Our next entry in the Screen-by-Screen walkthroughs is going to be nice and short!

There really isn’t a whole lot of content in the ‘System’ tab and most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple of important sections detailing the current state of your Helpdesk worth visiting.

System Settings

Your IP address (127.0.0.1) is not authorized to update/debug this helpdesk (or run scheduler jobs). Your administrator needs to authorize your IP in Helpdesk Setup or in the framework.config.php file under AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS.

If it does, just go back to this section and add the IP address from the error message.

Storage Information

This is the one area of the ‘System’ tab you may need to browse regularly if you’re concerned about disk space. If you signed up for the on-demand hosted plan with us, we have three tiers primarily based around storage usage (5, 10, 15GB). I imagine shared hosting plans from other companies have a similar businesses plan, so use this information to your advantage.

When space becomes an issue, the easiest way to do some “spring cleaning” is to delete your old tickets and/or attachments. Remember attachments can be deleted separately without affecting their corresponding tickets from the ‘Attachments’ tab.

License Registration

Whether you went with a Community or Paid license, you’re going to register Cerb4 with whatever key we e-mail you. After you enter your license, the “free mode” information will be replaced with the name of the company and e-mail you registered with us, along with how many workers you’re allowed to have. Both can be handy if you ever need to contact us.

• e-mail address and license information from your order: Fairly obvious what we want here, except for maybe the serial key format. Make sure you include the BEGIN and END lines when copy & pasting.

That’s it! I told you it would be quick :D

Browse the entire series: Table of Contents, Previous: Scheduler tab .

-joegeck@wgm

One of the more mysterious and elusive objects in Cerb4 is the ‘Due’ field. If you’re new to Cerb4, chances are you don’t know about it. In fact depending on your workflow, even veterans may not be familiar with the concept. Unfortunately the name itself can be a little misleading, and for those expecting an “overdue” feature you might be in for a surprise. That is why I want to take the time to explain what the ‘Due’ field really is and how it works.

For starters, don’t confuse this with the ‘Date’ custom fields you can create. This is an existing ticket field already set in every copy of Cerb4 and you’ll find it where you find all optional fields — in the ‘customize’ menu as a ‘Column’. From any ticket list click ‘customize’ and add the ‘Due’ column to your list of defaults.

Not what you think…

Now that we have a way to track “due dates” in our ticket lists, the next couple of questions to answer should be: A) How do I set due dates for my tickets? B) And what happens when they are overdue?

Answer: A) you set a time to resume the conversation and B) the ticket goes from a “closed” status to an open status.

Hopefully you’re scratching your head over that response. You see, here in lies the problem with the “overdue” concept — it doesn’t exist, at least not in the traditional sense. Cerb4 does not have due dates natively built-in as a standard feature you can just flip on. Instead we have a “Reopen” feature, and that is what you’re actually seeing with the ‘Due’ field.

The ‘Due’ field is set by creating a date to reopen a closed (or waiting for reply) ticket. Thus you cannot give an open ticket a ‘Due’ date to help find ones that are overdue.

When you reply to a ticket you should have noticed the ‘Next’ section, where you can take additional actions on the ticket after you send it out. Clicking the “Waiting For Reply” or “Closed” radio buttons will display, When would you like to resume this conversation?. Basically you’re telling Cerb4 when the ticket is due to reopen.

Now the ticket is closed and is set to reopen in two days automatically. Behind the scenes this happens during the next scheduled cron pass (specifically when the ‘Heartbeat’ scheduled job runs).

Note the same options are available in the ‘Properties’ tab if you don’t need to reply. And your choice is visible in the ticket ‘Audit Log’ too.

Some final notes about the how this system works in practice:

1. Since ‘Due’ tickets are not open, generally speaking they will be hidden from the default mail views. Mail Overview only shows open and waiting for reply tickets, while Workflow and the default “My Mail” Workspace are limited to just open tickets (the latter you can change of course).
2. If you really want to organize which tickets are due to reopen next, you’ll most likely need to create a dedicated workspace. Filtering non-open tickets by ‘Due’ date is fairly easy to do…

Give me overdue dates!

The moral of the story is the due dates probably aren’t quite what you expected. In reality, they are used when you want to “forget” about an ongoing ticket conversation for a while, clearing the worklist clutter for your more timely tickets. A good practical example is creating follow-up dates — close out the ticket temporarily and then schedule it to pop back in your lists when you need to write back.

So does this mean there is no way to mark open tickets overdue? Do you really have to close every ticket to get a more traditional “due date” workflow?

No, you do still have legitimate options at your disposal. But since there’s no native concept built into Cerb4, you need to use our “toolkit design” to create your own solution. For a walkthrough on designing a powerful, yet easy to implement overdue system within Cerb4, see our SLA example.

-joegeck@wgm

If this doesn’t qualify as a Hidden Gem! I don’t know what does — have you even heard of the debug menu before today? No. Well for the uninitiated, every copy of Cerb4 has an extra area for basic troubleshooting. The table of contents is accessed by visiting a URL similar to the following in your browser:

Simply tack on /index.php/debug or /debug (.htaccess users only) to the end of your root Cerb4 URL, and the page should load up.

As you can see it’s a very short list of tools, so let’s go over them one by one.

Requirements Checker

You probably won’t need to worry about this one after you get the install working, since the prerequisites page just double checks if your server environment is capable of running Cerb4. But if you’re missing some mandatory PHP extensions you can certainly find out here.

As far as I know this page is identical in function to the first page of the installer, and is also available as a separate file on the wiki page explaining how to install Cerb4.

In any case it’s duplicated at /debug/check for your reference.

phpinfo()

Creating a phpinfo page is something you should be familiar with if you’ve ever dabbled in PHP or possibly configured your own web server. Cerb4 has its own too for reviewing any of your current PHP settings.

To access it append /debug/phpinfo to your URL.

Debug Report (for technical support)

The one we’ve put off talking about until last, is probably the most valuable. As the title implies this is what the Cerb4 team is going to be interested in when helping you out. You can see that there’s all kinds of information on your Helpdesk install which we can use to spot possible issues. Everything from verifying your Unix permissions are giving proper read/write access to key directories, to whether or not you have set your PHP memory and file limits high enough to accept larger attachments.

With that said, I wouldn’t recommend you forward this data to us every time you write in for support. However if we request it, because it’s a block of plain text, you can easily copy & paste the information into your e-mail.

Since the ‘Debug Report’ is the one you want to keep handy in a pinch, try to remember it’s always available at /debug/report .

P.S.

Similar to the error you can get updating the Helpdesk, you may see this when accessing the debug menu for the first time.

Your IP address (127.0.0.1) is not authorized to debug this helpdesk. Your administrator needs to authorize your IP in Helpdesk Setup or in the framework.config.php file under AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS.

As usual, one way you can fix the problem is by logging into your Helpdesk as an administrator, clicking over to ‘helpdesk setup’, ‘System’ tab, and adding the IP address from the error message to the ‘IP Security’ section.

-joegeck@wgm (Thanks to RobertM for the P.S.)

If you look at the regular ‘mail’, ‘Search’ tab, you’ll notice there is a dedicated ticket mask filter and ticket ID filter. However the “Ticket Quick Search” bar in the top right corner only has a dropdown option of “Ticket ID”, which you might assume only accepts IDs. So what do you do when a customer contacts you about an open ticket and gives you the mask for reference? Most people would take the extra couple of steps and go straight for the traditional mail search — clicking over to the ‘Search’ tab and adding the ‘Mask’ filter.

Thankfully there’s a Hidden Gem! here you can take advantage of; the developers beefed up the “Ticket Quick Search” so it can handle both formats PLUS partial mask matches. (As unfortunate as it, you’ll just have to look past the confusing terminology on this one.)

As you know the two “types” have a very different format,

• Masks can look like JKB-49992-311 while,
• IDs can be as simple as 68.

Thus doing a quick search for ’68′ or ‘JKB-49992-311′ will successfully pinpoint the correct ticket, and because of the partial match capabilities, ‘JKB’, ‘JKB-499′, and ‘JKB-49992′ will all return that one ticket along with any other potential matches.

I realize this isn’t some miracle tip that will save you a ton of time upfront. But because the “Quick Search” dropdown will remember you chose ‘Ticket ID’ for the remainder of the session, you can save yourself a couple of clicks each time and immediately copy & paste a mask from any ‘mail’ tab. (Rather than going back to the ‘Search’ tab and re-adding the “Mask” filter constantly.)

Even if you don’t find this practical, hopefully you can at least scratch it off your “I had no idea that was possible!” list :D

-joegeck@wgm

If you’re checking out our software for the first time, one of your first stops on the website was most likely the free version page. There you’ll find a breakdown of our three available licenses: Free, Community, and Paid.

Now even if you’re relatively new to Cerb4 I reckon it will make sense as long as you’ve seen the Helpdesk in action. It’s fairly easy to spot what’s restricted in the free version as you click around the ‘helpdesk setup’ tabs. So what I’m going to do for these more seasoned, yet still new Cerb4 infants, is address upfront some of the common concerns I hear in live chat and in the forums. You guys can read the next section and skip the rest if you want, where I go over what the license differences are in more detail. At the very end I’ll explain how to acquire the Community license and how to activate a license.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can I try the software and then buy the Paid license later if I like it, without losing anything?

Yes, you can install and use either free version right away and later decide to upgrade. You won’t lose any data, have to re-install anything, re-tweak your settings, patch the code, etc. The only thing that will happen is any relevant feature restrictions will be removed.

• Ok, now if I decide NOT to upgrade, is there some kind of trial period or are the free versions good forever?

Good for the lifetime of Cerb4. Any “premium” features we may choose to add in the future of course will be locked, but you will not lose any of your existing features or data associated with them.

• Your site says if you fill out the survey you will be sent a free Community license. I haven’t gotten mine yet, did I screw something up?

No, as long as you “registered” the software with us by finishing the survey then you qualify for a Community license. The issue here is the license processing is not automated — all of the surveys are processed manually by the WGM staff. Therefore depending on what time of day you installed the software, our California-based company may have finished their regular workday. So be patient, the license may come within the hour or show up by the next business day.

• I noticed your buy page lets you buy a Single (+1 worker) license for $99. However I’m currently running one of the free 3 worker versions. To get a 4th worker can I buy a single worker license or do I need to buy 4 single worker licenses?

In this case a single worker license entitles you to one fully unlocked worker with all the restrictions removed. So basically to get a fully Paid license you should be opting for 4 single worker licenses. Although at this point it doesn’t hurt to suggest you buy the 5 worker pack instead at $375 as opposed to 4 workers at $396 (4*$99).

• An employee left and we disabled his worker account in ‘helpdesk setup’, however this did not free up a license slot? Can we “replace” him or do we need to purchase more workers?

Unfortunately the license applies to total workers (including inactive ones), so if you aren’t comfortable with the idea of deleting a worker out of the system it’s going to cost you. Deleting workers generally wipes all their statistics from the reports menu and releases all work assigned to them back to the “anybody” pool. Things like sticky notes, comments, or time tracking entries they created are NOT deleted.

• Our business is outgrowing a single Helpdesk, can I move Cerb4 to a different sever? Or maybe install a second copy of Cerb4 using my existing license?

Yes, and at no additional cost. From the On-Site section you’ll find a nice bullet point on the subject.

We like being fair and simple; the software is licensed to your entire company for use by a certain number of workers. We do not obnoxiously restrict you to specific e-mail addresses, URLs, IPs, or CPUs. You are permitted to run multiple copies for your own use.

For anyone reading this who may want to take advantage of multiple copies of Cerb4, but does not understand how you can “outgrow” your Helpdesk, it’s pretty simple. Say your sales and support teams are forced to share an increasing number of contacts and tickets. Normally not a big deal, unless you’re in the type of business where each department has its own distinct clientele. To help cut down on confusion and unneeded overlap, you might want to consider moving one of the teams to their own separate Helpdesk.

Understanding the three licenses

Ok Cerb4 babies (no offense!), you of course are usually the ones we want to make the best first impression with. It’s easy to assume on our part that you downloaded the software, demoed it, or are using the free version happily before you even think of upgrading your license. Unfortunately I know not everyone shops for software that way. Some may want to learn immediately about the locked features, and if their company can get by without making a purchase. After all if you can’t afford a paid license and you need these options, then it may be time to move on before you get attached! With that said, I know we are happy to negotiate pricing for your budget, so send us an e-mail first.

Let’s start by reviewing the feature chart:

We have three license brackets, a couple of “professional” features, a way to purchase 5 or more workers, and two free versions? Can be confusing for the uninitiated. So what I’m going to do is explain each benefit, show screenshots, and write in a way that assumes you’ve never logged into Cerb4. I’m also going to approach this from a different angle and not go over each license individually, since the above chart makes it pretty clear what’s in and what’s out. Instead I’ll break it down by each feature.

Groups (Community/Paid)

Just to be clear buying a Paid license naturally entitles you to both of the following benefits.

There’s two big changes that come with the Community (other “free”) license: uncapping the total number of Groups and removing the Cerb4 Tagline. With the traditional ‘free (non-community)’ version, Groups, much like Workers, are capped to a total of three. By default the Helpdesk creates a Dispatch, Sales and Support group but you can change the names as you please.

You can think of groups, in terms of teams or departments, in your company. Workers can become members of one or more groups, usually in an effort to pair them with others having a similar role (job).

Signing up for the Community license allows you to create unlimited groups, making it much easier to pursue a “divide & conquer” approach to answering e-mail. With more groups you can better recreate the structure of your internal operations, organizing your mail into smaller and smaller piles for each team of workers to pull from.

Cerb4 Tagline (Community/Paid)

Community benefit number two is removing the Cerb4 tagline. This is probably something you’re used to seeing in your own inbox once in a while. Basically we append OUR company advertisement to the end of your outgoing replies, below your signature.

Workers+ (Paid Only)

That’s it for the Community license, the remainder of this article focuses on the features that come with a Cerb4 purchase. The primary reason for most companies to go with a Paid License is typically to increase the Worker cap, as you can see our whole price structure is based on this. Both free versions restrict you to having three login accounts to pass out to your employees and administrators.

Note that workers have nothing to do with the number of e-mail addresses you can feed into the system. If you want to pull mail into Cerb4 from 10 different e-mail inboxes (support@, sales@, … , billing@) you can do so without buying a license. The worker count is strictly how many team members you can have actually log into the web interface. Your workers will need to login to do just about anything worthwhile such as assigning tickets to other people, moving tickets to other groups, or browsing a client’s past history.

So bottom line, if you have a large company and multiple people who want to work with Cerb4 on a daily and collaborative basis, you’ll need to purchase a license for however many logins you need. The buy page has more details, but currently we offer a single (+1) worker license, a 5 worker pack, or an Unlimited worker package. If you decide to start light, as your company grows you can simply buy more workers in small increments. Note once you reach 20 workers the license will automatically transfer to an Unlimited.

Opportunity Tracking (Paid Only)

Two other perks you get with a Paid license is unlocking two capped plugins: Opportunity and Time Tracking. Remember you need to first enable both from the ‘helpdesk setup’, ‘Features & Plugins’ tab.

With our software it’s almost easier to explain what’s taken away as opposed to what’s added, because with one exception every “locked” feature is fully functional but limited to a set number of uses. This allows you to get a solid feel for the premium features while effectively preventing use in full production. It’s very akin to a “try before you buy” system.

The key thing to notice here in that regard, is the statement “Limited to 10 (opportunities/time tracking) entries for evaluation with a free license”. To clarify you are capped at 10 active entries, which means once you have saved your 10th you cannot create another one.

You can think of the Opportunity Tracking as a basic CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. Any existing contact or e-mail address you can promote to an opportunity, typically so you can track that individual as a sales lead. You can give that person or organization a descriptive title and detailed notes for your team to use when evaluating sales “opportunities”, in deciding whether it’s time to get in touch with those interested clients (e.g. “on the fence, price conscious”). Once you’ve closed the sale you can mark them as “WON” and attach a dollar (monetary) amount to their order for your records.

Learn more by watching the Opportunity Cookbook video.

Time Tracking (Paid Only)

Just like the Opportunities plugin, Time Tracking is also capped at 10 active entries unless you purchase a license. However time entries are unique in that they can easily be deleted, so if you want to keep testing out the feature feel free to delete your existing data and replace it.

The feature is pretty self-explanatory, as you’re working on a ticket you can start a timer that runs in the background. When you’ve finished what you’re doing, stop the timer, jot down some notes (and edit the time to the nearest 15/30-minute interval if need be). You can see a summary of all your saved times in the ‘activity’, ‘Time Tracking’ tab or any of the available ‘reports’.

More information and a video can be found here, Sneak Peek: Time Tracking.

Itemized Worker Permissions (Paid Only)

Unlike the two plugins before, Permissions are NOT available for a “trial run” and will only be accessible once you purchase a license. The basic idea here is you selectively choose what a Worker can actually do from a long list of possible actions.

As you can see from the sample list there, it’s possible to prevent worker(s) from opening tickets on behalf of customers. When enabled, affected workers will not see the ‘Open Ticket’ button in the ‘Mail’ section.

After you purchase a license you can learn more about setup with our Permissions Explained article.

Signing up for the Community License

So how do you get a Community license? All you need to do is “register” your free version by filling out the survey at the end of the installation process.

The Community license is also completely free for the life of the product. You can think of it as a “gift” for not downloading the software anonymously, and giving us a chance to stay in touch for things like product updates and “how can we improve the product” surveys.

Licensing your copy

And I’ll finish off this tutorial by showing you how to upload your license. After you sign up for either the Community or Paid edition, we should send you a license by e-mail. Go to ‘helpdesk setup’, and at the bottom of the ‘System’ tab first enter the e-mail address you used in your order, then copy and paste the actual license (including the BEGIN and END lines).

With Cerb4 I realize it can be very difficult to make a licensing decision without test driving the software a bit:

• How many workers do I actually need?
• Are permissions necessary for our company’s operation?
• Is time or opportunity tracking something I can see my employees and administrators taking advantage of?

I’ll always recommend you install the free version and set up a test environment custom fit for your business workflow, as that’s really the only good way to decide what you need. But for those who can’t commit to “demoing all the features” and don’t have the time to spend evaluating Cerb4′s premium capabilities, I hope this walkthrough helps :)

-joegeck@wgm

Welcome to the second guide in the Screen-by-Screen Series! If you’re not familiar with this series, you can find an introduction to it in our first walkthrough, Screen-by-Screen #1: Helpdesk Setup -> Mail Setup

Scheduler

To get to the scheduler, click ‘helpdesk setup’ then the ‘Scheduler’ tab.

The Scheduler is what actually runs when you run the cron task. You can configure different items on the scheduler page, and you can also get the instructions on running the cronjob there as well. You can find more information configuring a cronjob to run the scheduler in our Wiki article on Automating mail parsing for the future.

Scheduled Jobs

You can see a list of scheduled jobs and some information on them as well. By clicking on each job, you can configure that job.

POP3 / IMAP E-Mail Importing

The POP3 / IMAP E-Mail Importing task is one of the most important tasks. It downloads the email from each of the mail servers you have setup (for more information, see the previous guide in this series: Screen-by-Screen #1: Helpdesk Setup -> Mail Setup or see our Wiki article on Downloading real mail into your helpdesk).

• Enabled: As long as this box is checked, this task will run. If you want to stop your helpdesk from downloading mail, you can uncheck this box.
• Run every: This task will run at the specified interval, in hours, minutes, or days.
• Starting at date: This task will only run after the specified date.
• Max messages to download per mailbox check: This is the number of messages that will be downloaded per mailbox each time this task runs.

Inbound E-Mail Processing

The Inbound E-Mail Processing task is the other most important task. When it runs, it runs the Mail Filtering and Mail Routing rules against the messages that were downloaded in the previous task, parsing them into tickets. This task also scans for raw email messages in the /storage/mail/new directory as well (for more information on importing raw email messages, see our Wiki article on Getting tickets via mail pipe). The settings are identical to the above task, except for one.

• Max messages to parse per run: This is the maximum number of messages the task will parse when it runs.

Heartbeat

The heartbeat task can be used by plugins to run custom, programmatically defined tasks. For more information, see our developer docs.

Maintenance

The maintenance task cleans up the database and the filesystem.

• Purge deleted tickets from database after: This setting controls how long tickets will remain inactive for before the maintenance task deletes them from the database. You can find more information in our wiki article on Deleted Tickets.

Background Importing and Synchronization

The Background Importing and Synchronization task is used when you want to import from the /storage/import/new directory. It is mainly used when you are importing data from another source. If you aren’t importing something, it is safe to disable this task.

Stay tuned for Screen-by-Screen #3!

We’ve made a couple tweaks to the Cerb4 On-Demand plans:

• Trickle: 5 workers; 5GB storage
• Stream: 10 workers; 10GB storage; added Priority Support benefits; added High Performance Cache (was previously exclusive to Flood)
• Flood: unlimited workers; 15GB storage; added Priority Support benefits
• The Priority Support benefits bundled with the Stream and Flood plans would cost $75/mo on their own.
• We’ve also added back the ability to prepay quarterly (5% discount), semi-annually (10% discount), or annually (20% discount).

Based on community feedback during the ordering process, we’ve made a couple quick tweaks:

• Single Worker License: You can now purchase individual worker licenses for $99.  There is no longer a ‘Starter License’ minimum number of workers.
• 5-Pack License: You can now purchase a 5-pack of worker licenses for $375, which is a $120 discount from purchasing 5 individual worker licenses.  This is similar to the prior ‘Starter License’, except you can now purchase any number of 5-packs to upgrade an existing license.
• Unlimited License: Any license is converted to an Unlimited License after it reaches 20 workers.  Previously the limit was 15.

We just received this notice from SoftLayer (Seattle datacenter):

Maintenance ID: 4443
Date: September 07, 2009 (09/07/2009)
Start time (PDT): 01:00:00
End time (PDT): 02:00:00
Services affected: Public/Private Network
Device: FCR01.SEA01, BCR01.SEA01
Reason: IOS Upgrade
Location: SEA01 (Seattle, WA)
Duration: 1 hour

=================================================================
SoftLayer Engineers have identified a potentially service impacting bug in the IOS code currently
running on these routers. Due to continued debug messages and traceback errors appearing on
BCR01.SEA01, Engineers have scheduled a reboot of FCR01.SEA01 and BCR01.SEA01 to upgrade to the
latest IOS code. Due to the severity of this bug, the timeframe between this notice and the
maintenance window has been shortened.

During this maintenance, customers will notice a complete loss of connectivity to their servers on
both the frontend and the backend. It is recommended to fully disconnect iSCSI and NAS drives
during this maintenance window. While the upgrade duration is scheduled for 1 hour, we only expect
between 15-20 minutes of downtime as the routers reload and fully boot.

A notice will also be posted in the portal prior to the maintenance, during the maintenance
informing you of the progress, and after with completion details.

=================================================================

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

These maintenance windows have been dependable over the past several events.

-Jeff@WGM