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.

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

I know it’s summer-time (in the Northern Hemisphere worldview, anyway) and you’d probably rather be relaxing.  I’m sure whether it’s hot outside or not you’d probably rather be relaxing.  What’s more relaxing than knowing Cerb4 has your back?  With everyone squeezing in their vacation, this is the perfect time to be sharing your e-mail workload in a web-based app.

Can’t this wait until September, you say?  Well sure… it could.  It could wait forever.  But you wouldn’t be doing yourself any favors.  How about this?

Deal #1: Buy a Starter License and get 2 extra worker accounts for free.  That’s 5 for the price of 3.

Still using a Community License?  Unlock the full potential of Cerb4 (worker permissions, time tracking, opportunity tracking) and give yourself a little extra growing room as a bonus.

Simply add a Starter License to your cart in the shop.

Deal #2: Buy an Unlimited License and get a year of Priority Support for free.

Get your entire team involved with an unlimited license.  Do you need to capture reports, receipts, leads, feedback, notifications or anything else through e-mail?  Cerb4 is a CRM toolkit and can do so much more than just fielding customer service and technical support questions.  A free year of Priority Support will let you jump to the front of the line any time you have questions or feedback.

Already have a Cerb4 license and interested in upgrading to unlimited?  Contact us and we’ll send you a coupon to discount the amount you’ve already paid.  You’ll also get a free year of Priority Support starting from the day of your upgrade.

Sound good?  Simply add an Unlimited License to your cart in the shop.

Remember, we license Cerb4 to your entire company when you purchase.  You’re not locked to a single helpdesk instance, or a single machine, or CPU, or IP address.  If you want to set up multiple helpdesks for different departments then you have our blessing.

Also remember, your Cerb4 license is perpetual and will never expire.  Maybe some day we’ll come to our senses and charge for upgrades, but if you buy now we’ll honor the promise of free Cerb4 upgrades to you forever for being with us in the beginning.

These offers are valid through July 10th, 2009.

Why’s Cerb4 so cheap?  Because we’re a company of developers creating the app we’ve always wanted.  We’re not selling Cerb4 to get rich; we’re selling licenses to fund ongoing development.  As I’ve said before, the biggest asset here is our experience and not the bits and bytes at a point in time.  We want to involve as many people as possible in our ongoing development process.  We have no problem with you using the app at no cost — it’s why we offer that option.  Your order says “I would like to see development continue.”

-Jeff@WGM

For the majority of Cerb4’s development history we haven’t really been pushing people toward an upgrade; mainly because Cerb4 was evolving from scratch and we acknowledged that it did have a couple key things missing that people were used to in Cerb3.  We didn’t need to push it prematurely.  For many people, including most new users, the differences didn’t make Cerb4 unappealing.  Even with Cerb3 in mothballs, people have been free to hold off upgrading until they felt comfortable about it.  Development has taken everyone’s feedback into account during our frequent updates — even people who weren’t completely sold on the new ideas.  That has kept us accountable.

Today we’re over 2.5 years into Cerb4 development, and our paternal reluctance to let the project have its own identity has left us with a pile of over 10,000 contacts stretching back to the beta.  Those have been lost opportunities.  Meanwhile, through early adopters from Cerb3, word-of-mouth, and traffic from Google, we’ve had so many people telling us great things about their experiences with Cerb4 already.  It has been ready for primetime for a long time.

Very recently, we’ve started going back through our address book and contacting people who haven’t seen the incredible progress we’ve made since we first announced Cerb4.  We haven’t talked to some of these people for over 950 days.  That long ago we were far more idealistic than practical — group workflow didn’t make sense, we didn’t handle UTF-8 properly or have translations, we didn’t have the public Support Center functionality in place, we were trying to avoid a knowledgebase in favor of wikis, and so on.

If you’re one of those people, welcome back!  When you evaluate Cerb4, please look at it from the point of view of what you’re trying to accomplish.  There might be a newer (and better) way to do something now.  It’s not helpful if you just do a side-by-side comparison without considering that Cerb4 has a “toolkit” mentality.  You can now do some amazing things with custom fields, filters, searches, and workspaces.  Unlike past versions, there isn’t one “right” way to do things that you need to learn.  It’s very easy to mistake the lack of predefined workflow as gaps of missing functionality (SLA, etc).  Please don’t jump to that conclusion! :)

The best way to get familar with the new concepts is to run through the Quick Start guide with an Instant Evaluation: http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Quick_Start

If you can’t figure something out — ask!  You have these resources at your disposal: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2009/06/22/guide_to_community_resources/

-Jeff@WGM

One common question that we’re asked nearly as often as “How the heck do you pronounce Cerberus?” is “How the heck do you guys expect to stay in business by sharing all the source code, giving away licenses, providing free support, and only charging people a one-time fee for a license they can use for several years?”

To be honest, we’ve never fully reconciled the conflicting principles that we inherited from both open source and capitalist philosophies.  We build software because we like building software.  We share so much because it’s the best way we’ve found to have a huge amount of great feedback to draw inspiration from.  It’s also the best way we’ve found to write reliable software (“more eyeballs find more bugs”).  Over 7 years later, we still get excited about new ideas because we’re still building something that we need just as much as everyone else.

There was surely a point in the history of the project where we could have done things differently and tried charging very large numbers to very large companies; yet we’ve always considered ourselves users of Cerb first and a business built around Cerb second.  While we likely would have made more money going the enterprise route, I doubt the project would be anywhere near as inspired or popular.  We want to build something for people who aren’t intimidated by innovation.

We recognized pretty early that the real value here is the experience we’re gaining from working with all of you while building this, rather than just slapping a price tag on the bits and bytes that come out of that collaboration.  Cerb4 is always going to have to evolve alongside the way people choose to communicate online.  The project is always going to need custodians that filter and refine feedback according to tightly-held values.  We’ve been well served by that philosophy so far, and we’re not at risk for becoming irrelevant just because you guys have all the source code.

I see plenty of software companies who are paranoid about letting people see the blueprints and guts of their apps because they don’t really understand where they’re creating lasting value.  People can always knock off a snapshot of your application at a given point in time, with or without the source code; but if your copycats are always dependent on your ideas and vision then you really have nothing to worry about.  You see huge companies hiding demos and screenshots of their applications because they understand the first half of that.  They fail to see that people want to ride along with an evolving project, with people they trust and enjoy collaborating with.

Cerb4 is a business investment, it’s not a $50 video game.  There’s no build-up to a final level with a big boss at the end, after which you uninstall and move on to something else.  We’re not selling something consumable.  Cerb4 becomes a member of your team, every day, pulling its own weight, helping your people communicate, improving in its small way whatever the founding purpose of your organization is.  You wouldn’t want a team member who couldn’t learn from past mistakes, so why would a cheap knockoff pose a threat?  A knockoff isn’t going to have any context for how a great application arrived at its conclusions.  They can’t show their intermediate work.  They’ll have a high propensity for repeating most mistakes which start with seemingly obvious answers.

Here is where capitalism creeps back in (as it should).  The inevitable flaw in our idealistic attitude about licensing is that someday the word-of-mouth referrals we get won’t continue to bring in enough new people to pay our existing team of people who are attending to our existing happy users.  That premise is already flawed to begin with because we should always be spending most of our time working with the people who are already on-board about the current direction of the project — not compromising our vision to appeal to a wider audience.

We want it both ways.  We don’t feel that charging more for licenses, or charging annual renewals for owned licenses, is providing any extra value to you guys.  However, we do need more ways to fund the project year-to-year from existing people who like working with us — people who want us to remain in business.  We’ve had an endearing chuckle over the occasional distraught call we’ll receive from someone who is genuinely concerned if we’ll be around next year — but, appreciation from us aside, we realize it’s a serious concern for many people who are investing in the project as a long-term decision (which we’d like to think is everyone).

So here’s our compromise.  A major way we can provide ongoing value to existing, happy Cerb4 users is to make sure we’re handling any issues or feedback as quickly as possible.  We do a lot of free support between Town Hall chat, our helpdesk, the forums, the blog, Twitter, etc.  While we don’t plan on cutting anyone off from free help, we’d like to offer a ‘Priority Support’ optional service to people who want assurances that their ideas and concerns will be answered the same business day we receive them.  Those people will jump to the front of the line everywhere that we interface with the community.  When we’re finished with the Priority issues then we’ll handle everything else.  We’ll make sure all Priority issues have responses before we leave at the end of the day; whether there are 15 or 150.

We started from the basis that anything we bring in on services for existing licenses from happy, willing, existing users is better than our one-time licenses which require so much attention on bringing in new business.  We are also conscious of the fact that if *everybody* is a priority then nobody is a priority.  So we established a price for the new level of support that we feel is sustainable to always have enough people trained on our end to help you out.  We also probably could have asked for a lot more if we felt like managing support contracts on a monthly basis, but we decided we wanted to cover people for an entire year to reduce the hassle on both sides.  We can offer a more pure price if we’re not factoring in the cost of chasing down invoices and expired credit cards every day.  When we’re asking for a lump sum for a service we have to keep things psychologically reasonable.

We arrived at a price of $399/yr for Priority Support for treating three (3) of your provided contacts as extra special; which is discounted to $199/yr for small businesses (under $250K USD revenues), educational institutions, registered non-profits, and open source projects.  Depending on who you are, that’s probably going to seem like too much or too little.  If you think it’s too much, don’t pay it!  You clearly don’t see the value in having our near-decade of experience on this project at your beck and call.  If you feel it’s way too cheap, then buy it and think of some things you’d like to sponsor from the development roadmap to get them done faster.  We don’t ask for donations, but we’re happy to accept financial “calls to action” on something you feel you need sooner than later.  We also ask for less on custom development requests if it’s something we can roll back into the project for everyone to benefit from.

Since this post is already wordy enough, you can find the full list of benefits for the Priority Support plan in the shop:
http://shop.webgroupmedia.com/cerb4-priority-support.html

If you can see the value in supporting the project in that way, in return for our rapt attention to what you’re hoping to accomplish using Cerb4, then please sign up for a year of Priority Support (it’s about $33 a month).

Before I retreat to 4.2.2 and 4.3 development again for a while, there’s one more service we’re now offering as a package deal of several smaller things we’ve done on a consulting basis.  We’re calling it the Cerb4 Tune-Up service, and you can find the full list of perks, once again, in the shop:
http://shop.webgroupmedia.com/tune-up.html

We’ve seen many people run into trouble during an upgrade over simple things that could have been avoided by just following the docs.  Unfortunately, this has given that group of people a general distrust of upgrading.  With the Cerb4 Tune-Up service we’ll be your wing-man during the upgrade, maintenance, and backup of your helpdesk.  For $75 USD, one time.

As an added perk, we felt it would be fair to give Priority Support people one free Tune-Up per quarter (i.e. once every 90 days).  That’s about the same pace that we’re planning major releases like 4.3 and 4.4 for the foreseeable future — so it works out pretty well.

The last time I posted a blog post like this, we had a number of people immediately ask if I was making a subtle cry for help during a recession.  I assure you, this isn’t a cry for help.  We’ve been here for 8 years.  We’re a lean bootstrapped company, with a well-respected project, with a decent flow of new interest in the project, with many On-Demand sites whirring away and paying monthly — and we’d have to do quite a lot wrong from this point to be in serious trouble.  I’d be less interested in the fact we’re asking existing, happy people to continue contributing and more interested in the fact we’re doing something worthwhile enough that you read this entire post. ;)

Thanks, as always, for adding your voice and thoughts to the project!

-Jeff@WGM

We’re happy to announce that the 4.2 release has been pushed into the ’stable’ branch and is ready for production use.  This update includes over 106 improvements from community feedback and contains a fairly balanced mix of new functionality and bug fixes.  Most of the new functionality elegantly evolves the concepts we’ve already been building in 4.x so far (e.g. Support Center, Mail Filters, E-mail Notifications) rather than being fundamental changes.

We’ve taken several concepts that provide a huge level of workflow flexibility and implemented their most popular feedback.  At the same time, we’ve reused some of these popular concepts to improve the rest of Cerb4 in a consistent way.  For example, after the success of Group Inbox Filters, we’ve brought that same criteria-based flexibility to Pre-Parser Filtering, Mail Routing, and E-mail Notifications.  We’ve also added new criteria, like date/time checks and message content scanning.

With those simple changes (conceptually, anyway) you can now do so much more.  Consider this: you can now set up an e-mail notification to alert your cellphone when tickets are opened in a specific Group (e.g. “Emergency”) — after-hours — and *only* if the sender’s organization has a ‘Priority Support’ custom field set.  You can configure that on a single screen… in a single rule.

You can also use the same kind of filtering to prevent tickets from being opened at all (from Pre-Parser Filtering) based on custom fields you’ve set on the sender or their organization.  This means you could essentially ‘gate’ your entire helpdesk like earlier versions of Cerberus Helpdesk (and only allow tickets to be created from whitelisted companies who have a contract).

Our goal with 4.x has been providing a “build your own workflow” CRM toolkit.  This is another huge jump in that direction.

We’ve also made many improvements to the Support Center, which had been fairly neglected in 4.x so far.  The most interesting changes with the Support Center involve the inherent plugin-based nature of Devblocks (which sits at the center of Cerb4).  You’re no longer limited to the few things we’ve built-in (ticket history, knowledgebase, etc); you can easily develop plugins to integrate and display things like server status, billing history, owned licenses, live chat, etc.  Increasingly more apps and services are providing web-based APIs… we’ll be fostering several mini-projects (with open source code, of course) for popular integration combinations.  There’s no reason Cerb4 should also be a billing system, but that doesn’t mean your Support Center can’t display billing history (by e-mail address or a client ID custom field).

The adventurous or deeply curious can find the full 4.2 changelog in the forums here:
http://forums.cerb4.com/showthread.php?t=1889

The condensed and summarized version of 4.2 highlights can be found here:
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/4.2

We’ve expanded the wiki documentation to cover the recent Support Center improvements.  This also includes several snippets you can quickly copy & paste to change your Support Center color scheme (along with previews of what it will look like):
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Support_Center

And for those wondering where Fetch & Retrive went, here’s the wiki documentation about its successor — the Google Custom Search plugin.  Read through the page to see why we’ve made this change (this is simpler and better, and doesn’t require any custom code):
http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Plugin:Google_Custom_Search

When we first re-introduced the Instant Evaluations for 4.x, we removed the 14 day free trial from our On-Demand service with the rationale that the Instant Evals offered the same thing.  We’ve found that a lot of people would still like to be able to test with live e-mail and no upfront cost, so we’ve added back the 14 day free trial to our On-Demand service.  If you run into any trouble installing Cerb4, you can sign up for a free trial from the Cerb4 website.  We’ll handle the technical side for you (backups, scaling, upgrades), and you can focus on your business — unless, of course, your business is server management (in which case we feel your pain!).

We’ll probably do another milestone or two inside the 4.2 branch as the inevitable small things come up from thousands of people hammering on it.  Then it’s onward to 4.3, which at this point looks like many Web-API improvements, mobile interface improvements, better control of Support Center users from the worker GUI, and other popular feedback.

If you don’t already follow the Cerb4 blog or Twitter, please do!  Your timely feedback during on-going development makes a huge difference (we try to keep the noise to a minimum in these channels):
http://www.cerb4.com/blog/
http://twitter.com/cerb4

If you’d like to be even more involved during development:
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD
http://github.com/wgm/cerb4

Thanks for using Cerb4!  We’ve heard so many interesting stories of how the app is being put to use.  Keep that feedback coming. :)

-Jeff@WGM

With the release of Cerberus Helpdesk 4.1 today, and a pile of over 147 improvements inspired by your feedback delivered into your waiting arms, it’s finally time for me to vindicate a comment I made about a year ago.

Back in May 2008, I wrote a blog post justifying a price drop at the time by saying:

You’re probably thinking this lead-in sounds like a typical justification for raising prices, right? Well here’s the curve ball… we think we’ve been pricing Cerb4 too high based on its exciting future potential that (for the most part) only we can see right now.

On our end, we have a unique perspective of the Cerb4 rewrite.  It gave us an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over with a load of things we knew we wanted to do better.  E-mail has changed far less over the past few years than the tools and philosophies behind building fast and scalable apps for the web.  Back in 2002 we didn’t expect the project to grow to this point.  There was no vision or plan in place, and the code was working only because it was between being broken.  By 2006 it was getting difficult for us to make any changes to Cerb3 without breaking things, as we had bootstrapped the project since the early days by accepting nearly every feature request in exchange for a couple sales.

That’s why for almost the first two years of Cerb4, we spent the majority of our time sweating through the invisible engineering required to make future development easier — designing a system that *would* be changed daily from good feedback, and would be built to thrive in that environment — even when all that work didn’t translate into anything people could see or play with.  Everything was about future potential.  We could picture it, but we couldn’t keep asking you guys to close your eyes and imagine it.

I’d like to think today we no longer need to ask you guys to imagine it.  It took two years of hard work and soul-searching to build the platform and concepts of 4.0, and from that point it only took about 3 months to deliver the 147+ improvements in 4.1.  That total counts some huge leaps forward (e.g. workspaces, custom fields done right, worker-level permissions) as single improvements.  We could never have done that without the Cerb4 rewrite.  Beyond the speed of 4.1 development, the app is (almost paradoxically) *more* maintainable now than before the recent update.  That’s all the result of having a plan.

Alright, I can hear the grumblers in the back row muttering “Enough with the foreplay…” — OK… OK!

We’ve had a lot of success with the community-edition of Cerb4 introducing new people to the project.  That version limits people to 3 workers and blocks a couple non-essential features.  We’ve talked to so many people who would like to use the full app, but felt the jump from $0 to $499 was too steep; and we’ve agreed, but we still felt strongly against disabling anything important to create a cheaper version.

With the latest development we feel we’re finally at a point where we can reintroduce the per-worker licensing, in the interest of offering a more affordable entry-price (even more crucial in the present economy), with the ability to scale up the number of workers gradually as Cerb4 pays off.

In a nutshell:

• We’re still offering free licenses to qualifying charities and open source projects.
• Small businesses (below $250,000 USD per year revenue) and educational institutions can now purchase Cerb4 for $99 (total) for the first 3 workers, for all functionality, and $50 per additional worker up to 15.  After 15 workers a license will become unlimited.
• Everyone else can purchase Cerb4 for $199 (total) for the first 3 workers and $75 per additional worker up to 15.  Then the same thing happens, a 15 worker license becomes unlimited.
• Everyone who sponsored Cerb4 development up to this point by already buying a license has an unlimited license with no costs and no strings.  You may have to ping us for a new serial number, but we owe everything to you guys/gals for believing in us.  You kept the lights on so we could get to this point.  Thank you! Thank you!  Thank you!
• Starter Licenses (the first 3 workers) and additional worker licenses can now be purchased from our store.
• We’ve also reintroduced an Unlimited License in the store which has the benefit of being $100 cheaper to buy up front than to upgrade past 15 workers.  It also retains the above discount for small business and educational use.

Inevitably, these changes are going to be much cheaper for some people going forward and a little more expensive for others.  We’ll probably have some issues come back to the surface, like “unpaid helpdesk volunteers” or disabled worker accounts.  We’ll continue to err on the side of fairness.

Everything said, we feel the one-time cost per worker *is* fair given everything you’re getting in return at this point — but I’d like to make one thing abundantly clear: If you want to use Cerb4 and money is the only thing stopping you, pick up a phone or open your e-mail client and talk to us.  We’ll help you out.  We don’t see ourselves as selling bits that are already written; the current state of things is our resumé, and your purchase will fund development going forward (with whatever new innovations that brings).  If it was realistic, we’d just plop down a huge subjective tip jar and be done with it. :)  We’re obviously not economists, but our process has worked well enough for the past 7 years.  Thanks to you for that!

I’m preparing several new videos to walk through the latest changes.  I’ll also do another post here about the biggest improvements.  If you’re really eager, you can scroll through the full list of changes in the forums.  I’ve bolded the things I think you’ll find most interesting.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

We’ve strived to make your evaluation as painless as possible: no time limits, all the source code, and all the functionality running on your own hardware.  That much freedom is a risk on our part.  Occasionally we’ll talk to someone who loves the system but has fewer than three helpdesk workers and they feel a bit guilty that they didn’t need to buy anything.  First, there’s no need to feel guilty!  We want the free version to actually work as promised.  But if you’re one of those people, especially if you’re in an established company that routinely pays for software expenses when there’s a licensing “gun” pointed at your head, I’d like to ask you to sponsor our project entirely based on whether you find it useful.  We consider your contribution as a vote of confidence in what we’re doing; which enables us to keep forging ahead without having to weaken the project by pandering on roadmap functionality (doing things just because they’ll close a few stuck sales, opposed to doing things because they’ll improve the project for everyone).

Think of it this way: a $499 order contributes about 10 developer hours to the project (including wages, health benefits, space, and tools).  In exchange you’re getting over 6.5 years of software evolution, several decades of combined software and technology experience at your disposal, and a dedicated group of people on our end who are immersed in thinking about how much more you could be getting out of your helpdesk (which is surely more than just a never-ending pile of messages to write back to every morning).  We don’t look at sales as recouping the costs of getting to this point, we consider them as encouragement to keep marching forward.  That’s why we don’t think it makes much sense to hold major functionality hostage as a way of funding the project.

So that’s it for my plea for why you should support the project.  Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit out of it!  ;)  We’re not one of those companies that calls you 75 times just because you downloaded an app to take a look.  We really do mean ‘free’ when we say free version.

Thanks!

-Jeff@WGM

[ This Open Letter was sent to Cerb2/Cerb3 On-Demand customers this afternoon. ]

Hey there,

It’s time for us to spend more of our lives on the Cerberus Helpdesk project focusing on what we feel we’re doing right.

While we’re making a good case that Cerb4 is more focused, coherent, and easier to use than past versions, we feel we likely haven’t spent enough time explaining the advantages of our Cerb4 On-Demand model. There’s a lot of value in providing things On-Demand that goes far beyond just having access to the software with your browser; we take over all the server-side headaches — upgrades, backups, security, performance tuning, monitoring, etc.

As a Cerb2/Cerb3 On-Demand user you’re already familiar with how the basic process works. However, we rebuilt Cerb4 from scratch around what we’ve learned over the past several years by hosting hundreds of helpdesks like yours. There are many advantages in the latest version that we simply can’t offer to users of past versions because of the intentional deep cooperation between Cerb4’s design and the On-Demand model.

Which brings me to my point: It’s increasingly time-consuming for us to manage multiple On-Demand environments, especially given that the past versions are inefficient by design. We need to face the fact that we will never return a significant amount development attention to the older versions. We’re very confident in the Cerb4 foundation and approach. We need to retire Cerb2 and Cerb3.

Consequently, we’d like to offer you a choice from these more sustainable options (in order of long-term viability):

#1) Upgrade to Cerb4.

Cerb4 is different, but there’s a method to the madness. We’ve reigned in the “Frankenstein Factor” to refocus the project around a central mission: team-based e-mail that helps you extract value from all the conversations taking place every day that would be closed and lost forever in other applications. We haven’t perfected that process yet, but it’s something we constantly refer to as we look ahead. For example, you should have a way to highlight great feedback independent of a ticket – tickets are quickly buried, but good ideas and opinions should survive them and find their way to the right decision makers who aren’t on the front lines of customer service.

Incentives: If you’re currently paying less than $65/mo for On-Demand you can keep your current discounted rate with Cerb4 until you cancel. If you’re currently paying more we’ll discount you to $65/mo for unlimited workers. We’ll also migrate your existing helpdesk data to the new service free of charge.

All our Cerb4 On-Demand helpdesks are located on our faster network and fastest servers.

You can find an overview of what’s offered with Cerb4 On-Demand here:

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/On-Demand

#2) Move On-Site.

If you feel that you absolutely can’t use anything but Cerb2 or Cerb3 then you can continue running your current version forever if you move your helpdesk to a general purpose hosting account or server. Our objection is to living with our past mistakes, but if you want to be roommates with our past mistakes then you have our blessing.

Incentives: We’ll offer you a free On-Site license for Cerb2 or Cerb3. We can also provide a database backup in your preferred format, and we’ll even upload it to your desired location for you (which is usually much faster than downloading it and re-uploading it).

#3) Stay, but pay more.

Our network is now specialized for Cerb4 On-Demand, and the current discontinuity requires us to teach our team three major ways of doing everything. The earlier versions predate many of our team members, and you can imagine how wrong it feels to spend our time training new people our outdated ways of thinking. It’s a pointless, time-consuming, corrupting influence – and that’s putting it lightly.

We’ll be moving any legacy helpdesks that decide to “stay put” to our new server network. These are faster machines, on a faster network, with more maintainable environments. While these are more maintainable, it doesn’t avoid the issue of us having to support and train for three different environments.

DIS-incentives: On November 1st 2008 we’ll be raising the monthly rate of Cerb2 On-Demand and Cerb3 On-Demand to $125/mo.

Please respond at your earliest convenience to let us know your preferred course of action. If we don’t hear back from you we’ll assume option #3 (which preserves your current situation but raises the price).

-Jeff@WGM

Regarding The Fundamentals Of Our Cerby Are Strong:
we are not sure what to make of this message and find it, frankly, alarming. Are we to understand that your company and your product are in danger and that we had better move to another product? To us, this message sounds like a cry for help, or at least it rings alarm bells.
-a concerned Cerb4 customer

Hey there,

The issue is that everything we can do from our end — price, functionality, value, philosophy — has the risk of being overshadowed by the Market’s irrational, paralyzing fear of financial Armageddon.

As I mentioned in the very first paragraph of that message, our company tends to experience an upside when budgets are tight since our software is relatively inexpensive and provides a great value.  The only negative implication I can find in the message we sent out is the ‘downside’ note that we’re not winning every sale — who does in any situation?

We’ve always had the risk, when getting most of our income from one-time sales, that we’d someday saturate our niche.  Realizing that inevitability, we’ve built up our On-Demand option that provides ongoing services (e.g. application hosting, backups, optimization, support, custom development) for monthly residuals.  While that’s more of a time investment than simply selling licenses to run on your hardware, it’s also more stable and creates a stronger “outsource” partnership between us and our clients.  It’s leasing out our experience instead of depending entirely on software which was written in the past.

We’re not in grave financial danger — we could run the company from a coffee shop on a shared laptop if it came down to it.  Unless we start making a lot of silly mistakes, or the sky actually does fall, it’s not going to get that bad.

If we lose the pulse of the community and stop producing software that you feel is worth what you’re paying, then that would be a very appropriate point for you to jump overboard.  However, if you’re simply worried that some external forces will dissolve our company and force us into unemployment, you can worry when we start giving everything away for free and we stop writing spry responses to your e-mails of concern. ;)

-Jeff@WGM