Hopefully this is the last one for a while, but once again I’ve retooled some older documentation on the wiki.

Running multiple independent companies through a single Helpdesk

There wasn’t a whole to change here, the screenshots were the only real thing dated, but I did change the example around to hopefully make it easier to digest (no more companies Alpha & Beta).

As usual ignore the old blog post, new Cerb4 users!

-joegeck@wgm

In the ‘Workers’ tab of ‘helpdesk setup’, you’ll find that each worker has a ‘Disabled’ option. Is there any difference between disable and delete? Yes, a couple of which are very important to understand. This guide will help break it down for new Cerb4 users.

Disabled

• Time Tracking -> A worker. The description in the ‘Time Tracking’ tab of ‘activity’ is changed to a generic “A worker tracked # mins on activity Z”.

• Opportunities, Organizations, Tasks -> anonymous. Here I’m referring to the ‘Notes’ tab you see when clicking into an Organization or Opportunity. Task notes were added in 4.3.1 .

• Worker data is removed from reports. You can no longer see his or her statistics in reports like ‘Time Spent Per Worker’.

When to use

Deleting a worker is a good way to clean house in one swoop. Like I said there are a couple of exceptions where data integrity may be lost but generally speaking the actual content of past messages, comments, tasks, and notes, is kept. If you don’t care about keeping performance reports and don’t mind losing a couple of “who made this or that change”, then deleting a worker may be something to consider.

With that said, why delete workers at all and just disable them to be safe? Normally you would be right, go for the disable lever first. But you may need to go with delete in one important situation…

Disabled workers take up a license slot (upgrade your license or delete your workers)

Most people rightfully want to err on the cautious side and never delete a worker out of the system. However there is one scenario where you might want to take that route against your better judgement. Our worker-based licensing is priced around how many total workers you have registered in your Helpdesk, and unfortunately the total includes “disabled” workers. Thus it’s very easy to run out of free slots and the only way to effectively fix the problem is to go ahead and delete the worker OR to buy more workers for your license. If you can’t afford the upgrade cost than you will need to delete workers…sorry.

Note that if you can afford an Unlimited license, you will be able to disable workers and add new ones as often as you like.

-joegeck@wgm

I guess it’s spring cleaning on the wiki, because I fixed up yet another piece of documentation that was aging a bit. In fact it’s one of the oldest articles on the wiki:

• Automatically filter and sort your mail in 3 steps

So once again I brought this one up to speed for 4.3 — I changed some of the language, added new screenshots, and created more linkouts. Not as major of a revamp as the Knowledgebase or Fetch & Retrieve resources but still significant nonetheless.

As usual ignore the old blog post and for those new to Cerb4, I hope this helps.

-joegeck@wgm

Much like our Knowledgebase documentation, the Fetch & Retrieve resources were aging quite a bit and needed a face lift. So this afternoon I went ahead and overhauled the entire wiki page with updated screenshots and references. I believe there are really only two noteworthy changes since we talked about F&R last time:

1. The removal of the ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ button (i.e. search) from the reply window. Now it can only be accessed separately from the ‘research’ top-level menu.
2. A dedicated ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ module was added to the Support Center. That means you can put your search on the public site too if you’d like.

Now I will say that we have made it clear in other places that the Google Custom Search Engine (GSE) is the recommended alternative, and Fetch & Retrieve has been spiritually “demoted” and pushed to an optional plugin. The feature is not completely abandoned by any means, so hopefully the new documentation works for those still wanting to use it.

So again I just wanted to post that I’ve updated the wiki to be current with 4.3 and should be much more helpful for those new to Cerb4. Please refer to this for all your Fetch & Retrieve questions and ignore the old blog post. Here’s the new permanent URL.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Search_your_organization%27s_resources_using_Fetch_%26_Retrieve

-joegeck@wgm

If you’ve been to the old Knowledgebase tutorials lately, either on the blog (part 1 and part 2), or the carbon copy placed on the wiki, then you’ll realize how your Helpdesk looks nothing like the images.

Despite all the confusion and questions we were getting about the old documentation and how to set up the Knowledgebase in versions 4.2+, I wanted to wait until 4.3 was released before updating the guide. The Support Center configuration page had a couple new module options (Everyone/Logged In/Disabled) that I wanted to account for. If I had tackled this project a couple of weeks ago I would have had to replace the screenshots yet again, as things were going to look differently in the near future.

So today I just wanted to post that I’ve updated the wiki to be current with 4.3 and should be much more helpful for those new to Cerb4. Here’s the new permanent URL. Please refer to this for all your Knowledgebase questions and ignore the old blog posts.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Using_the_Knowledgebase_to_share_resources_the_way_you_want

Thanks everyone for your patience and I hope the new guide serves you even better than before!

-joegeck@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

When you adopt Cerb4 you’re benefiting from the feedback of thousands of community members who came before you.  You also become a new voice in the community, encouraged to add your own opinions and experiences to the mix.  We get better feedback about where you would like to see the project go next; and you’ll have the confidence of knowing there’s a team of people working every day to make your online communications more efficient (while you focus on what you do best).  Your input is how we decide what our priorities are — so take advantage of it!

Blog

URL: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/
Volume: Low (a few posts a month)

The blog is our primary channel for sharing:

• New Releases
• Tips & Tricks
• Community Mailbag
• Highlighting New Resources
• Sneak Peeks of Upcoming Functionality

Twitter

URL: http://twitter.com/cerb4
Volume: Medium (a couple messages per day)

We use Twitter to share our daily goals and progress in real-time.  If you want to be among the first people to see things as they’re being built, and occasionally get a sneak peek not announced anywhere else, then sign up and follow us on Twitter.

The following WebGroup Media staffers also have active Twitter streams:

• Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D – @jstanden
• Darren Sugita, Operations – @dsugita
• Joe Geck, Quality Lead – @joegeck

Forums

URL: http://forums.cerb4.com/
Volume: Medium (a couple dozen posts per day, but no need to read everything)

The forums are the most collaborative of the community resources.  This is where the developers and users meet to discuss:

• General Questions
• Feature Requests
• Odd Behavior and Troubleshooting
• Developer Diaries (Progress Logs)

Wiki Documentation

URL: http://wiki.cerb4.com/
Volume: Low (a couple articles or edits per day)

The wiki is the closest thing we have to official documentation.  If you sign up for an account you’ll be able to add your tips, tricks, and experiences with the rest of the community.

You can watch wiki edits via RSS:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Special:Recentchanges (click ‘RSS’ at the bottom of the left sidebar)

And here’s the handbook of how to write in wiki markup:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents

Project Development Portal

URL: http://wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD
Volume: Low (a couple new issues per day)

This is the best place to file feature requests or bug reports.  We’ll accept feedback in any channel, but most of it ends up here.

Sign up for an account in the project portal to add your vote to issues you care about, or to receive updates when ‘watched’ issues have progress.

Support Center

URL: http://www.cerberusweb.com/support/

If you need to send us a direct e-mail, you can do so using our Support Center.  This is usually your best option if the topic of your conversation should remain private — for example, to resolve your issue you need to share some personal information about your helpdesk or configuration.  If you’re just asking general questions, you should try the Forums first, since another community member may have an answer for you quicker than an official developer.

Town Hall

URL: http://www.cerberusweb.com/chat

During the day, we almost always have at least one official member of the Cerb4 team in our Town Hall live chat room.  You can instant message using your browser without any special software.  Rather than being one-to-one, our conversations are open to everyone.  You can usually spot an official project member because their name ends with ‘@WGM’, such as Jeff@WGM.  Be forewarned that there’s no visible distinction between guests and developers.  You shouldn’t divulge any private information in Town Hall because anyone can read it.

Google Custom Search Engine

URL: http://tr.im/cerb4search

We have a lot of resources, huh?  Using the link above you can use our custom Google Search Engine to search through everything from a single place.  This should be your default starting point when you have questions or are troubleshooting.

Thanks for using Cerb!  If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’d love to hear what you think.

-Jeff@WGM

For several months it’s been possible to translate a good chunk of the Cerb4 UI into new languages using our built-in Translation Editor plugin.  Because early 4.x development was constantly shuffling things around as it evolved, we didn’t officially request translations because we didn’t want to create tedious and unnecessary work for people.  We’re feeling really confident about how things look in 4.2, and we’d like to start pooling together the translations you guys have created so they can be shared with the rest of the community.

We’re also aware that not all text in the interface can be changed from the Translation Editor yet.  Now that the major functionality of 4.x is finalized we’ll make everything translatable.

Over the past few months, I recall hearing about translations for German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovak, Chinese, and Norwegian.  I’ve been able to track down the files for German and Italian from the forums.

I just created a new project on GitHub to share Cerb4 translations:
http://github.com/wgm/cerb4-translations/

I chose GitHub because it provides the best of both worlds:

• Contributors can ‘fork’ the official project and have ‘commit’ access to their own copy. This gives everyone the benefit of version control (history, merging, revert, etc) without us compromising the official project.
• Developers can monitor forks to easily merge new contributions back into the official project.
• We can also recruit redundant translators (e.g. several people who know German) to proof each other’s work and refine the translations.

If you’d like to contribute a translation but would rather not learn GitHub, feel free to post it on the forums or send it to us in e-mail.  We’ll copy it over to the GitHub project for you.

If you’re willing to create a new translation from English into any another language, here’s a guide with instructions:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Creating_a_new_translation_and_sharing_it_with_the_community

Thanks!
-Jeff@WGM

4.1 (Build 890) is a quick maintenance release to address some minor issues reported by people who recently upgraded to the 4.1 release.  This update also includes some project-wide improvements to support the hosting multiple instances of Cerb4 from a single copy of the project files.  I’ll write more about that later.

Here’s a summary of the main fixes:

• Fixed an issue with the new ACL (permissions) system where users without access to particular plugins (e.g. Watchers/Audit Log) could prevent those plugins from triggering for everyone.
• Fixed an issue with Internet Explorer 6/7 related to non-English languages being defined as the browser locale.  Zend Framework 1.5 changed their locale auto-detection behavior and we inherited the bug.
• Fixed a few more places where the permissions weren’t being restricted properly (mostly: close ticket, assign ticket).
• Fixed the issue with the Support Center not allowing certain browsers to cache the resources (namely images); which often manifested more in SSL mode.  Things should be speedier again.
• A handful of other things.

In addition to the bug fixes, there were also a few improvements.  The bigger improvements here don’t directly apply to day-to-day use of the app, but make room for more scalability (cloud computing, distributed installations):

• Usability: You can now remove attachments that you had added to a ticket reply without having to discard and start over.  It’s silly browsers don’t provide this functionality since they’re the ones rendering the file upload control.
• Platform: The /libs/devblocks/tmp directory has been moved to /storage/tmp to simplify permissions and scaling.  The ’storage’ directory should be the only place on the filesystem needing write access.
• Platform: the Cerb4 code now properly supports symlink installations.  We used realpath() in PHP previously which dereferenced virtual paths and led to problems.  The only things you need at the instance-level now is a framework.config.php file and the /storage/ directory; the rest can be symlinks to shared files.  This means you can cheaply share an APC cache between dozens of helpdesks per server.  We’ll write up some more instructions about this on the wiki.

Thanks for being a part of the Cerb4 community!

-Jeff@WGM

In an effort to keep better partity between the documentation and the latest development, here’s a Quick Start guide you can use to bring your team up to speed with version 4.1:

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Quick_Start

The next sections we add will deal with the major plugins: e-mail notifications, feedback capture, time tracking, and opportunity tracking.  We’ll also add a section on the Community Tools.

Let me know if there’s anything else you think we should cover.

Enjoy!
-Jeff@WGM