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