Happy 2010! We have a lot of confidence in our Devblocks platform as we enter the new year, and we’re working on a major upgrade which will power Cerb5. In the meantime, we have several new applications to release that use Devblocks, and they benefit greatly from the experience we’ve gained from working on Cerb4 over the past 3 years. When we use outside applications in conjunction with our helpdesk, we’re constantly wishing we had features like Cerb4’s customizable lists, workspaces, custom fields, peek, bulk update, permissions, and plugins. We hope to replicate some of Cerb4’s success by approaching these new projects with similar innovation and the same commercial open source mindset.

Our design goals for Cerb5 involve bolstering Devblocks, the web-API, documentation, and the plugin system. We’re trimming down the dependencies that we’ve used as scaffolding (e.g. ADODB), which will speed things up even more, and we’re exploring more optimization ideas. For major features, we’re working on e-mail broadcasting functionality (CRM) and far more flexible e-mail templates. Keep an eye on the project portal for a detailed list.

This month is also our project’s birthday!

We started working on Cerberus Helpdesk in January 2002, so Cerby is turning 8 years old this month. We owe our vitality to all of you! In celebration and gratitude, we’re discounting 5-pack Cerb4 licenses to $250 (33% off; a $125 savings) through January 31st 2010. That’s also nearly a 50% discount from purchasing 5 worker licenses individually. There’s no restriction on the number of discounted 5-packs you can order.

If you’ve been considering purchasing Cerb4, or expanding the number of workers using your existing helpdesk, here’s a link to the shop with the discounted price:
http://shop.webgroupmedia.com/cerb4-on-site.html

Thanks for being a part of the project!

- Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D, WebGroup Media LLC.

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.

what do all the new bug tracker statuses mean? Are they just different cryptic categories of wishlist or something more exciting?
- @Layershift (via Twitter)

If you haven’t stopped by the Roadmap/Wishlist lately, this is what Layershift is talking about:

Previously, we had one category called “Wishlist” that contained everything else beyond the current release.  The problem with that approach was we had to dig through the entire wishlist every time we started a new release, even though we knew that some of the items weren’t immediately actionable regardless of how many votes they had.

We also started to have issues from a vocal minority of users (who are passionate enough to care; and we love them for it) who were frustrated that their requests were occasionally pushed from release to next release through several updates.  That was happening because we kept the most interesting feedback — far more than we could possibly do in one update — assigned to the current release so we wouldn’t lose track of it at the bottom of the wishlist.  We wanted to be aware of those things as we decided where to draw the line for each update; and we chose between those items, released the update, and moved the unfinished tasks into the next update to repeat the process.

To set people’s expectations a bit better, we’ve removed the nebulous “Wishlist” category and we’ve added a few more.  We had a little fun with the new category names; because, frankly, sorting through 500+ requests every couple days can be a tedious affair.  We did add some illustrative descriptions to the categories, but JIRA (the software that runs the roadmap/wishlist) doesn’t actually display them where people would notice them.

Here are the missing descriptions:

Rather than gathering *all* the best ideas into the next release, we’ll be using The Yellow Brick Superhighway category to keep track of them.  Those are the ideas that expand the project’s reach; such as expanding the platform (what plugins are capable of) or core functionality.  These are the things we lose sleep over until they’re done.

The Sea of 1000 Wishes category is the incubator for new requests, where they receive comments and votes until they move to the near-future roadmap. It includes everything from big ideas to “It would be nice if you moved this button 3 pixels to the left”.  I wouldn’t take the sarcastic category description too seriously, as everything on that list is something we’re committed to doing if enough people ask for it.

Cryostasis is a category we’ve needed for a while to contain great ideas that just aren’t possible at the moment.  In many cases the ideas may seem simple enough, but there’s something we’d like to do with the platform (such as switching to jQuery, or performing a refactor that affects the API) that would make the requests much easier to do properly.

With Everything Looks Like a Nail, we’re finally able to sort out all the good ideas that we just don’t see ourselves making a mandatory part of Cerb4’s core.  This includes everything from “I want a live chat feature” to very subjective workflow tweaks.  We built Cerb4 on top of our Devblocks framework so we could deliver tweaks and features to segments of users — or even to individuals — without making a mess of the app and forcing an amalgamation of 1000 opinions on everyone; pleasing no-one.  Because of its subjectivity, this is the best category for sponsors to pay for the development of things they want to get them done immediately.

And lastly, An Ounce of Prevention is the category where we’re quarantining ideas that introduce too much complexity or that go against the spirit of the project; such as: locking things down to the point it hurts collaboration, editing customer email after the fact, making tickets parents of other tickets, etc.  We’re keeping those requests here in the open rather than deleting them so people are free to build their case in support of them.  This helps us manage expectations; so people don’t see one request sitting untouched for a year and think everything is neglected that way.

Ultimately, we have some big ideas for transforming the Roadmap/Wishlist into a far more interactive community meeting place.

Thoughts?

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4 (4.2.3) was released as a stable update on August 3rd 2009 and contains 23+ improvements from community feedback.

Here’s a great page on the wiki that covers the highlights for this release:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/4.2.3

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

-Jeff@WGM

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