At its core, the KB is a collection of informative “articles” your workers create inside the Helpdesk, as a way to keep “documentation” relevant to your organization available for reference. When used properly, it can serve as a collaborative resource for both your workers and your users to search through when they need to find information — you might think of it as a FAQ of sorts.

If you’ve read my earlier write-up detailing the Fetch & Retrieve tool, the Knowledgebase will sound very familiar, almost too similar perhaps. Both serve the same general purpose as an information resource, both are used for retrieving documentation collected and updated by your organization, and both allow you to search and grab text right from your reply box. But that’s where the similarities end; it’s the few differences that makes the KB valuable in its own right, and worth using in addition to F&R.

• Unlike F&R which “taps” into existing outside resources such as blogs, wikis and forums, the KB is a single resource created and maintained internally within the Helpdesk. All of your workers can edit and develop new KB articles, so if you don’t want workers making changes to your external resources, you can let them generate content for the KB instead.
• All or portions of the KB can be opened to the public at large. With the public KB in place, your users can go to a single search portal and find any relevant information without bothering your staff with e-mails. By locking out portions of the KB, users can only see the information you want them to see, while at the same time, workers can maintain a “private” section of the KB for your organization’s own internal use.

With those details out of the way, getting the KB production-ready requires two stages of configuration corresponding to the two use cases just mentioned. The first half consists of creating your KB articles and prepping it for your workers to use within the Helpdesk. The second half is directed at deploying your KB to a public directory, which users can access outside of the Helpdesk.

Since explaining the entire process is difficult to do in one reasonably sized write-up, I’m going to only cover the first half here. By the end of this article you should have an internal KB setup for your workers to use (we’ll save launching the public KB for another time).

So the first thing you have to do before anything else is create your basic topics, or categories, to house your KB articles. Categories are loosely structured in a tree-like hierarchy, with a parent having multiple children (I say loosely because the KB can have more than one root). In this case the roots are referred to as top-level categories, where all other categories spawn from. To start click ‘helpdesk setup’ then the ‘Knowledgebase’ tab and add your first couple of categories.

Categories can be anything you want to help organize your KB articles into logical groupings. I’ve created two generic top-level categories here: “Private (Internal)” and “Public (external)”, to make it clear that one category will be for internal use and the other will be opened to the public. In real life, the “private” category might be the name of the software your workers are training to use, while the “public” category could be the name of a product you sell to your customers.

Once you create the top-level categories you have a couple of choices; you can either create subcategories or start creating the actual KB articles. In both cases you need to move on to the Knowledgebase section by clicking ‘kb’ in the main menu, and then clicking into one of your top-level categories. Clicking the ‘Add Article’ button will bring up an “editing” window where you can fill in all the details of your new KB article.

Here you create a title, pick which category or categories it belongs to, and write down the content of the article in html or plain text. Once you save, the article will appear in your ‘Articles’ list at the bottom.

At this point the KB has all the basics down and is ready for use. From this section, your workers can of course browse the KB tree and look up information, however they can also search the KB while they’re answering tickets. As you write your replies you will see a button named ‘Knowledgebase’; click the button, pick a category if you wish, and then start a search. The titles of any relevant articles will appear and clicking one will open a pop-up window with the contents of that article. From here you are free to copy and paste any information you find useful into your reply.

As you can see, when used in conjunction with replies the KB works very similar to F&R — workers can refer to it whenever they need to look up any information. The next major application of the KB is letting your users explore categories of your choosing, outside of the Helpdesk. We’ll cover that in part 2.

-joegeck@wgm

We’re proud today to announce several new major features:

• Time Tracking - track how your workers spend time by organization and activity.
• Feedback Tracking - capture valuable customer feedback from conversations and share it with the appropriate team: testimonials, criticism, competitive comparisons, mindshare, etc.
• UTF-8 / Translations - now you can send and receive mail with international character sets. You can also translate the helpdesk interface into most languages.
• Translation Editor - create or share language packs from right inside the app. The highly-usable translation editor allows you to see the result of your translations in real-time. It supports incremental translations (quickly finding new text from plugins or upgrades).
• Spam Analysis - if you’ve ever wondered how Cerb4’s anti-spam system makes decisions you can enable the Spam Analysis plugin and click the new tab while displaying any ticket.
• Home and Activity - ‘Home’ provides an easier way to keep track of your assignments: tickets, tasks, forums, etc. ‘Activity’ groups together feedback, tasks, time tracking, and forum explorer to reduce clutter. Both areas are plugin-ready.

You can read through the appropriate blog entries for more in-depth explanations:

• Sneak Peek: Sender Management
  
• Sneak Peek: Time Tracking
  
• Sneak Peek: Feedback Tracking
  
• Sneak Peek: UTF-8 / Localization
  

Be sure to subscribe to the blog for a stream of tips, sneak peeks, advisories, and community discussion.

You can find the full list of changes for this release in the forums:
http://forum.cerb4.com/showthread.php?t=1423

Thanks for being a part of the project!

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

“Can you tell me more about your CRM plugin?”
-a curious customer

Sure!

At the moment the CRM plugin allows you to find ‘opportunities’ (leads) from helpdesk conversations and track them separate from tickets.  The nice thing about that is you can import leads from anywhere (as simple as e-mail addresses or with all their contact info), and then you can see what historical conversations you’ve had with those people.  For example, if I have a beta form on our website for a new project, I could import any signups as opportunities in the helpdesk, and then I could quickly tell which of them we know something about from past tickets.

Ultimately we’d like to use the plugin to do product management and associate products/services with customers.  Then each time someone writes in I’d know what our current relationship with them is.  I’d also be able to track custom fields along with the product/service.  For example, I’d be able to track a few notes about your Cerb4 configuration so we don’t ask you the same questions over and over each time you write in for support.  It’s bad for business if every time you write in we act like it’s the first time we’ve heard of you.

CRM for us right now is still more about what we can do than what we’ve already done; but as the latest released just showed, now that we have a really solid e-mail component at the heart of Cerb4 we can start to do some really interesting things on top of it.  Feedback capturing and time tracking are just the beginning of that mindset.

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

I see this question come up every so often in our support inbox and thought it was finally time to officially address it. For those reading this before actually trying Cerb4, let me show you what all the fuss is about. On the last page of the Cerb4 installer you will see the following image:

If you ignore it, a second warning appears whenever you browse the ‘helpdesk setup’. Unfortunately this ugly warning will not go away until you actually do what it says.

So why are we constantly reminding you to delete this “potential security risk”? I’m sure there are a host of legitimate reasons, but a couple of obvious reasons come to mind. For one thing the ‘install’ folder contains a phpinfo file, giving sneaky individuals a possible entry point to grab information about your server. And second by removing this directory, it eliminates the possiblity of someone purposely or accidentally running the installer again — destroying your current setup.

Ironically the most confusing part of this whole message, is where to actually find this directory. It’s a lot simpler than you might think as there is nothing to do in the Cerb4 web interface. You simply need to delete the physical ‘install’ directory from inside the Cerb4 folder you downloaded and unzipped on your server.

Note that if you grabbed Cerb4 through Subversion, the directory will re-appear on future ‘SVN Update(s)’. It’s a bit of a pain but you will have to delete it again.

With the ‘install’ folder gone you should be a little safer and you can finally kiss those annoying pink messages goodbye.

-joegeck@wgm

You can of course save and reuse “thank you” messages, newsletters, and announcements, but one of my favorite uses for templates is call logging. With the right outline in place, your workers can capture all the right information in a standard layout. To create a call logging form, go to the mail section and click ‘log message’, ‘E-mail Templates’. and then ‘Create Template’.

Everything here should be fairly self-explanatory — by specifying a ‘folder’ you can categorize templates into use cases, and with placeholders you can automatically sub in values, such as your name and job title.

Once you save your template, it’s ready for use! From now on you can add this text into any message you compose with a couple of clicks. Just click ‘E-mail Templates’ and then click the name of your template, the text will be inserted into the message wherever you left the blinking cursor.

Pretty simple, no? However there are a couple caveats with E-mail Templates you should be aware of. One, templates are “shared” and can be used by any worker in your Helpdesk, i.e. there is no permission system. And two, “send mail”, “log message” and replies are three separate sets of templates, meaning templates created in one area are not saved in the other. If you frown on either behavior, there are two open JIRA issues you can vote on: CHD-828 and CHD-712.

So the next time you come up with a golden reply to a common question, go ahead and save it as a template — the benefits far outweigh the hassle. When used properly everyone has to do less typing, reducing spelling mistakes and embarrassing omissions, and perhaps more importantly saving company time. Even if you only use a template a couple of times, you can always delete it later. 

Got any templates you like to use? Share them with us in the comments.

-joegeck@wgm

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)

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

One of the key differences to this edition of Cerb, is the expanded list of available resources that can be searched. Fetch & Retrieve has been improved to support many different types of web applications built outside the scope of the Helpdesk. Things like blogs, forums, wikis or any website where “documentation” important to your organization has been scattered about, can be effectively tapped into. The only criteria is the web software returns its search results in an RSS (XML) feed. While it may take a little bit of extra setup to add support for these external applications, the biggest advantage is you no longer need to copy all your important materials into Cerb4’s internal knowledgebase.

Now to make Fetch & Retrieve work, the only piece of information you need out of our existing web resources is a search adapter URL. These URLs usually take the form of your typical search query, fitted into an RSS feed. So here is a legitimate feed constructed, first, by doing a search on Google News for the term ‘Microsoft’, and then clicking the RSS button  .

http://news.google.com/news?output=rss&q=Microsoft

The only modifications you need to make this ready for Fetch & Retrieve, is to replace the search term ‘Microsoft’ with the generic term, ‘#find#’. The final useable URL would look like this:

http://news.google.com/news?output=rss&q=#find#

On the wiki page you can find a number of similar URLs to hook into some of the more common applications such as WordPress, vBulletin and MediaWiki. To start adding knowledge resources go to the ‘helpdesk setup’ page and click the ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ tab.

Once everything is configured, you can start using this searching capability as part of your daily routine. The next time a customer writes in, click the ‘Fetch & Retrieve’ button in your reply to search your information resources; any relevant text snippets and web links returned can be passed on to your customers. Just copy & paste anything useful you find.

When used properly, Fetch & Retrieve will give your workers answers to all but the most complex questions found in your Helpdesk. With the right setup in place, your workers can easily find important information that’s been piling up over the years, whether it’s spread out over your intranet or the internet at large. Don’t forget that this can help train your new workers as well — by giving them access to a wealth of knowledge documented throughout your organization’s history, they will be just as capable of responding to inquiring e-mails as your veterans.

A wise man once said, the more you know… the more you can answer.

-joegeck@wgm

We have our hands full with several collaboration-based projects (like Cerb4) and we didn’t want to have to stop and build something.

We’ve been on the lookout for a ready-made ordering system that had the following benefits:

• Source code (but not necessarily free)
• Clean design (minimalistic, with templates to build out from)
• Coupons
• Resellers
• More payment options: Credit Card, PayPal, Check, Purchase Order, Wire, etc.
• Flexible product options
• Invoices and order history
• Electronic-delivery products
• Subscriptions support (On-Demand)

We finally found what we were looking for with CS-Cart.

Swing by the new Cerb4 shop and take a look around.  Leave feedback if there are more improvements you’d look to see.

-Jeff@WGM