The introduction of Worker Notifications was a major improvement to Cerb4.  The purpose of the feature is to tell you in real-time about things like:

• Tickets assigned to you
• Tasks assigned to you
• Comments needing your attention
• Ticket notes needing your attention

Unfortunately, the dependability of these notifications (for both sender and receiver) is greatly diminished when they’re only shown when you log in and the Home->Notifications tab is displayed.  Workers shouldn’t be expected to habitually check their notifications — that defeats the point.

In the next update, the number of unread notifications will be shown in the top right of the interface:

This alert is shown on every page, and clicking it will take you to your list of unread notifications.

That should solve the issue of notifications being unintentionally neglected by active helpdesk workers.  The next issue is to make sure workers are aware of new notifications even when their browser is minimized or closed.  Currently we provide an RSS feed.

The worker notification system isn’t limited to just tickets, tasks, comments, and notes.  Here are some other improvements we have planned:

• In 4.3 we’re planning to expose worker notifications to the Web-API so you can receive real-time alerts in a variety of other ways: Windows system tray, iPhone with push notifications, dashboards, SMS, etc.
• In 4.3 we’re also planning to allow worker notifications to be created using the same filters as ‘watchers’ do in Preferences.  This means you could set up any number of flexible criteria to watch for and then generate a notification rather than an e-mail.  By separating notifications from e-mail you run less of a risk of ignoring them entirely while you work.
• For Mac OS X users, there’s a new Fluid.app plugin that will integrate notifications with your desktop using the Dock and Growl.
• We’ve designed the worker notification system so custom plugins can also send alerts about anything.  Administrators and managers could receive snapshot reports of Group activity.  Workers could receive alerts about overdue tasks or SLA metrics.
• Notifications could have an expiration so they’d be useful for short-lived alerts.
• Notifications could provide worker-to-worker private messages without requiring an additional feature.

Worker notifications should be another great, reusable tool in the Cerb4 toolkit.  We’d love to hear what else you feel they should be capable of doing.

-Jeff@WGM

There’s a lot of ground to cover with the new 4.1 improvements: custom fields, group inbox filters, and workspaces. I figured it was probably best explained with a realistic example in the video that made use of all the new functionality: A company that wants to sort support mail from paying customers into a Priority Support group, with the rest of the mail going to Support. Their customers can still all send mail to the same support@example.com address (from contact forms or anything).

The screencast is below.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4: Using workspaces, group filters and custom fields to auto-sort priority support from Jeff Standen on Vimeo.

After a longer-than-it-should-have-taken wait, one of the most requested features is now in the 4.1 release (due on Monday, Feb 16th 2009)… auto-refresh!  If you aren’t one of the people who has been banging on development’s castle gates about this, maybe you’ll find it useful anyway.  I sure wasn’t a big fan of the idea until I came up with a compromise that didn’t sacrifice usability (like reloading in the middle of trying to use the UI, or having to toggle it on/off constantly).

People asked for this so they could park Cerb4 in a separate monitor, or on a projector, and glance at it without needing to constantly interact with it.

As usual, we may wait on something that seems simple until we feel we can do it well, but we’re always proud of what we end up with that way.

Below is a video showing the new functionality in action.  I also haven’t finished up the video on the Workspaces changes yet, so this is a ‘peek’ at that in the truest sense.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

Cerb4: Auto-Refresh from Jeff Standen on Vimeo.

Another long-time request has been the ability to mix different kinds of lists on workspaces (formerly ‘dashboards’).  I just added that functionality to the upcoming 4.1 release as well.

This is incredibly powerful when mixed with the new custom fields and mail filters.  You can create a workspace for an afternoon project — such as marketing — and mix lists of organizations, tasks, and opportunities on the same workspace tab; including filtering based on your custom fields and showing those fields as columns!  When you’re done you can simply toss the workspace.  That saves so much clicking around and swapping searches.

My head spins at the potential.

-Jeff@WGM

Here’s a quick screenshot of some of the crazy things you can do with Custom Fields and Group Inbox Filters in Cerberus Helpdesk 4.1 (which we’re hoping to have out in a week or two).  I’ll probably do a video about the changes this weekend, but for now I leave you with this:

-Jeff@WGM

The upcoming 4.1 release includes some major improvements to mail workflow.

Some highlights:

• A ‘Workflow’ area has been added to Mail to provide a focused way to do the most important work first.
• Buckets can now be reordered so the most important piles of work are shown first.
• Buckets (including inbox) can be flagged as ‘assignable’ by group managers. Buckets that aren’t assignable — like: spam, newsletters, receipts — no longer count toward totals in the Workflow area.
• The mail area now displays in tabs, with the defaults being: Workflow, Overview, and Search.
• Workspaces are now much better integrated with the rest of the mail section.  Each workspace displays as a tab, and you can continue to create as many lists per tab as you want.  They’re no longer out of the way.
• Overview has been simplified and returned to its original purpose: showing the status of everything at a glance.  It wasn’t the most efficient way to find the right things to work on.

I recorded a quick screencast video that walks through the changes:

Using the new mail workflow functionality in Cerb4 on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM

We have some major improvements with the Address Book and Custom Fields ready for the next update (which is going through Q/A now).  The Address Book’s potential had been neglected up to this point, and we’re really excited about the new possibilities.

Below is a quick screencast that I put together to show the improvements in action.  This includes:

• Modeling a brand new workflow in the Address Book with a few custom fields.
• Using custom fields as new list columns and search filters.
• Leaving notes on Organization records to track progress and contacts.
• Exporting Address Book information to CSV or XML using the built-in search functionality.
• Using Bulk Update on Organizations and Addresses to save monotonous data entry.

I realized after I finished the video that I didn’t include an example of setting custom fields using the “peek” pop-ups; but you’re able to quickly enter any of that info where you normally use peek (lists, search results, record display).

Here’s the video (it runs about 9 minutes):

We hope to have this release available as a stable update by the end of the month.

Think we’re on the right track?  Are we missing something?  We’d love to hear some feedback in the comments.

-Jeff@WGM

I know a lot of my conclusions here are going to be forehead-slapping obvious to some of you — but I’m going to post this anyway!

One of the big things people have been asking for in Cerb4 is having custom fields on contacts (organizations and addresses).  You could add custom fields to those records in Cerb3, but the approach left a lot to be desired on performance and code maintenance/simplicity.  I’ve always felt like the custom field and search results combination was the most complicated part of the app’s design.

I know I’d been groaning and avoiding custom fields growing beyond tickets because of the cruft introduced by earlier versions.  But when I finally sat down and thought about it, I came up with something as elegant and speedy as the rest of Cerb4, which allowed us to add custom fields to every type of object in the helpdesk.  This is one of those “How did we ever live without this!” moments for me.

Once I was over my bias about custom fields I started to realize where they led:

• One of the worst parts of introducing new features is having to decide on a neutral design that tries not to do too little or too much.  Inherently, that makes it really hard to please anybody.  With custom fields we can provide a new type of object, like a “call” or time tracking entry, without having to feel like any fields we come up with will box people in to our particular way of working.  This solves a few standing, nagging issues — like how people are expected to keep track of which time tracking entries are billed (through an outside invoicing process).
• Some existing records in Cerb4 now have fields we feel are superfluous.  We can now use the upgrade step on a new release to move these fields into custom fields, and people who no longer want them can remove them entirely.  A good example of this is the “Account #” field on organization records — if you’re not using it, it’s just wasting space by being there.  It confuses teams who don’t have a pre-existing account number for their customers.  The same is true of the “Service Level” feature, which will probably be pushed to custom fields very soon to make way for better SLA functionality.
• It’s tough to get people to agree on how granular a field like “priority” or “status” on tickets should be.  Those concepts are useful to a lot of people, but we don’t feel like they warrant being required.
• Sometimes different teams want to assign objects to workers (e.g. organization records to account managers) that we didn’t build into the system.  We really don’t want to add the concept of assignment to things unless people really want the workflow — otherwise it’s just another unused field taking up space.  By letting people add custom fields to those objects to track ad-hoc assignment, everybody wins.
• This moves dozens of other great ideas forward by removing the fear of bloating Cerb4: assigning products to organizations in the CRM plugin, the call logging plugin, SLAs, etc.

To risk getting a little technical, the revelation to me isn’t so much about what custom fields can do — that much was obvious — but I’m excited about having designed custom fields as a “platform service”; which is a fancy way of saying Devblocks (Cerb4’s engine) now makes it painless for developers to allow custom fields everywhere.  That even includes objects that come from third-party plugins.  For example, if someone out there created a live chat plugin, they could add complete custom field functionlity to transcripts (list columns, search filters, export, peek data-entry) in a matter of minutes; and it would work exactly like the rest of Cerb4.

You can expect to see a lot of interesting things come out of this in the very near future!  The mental gears are spinning at full speed again.

-Jeff@WGM

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