems! because it’s easy to assume disabling the ‘Watchers’ permission for every worker would inevitably turn off the entire feature. But in reality it only stops your workers from creating or modifying watchers, not the administrators from doing it for them.

• In the ‘helpdesk setup’ -> ‘Permissions’ tab create a “restricted” role, assign all your workers to it, and enable everything except the ‘Watchers’ permission.

Remember this physically removes the actual ‘my account’ -> ‘Watchers’ tab from their logins, so they won’t be able to see what watchers you’ve prepared for them.

• Finally, as the admin set up the watchers for each worker as you see fit in ‘helpdesk setup’.

If all goes well, your administrators will ensure the right employees are getting the right ticket notifications. However, since the actual workers are not in complete control of their own setup, be sure you go over everything carefully and see that the watchers actually operate as intended. As a last check I’d recommend you create a couple of test tickets that follow your usual workflow, and ask your employees to verify the notifications were sent to their private e-mail addresses.

P.S. If you’re confused by the term ‘Watchers’, that was the replacement for ‘E-mail Notifications’ in name only. The general functionality remains the same.

-joegeck@wgm