We’ve had a lot of great feature requests for all kinds of notification events in Cerb4.  I agree that two of the big things Cerb4 can do better are (#1) notifications for everything and (#2) making it easier to pull more work without having to dig and step on toes.  This post is going to focus on #1.

There are a lot of feature requests that don’t specifically say they should belong to a notification system, but they really make the most sense in that context.  A good example of that is the requests we get for “SLA reminders” or “task reminders”.  It wouldn’t make good design sense to invent yet another way to send you e-mail from the helpdesk, and yet another way to configure them.  You’d need a new helpdesk just to manage the flood of status update junk your helpdesk was sending to you (and maybe that’s fine for our competition, but it’s not a situation I want to be responsible for).

Consequently, in providing a better notification system the main thing I knew we didn’t want to do was simply send all these status updates through e-mail.  I started to elaborate in depth here, but my thoughts ballooned into another post in their own right.  The short version is that Cerb4 tries to reduce your e-mail workload instead of mindlessly piling on even more.  When you don’t separate your routine e-mail from events that need your immediate attention, you can end up becoming desensitized to the very process that you’re counting on to get your attention when it actually matters. (Either that or you become a very distracted individual!)

Because of this philosophy of trusting your notifications to be meaningful and having the intended party react in a timely fashion, we designed a new, global notification system for workers that can be easily reused by every part of Cerb4 (including plugins we and the community haven’t dreamed up yet).

The “Notifications” tab shows up in the “home” area, and it’s now the default landing page when you and your team log in to your helpdesk.  This helps ensure that, in the worst case of missing every ping, someone is at least seeing things that need their personal attention the very next time they log in.  If all goes as planned, now the longest something will go unnoticed is a workday or a lunch break.  We’ve noticed through our own use of the task system that the longest something can be overlooked when it requires worker proactivity to check (clicking into an off-the-beaten-path page) is far longer than we’d like to admit.  I have a feeling we’re not alone there.

This new global notification list also has a consolidated RSS feed, which saved us from the unhealthy trend where you’d need 10+ different RSS feeds to keep your eye on new tickets, assignments, tasks, opportunities, etc.  With the single notification feed you’ll automatically start to receive notifications from new functionality that takes advantage of the system.

There were a lot of things we could hook into the new notification system right away, but we decided to start with the most common events that were being mishandled.  We’ll likely be taking more advantage of the new system with each successive update.

The events currently taking advantage of the new system are:

• New Ticket Assignments
• New Task Assignments
• New Ticket Comments
• New Ticket Sticky Notes

The highly-useful thing about comment and sticky note notifications is that the worker leaving the original note can choose any number of other workers to notify about it.  Our focus on usability mandated that we have a shortcut button for the ticket owner when choosing who to notify, of course!  There’s no reason you should have to dig for that every time you leave a comment.

In the very near future, we’re planning to add global notification support for:

• Task Reminders (approaching due date; over due date)
• Ticket Reminders (according to SLA)
• Forum Explorer Assignments
• Helpdesk-wide Announcements
• Server Monitoring Events (high load, no ping)
• … and wherever else it makes sense.  Your ideas here are welcome, as always!

Another nice usability aspect of the new notifications is that they’re marked as “read” when you click the link to acknowledge them.  This means your list of notifications is always showing you something new, and you never need to click back to remove old items so new ones show up.  If you want to keep old notifications around until you explicitly delete them, use an external RSS reader that provides a history (which they all pretty much do).

While I’m completely sold on the consolidated RSS feed for staying on top of things that need my attention, I realize that there will always be people who want e-mail notifications because it makes it easier to send updates to mobile phones, etc.  In the next update I plan to add a per-worker option for sending notifications (or digests of several notifications) to e-mail.

The Global Worker Notifications list in the helpdesk: (click to zoom)

How the RSS feed looks on your desktop: (click to zoom)

Here’s you leaving me a sticky note on a ticket that needs my attention: (click to zoom)

It’s hard to miss new notifications when you have a decent, dedicated RSS reader that gives you visual cues on your desktop:

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

When I designed the skeleton of Cerb4 about a year ago, I built it with the intention of flipping a switch for UTF-8 support at some point in the future.  Full UTF-8 support is still a tricky thing with PHP5 since it deals with everything internally as latin1/iso-8859-1 (Western Latin) encoded.  That means most functions aren’t multibyte friendly.  On top of that, MySQL also defaults to latin1 (though it’s easy to switch multibyte support on).

We had been planning to wait until PHP6 for multibyte languages since it will finally support them natively, but there has been a UTF-8 patch for Cerb4 floating around the forums which actually works quite well.  It cleanly builds off the placeholders I left in the code and mops up some lingering issues.

Earlier this week I had Dan@WGM and Mike@WGM take the patch and put it through the paces.  They made some improvements (a simple toggle for latin1 or utf8) and sent the new version to me.  I fixed some minor inconsistencies, and a templates issue that was corrupting multibyte display, and merged the patch into the official codebase.

That means with the next stable release we’ll *finally* have UTF-8 support.  I wrote up some preliminary instructions for converting an existing database to UTF-8.  You can take a peek, but please don’t follow along yet (unless you’re planning on running the daily development builds of Cerb4).

Special thanks to rogerger and LudovicLange from the community forums for their hard work and collaboration!  ;)  It’s great to have some outside eyeballs on the code.

-Jeff@WGM

(The text shown above was copied for testing purposes from The Kermit Project’s helpful UTF-8 Sampler)

The new Feedback Tracking plugin helps you capture the valuable praise and criticism that would otherwise be buried along with closed tickets (even worse, after only a single front-line worker reads it).  This feedback can be pooled into lists which share this insight with decision makers who may not normally be involved with reading helpdesk e-mail.

Some examples of overlooked value you can extract from helpdesk conversations:

• Cancels - Ask departing clients a quick question or two on their way out the door and track the interesting responses.  They usually have some valuable and candid feedback about what you could be doing better.
• Mindshare/Goodwill - Track referrals: how did people hear from you and what was said?  This helps you see if you’re getting your message out.
• Testimonials - Capture testimonials in a completely natural way.  You can look through this list to find comments to use in your marketing campaigns or to share on your website.  It’s also great to read these comments as a team to counterbalance the fact that customer service usually means dealing with problems most of the day.  Remind people what’s going right.
• Competition - Any time someone is providing their opinion on the contrast between you and your competition, track it!  This is how real people in the marketplace think and make decisions.

The Feedback Tracking plugin isn’t limited to just things you find on tickets; you can use it to track feedback from live chats, community forums, blogs, phone calls, etc.  You can track comments anonymously and you can save a link back to external resources (such as the full forum discussion from where you excerpted a quote).

There are also some nice usability-minded touches:

• You can highlight text from any ticket message, click ‘more’ (next to Reply) and ‘Capture Feedback’.  This will automatically fill in the quote (no copy & paste!).
• When you add a new feedback entry from a ticket a new comment will be added to the conversation automatically.  This summarizes the feedback you extracted to save other workers from the hassle of searching to see if something was already tracked yet.

Check out the screencast below to see the plugin in action.  (If your company network blocks YouTube I’ll try to get an alternative link up shortly)

-Jeff@WGM

The Time Tracking plugin has been a long time coming since it was voted up months ago as one of the top two feature requests in a community forum poll.  The development kept going to the back burner because we didn’t want to simply “hack” something together that mimicked Cerb3’s approach.  Our past approaches were uninspired.  We had to take this feature request and turn it into something we we would use — enthusiastically — ourselves.  We never actually used the older implementations (it was created on contract to someone else’s spec).

A couple months ago I posted a preview of the Time Tracking “timer” functionality, but we ended up stalling out shortly after that point because we needed to think a lot about where time tracking meets billing and usability.  We also needed to design how time entries would link to organizations (for integration with SLA and billing) without adding extra hoops to workers who didn’t need to be concerned with anything more than responding to people who wrote in.

At this point, I’m really happy with the workflow we have in place for Time Tracking in Cerb4; it fits into the nature rhythm of reading and responding to messages.  Workers aren’t saddled with extraneous steps, and managers are able to bill clients for the workers’ time without having to micromanage each entry.

We’re hoping to get the Time Tracking plugin in the next update; which we’d like to have ready by the later half of the month (Oct 2008).  This plugin will likely belong to a set of advanced functionality that will be free to all paying On-Site and On-Demand users.

Below you can find a video preview I put together to demonstrate the Time Tracking plugin in action.  It includes an audio commentary where I explain our thought process behind the implementation.  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

-Jeff@WGM

More usability tweaks from your feedback. The next milestone release will include a better visual indication of whether a sender already has detailed information in your address book or not.  It also includes the ability to see a linked organization for each participant in a ticket conversation, which was sorely lacking in past versions.

See the video below for a demonstration of the “before and after”.

-Jeff@WGM