New to Cerb5? The truth about upgrading

Documentation August 4th, 2010

posted by Joe Geck

Notice anything different about the title?… That’s right, we’ve finally made the jump to Cerb5! Hopefully this comes as a surprise to very few people, because by the time you read this we’ve already released a follow-up in the form of 5.0.1. For those looking to jump on board, that means the early adopters have successfully put it through the ringer and many of the quirks have been ironed out. So if you’re still on 4.x now might be the perfect time to try it out the latest version. The software is available for consumption from the usual sources.

Installation & Upgrade Instructions

  • For new users installing Cerb5 for the first time and not upgrading, you can follow the basic install guide.

If you tried Cerb4 in the past and didn’t like it but thought you’d try again fresh with 5.x, the instructions and prerequisites are very similar to 4.3.1.

Nothing super fancy for this upgrade. You’re checking out the latest 5.x code from a different repository, installing it in a new location, and then updating the 4.x database to work with it.

  • If you’re upgrading from a legacy desk (2.x/3.x) you’ll need to do a migration first:

This upgrade is a little more complicated. Because the database format changed you need to get the data out first and then “copy” it into the new system. This entails installing a fresh copy of Cerb5, get it up & running so you can login, export the key components from your old version into a Cerb-readable format, then import them into the new 5.x Helpdesk. The components include things like tickets, workers, address book contacts, and Knowledgebase articles.

New pricing, restrictions, and no free updates

Cerb5 pricing

Ok this is where it gets interesting and why this blog post is titled as it is. DO NOT UPGRADE blindly to 5.x without doing a little company research first. The upgrade pricing has changed, and you may not qualify for a freebie.

  • If you purchased Cerb4 LESS than a year ago, the upgrade is in fact free at no cost.
  • If you bought Cerb4 OVER a year ago, then you are eligible for a price break. Right now that comes out to a 50% discount, though it’s not an exact science.  I’ll explain what I mean when we talk about “seats”.
  • If you’re coming from way back prior to Cerb4 (2.x/3.x) then it’s the regular price. You’ll pay the standard rates a brand new customer would.

There’s more… Cerb5 uses a new license key that restricts the software in a completely different way, and for long-time users an unexpected way. That means if you upgrade without the 5.x key handy, the software will be gimped until you request a new license from us. Furthermore if you choose to upgrade without heeding this warning, and do NOT want to pay for an equivalent license to what you’re using already, you may not be able to able operate the software like normal. The free 5.x license you’d be downgraded to restricts you to ONE seat (see next section).

The “new pricing” screenshot is from Aug 4, 2010 so price and conditions are subject to change.

New Seats format

Seats and sessions

Remember how 4.x restricted you to a maximum number of workers, no more. In 5.x you can have unlimited workers, but the catch is only a certain number can be logged in simultaneously (“seats”). So when you purchase the product this time around, you’re really buying the number of workers you envision using the system together.

For certain demographics of our customer base, there’s a good chance that number is less than the number of workers in their system. Imagine you have two shifts of employees, if there’s a daytime group consisting of 10 workers and a nighttime group of 5 workers, technically you only need to buy 10 seats not 15 seats (and not 15 workers like you would have in 4.x). That’s why I pointed out earlier that the upgrade discount is a little deceiving, cause your cost could be much less than the 50% per seat. You may not have to convert all your 4.x workers to seats in the 5.x system, and you’ll never have to buy more workers in the future. All you’ll have to worry about is if you need more seats/logins.

But if you upgrade and don’t get a new license as we discussed earlier, then you’ll be stuck with only ONE seat and thus one worker who can log in at a time. If I’m trying to log in and Scott is already logged in, then I have to wait for Scott to log out first. Not only that but I have to wait for his “session” to expire as well (see above screenshot).

Future paid updates

The update prices

Seats was new policy A, new policy B is the “update window”. Starting with Cerb5, major point releases (5.1, 5.2, 5.x) are no longer guaranteed to be free. When you purchase the software going forward you have to decide if you’re happy with the version you have right now. Beyond the short warranty period where you’ll get all major updates on the house, going forward it will cost you.

There’s no penalty for not buying each version, when you see a feature you like or fix you needed you can opt in for more updates; simply purchase another window of updates and you get the current version and any future releases in that time frame. The system will prevent you out from upgrading a 5.x desk past your expiration date.

So what about minor point releases (5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.x)? Remember those are now free for your version, and now more than ever a minor release is strictly a maintenance update; bug fixes or simple suggestions from the community only. If we find some glaring flaw in a future major release and can back port the fix into the earlier versions, we will do so.

More details on everything “license”:

The “update” screenshot is from Aug 4, 2010 so price and time window are subject to change.

Things you lose with an upgrade from 4.x

There’s probably a ton of things that have changed if you’re jumping from 2.x or 3.x, but unfortunately they’re versions of Cerb before my time with the company, so I’ll have to skip those. Let me just say if you’re migrating from that far back you’re in for a gigantic learning curve anyway!

For those upgrading from 4.3.1 to 5.0 not a whole lot is blatantly different. Sure some terminology and behavior has changed (we feel for the better), and there’s a couple of new features, but there’s only a handful of things that were outright deprecated. All of these were plugins and while a few things are gone, a few others were just made optional downloads.

Deprecated Plugins

All three of these are GONE, you cannot get them back.

Web-API — It’s now been retooled as the RESTful Web-API for 5.x. The RESTful Web-API is still named “Web-API” on it’s wiki page, so try and ignore the seemingly awkward contradiction in the name. It does not require the internal ‘helpdesk setup’ tab as it did in 4.x.

Old Web-API interface

Fetch & Retrieve — Early versions of Cerb4 included this as part of “core”, but was phased out in favor of Google Search Engine. It was put back in as an optional plugin during the latter stages of 4.x’s lifespan (helpdesk setup, Features & Plugins).

Fetch & Retrieve

Mobile phone interface — Chances are this is going to be replaced with something better shortly.

Mobile phone interface

Optional Plugins

Both of these can be downloaded via SVN, moved to the cerb5/storage/plugins directory, and enabled via ‘helpdesk setup’, ‘Features & Plugins’ – http://svn.webgroupmedia.com/cerb5/trunk/plugins/official/

Forum Explorer (severely dated documentation)

Forum Explorer

Google Search Engine (fairly up to date documentation)

Google Search Engine

Summary of new features

This is not everything by far, as a lot of the changes are more subtle. I’ve chosen to spotlight a few that already have some comprehensive documentation available. For a full list of all the changes:

Drafts — Long requested feature to save worker replies still in progress. Includes an auto-save mechanism to protect you from delivery failures (SMTP issues).

Pending Drafts

Snippets — Revamped “E-mail Templates” for improved personalization, including an expanded set of tokens (latest sender’s assigned organization) and conditional logic (if sender is from Microsoft, add a support worker’s name and phone number to the message). Auto-responses and group signatures inherited these same benefits as well.

New Order Snippet

Broadcast — Bulk messaging or replying to multiple tickets at once. The message body supports the Snippets syntax so you can write a personalized message to each recipient in one go. (The documentation for this one is still a work in progress.)

Broadcast

Explore — Global navigation toolbar, useful for paging through any list in the Helpdesk. This replaces the Prev/Next shortcuts in ticket lists, but can also be put to good use for flipping through the address book, tasks, filtered searches, and workspaces.

Explorer Bar

Out with the Old 4.x and in with the New 5.x

Starting from this point on, all blog write-ups will be 5.x focused. 4.3.1 will be the last version for the 4.x branch and all efforts in development and documentation will look to the future. (We still support Cerb4 so feel free to get a hold of us in Town Hall or via the e-mail contact form.)

Remember the new “update window” policy we talked about at the beginning? Well a side effect of that deal is not everyone will be on the latest version anymore; that was an issue back in 4.x too but a personal choice, now money ($$$) can be the deciding factor. Therefore some people will choose to stay with 5.0 and not pay for the newest release, and some people will stay on the cutting edge updating with each version. Naturally that leaves us at a disadvantage here when it comes to documentation, as each upcoming release will have brand new features and possibly re-tooled behavior for old features.

For example Links is a new 5.1+ feature and is not available to 5.0 users, which means that tutorial only applies to 5.1. The same can be said of how “Next Worker” changed. It’s not a new feature per se but the fundamental behavior has changed between point releases (5.0 -> 5.1), so we’ll need TWO separate docs explaining it for each version.

The moral of the story: I will try to make note of which 5.x version I’m writing for at the top of any corresponding blog or wiki posts. Hopefully it’s not too confusing.

See ya in Cerb5!

-joegeck@wgm

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New to Cerb4? Learn about about all (most) of the features in our HOWTOs section

Documentation, Tips & Tricks March 26th, 2010

posted by Joe Geck

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of my New to Cerb4 blog tutorials, but I assure you they will be back. In the meantime I’ve been restructuring my HOWTOs area of the wiki to better integrate these older posts into more streamlined documentation, going out of my way to ensure it’s one of the most up to date resources we have as Cerb4 evolves. 99% of the blog content that I personally wrote (Joe Geck @ WGM) has been migrated over and retooled already for easier navigation!

A goal of this mini-project was to try and consolidate all the guides together under a singular “feature” when possible. This should make it easier to locate a specific topic in the Helpdesk and learn everything there is to know in one place. For example, in the past we wrote several blog posts on Watchers. A couple of them explained the topic itself and a couple of others gave you some unique examples to implement. These have naturally been merged into one massive article on Watchers.

I’ve also applied this in different ways by simply expanding shorter articles. We had a short blog writeup that included information on how flood protection applied to auto-responses; this has been ripped out and reconstructed to be a complete guide to Auto-responses (flood protection is a dedicated troubleshooting area at the bottom now).

With all that laid out, there’s three things I want you to remember:

  1. For new users, after you’ve gone through the installer and visited the Quick Start guide to learn the basics, your next spot should be the HOWTOs section. In my opinion, this table of contents is the closest thing we have to a general feature list: Mail Rules, Ticket Masks, Time Tracking, etc. Beyond that there’s a Screen by Screen walkthrough (just like the blog’s) and a Cookbook for sample workflows should you need additional resources.
  2. Placeholders in the feature list have been added as dead links, where there isn’t sufficient (or consolidated) information yet. That means any of the red-colored links are a good indicator of what we don’t have in the way comprehensive tutorials to share. As I plan ahead and research, I’ll often add more “for later” links and fill in some of the old ones too. If you need some help in these areas right now, try our community Town Hall where we can talk you through the features.
  3. If you ever google search (or Cerb4 search) your way into an old blog post and sense it might be out of date, again please go to the HOWTOs section and find the corresponding article. You’ll notice some of the older posts have a link to the updated wiki docs already. In the future, I’ll most likely write a blog post, copy it to the wiki immediately, and simply link the two. (I still enjoy having a real blog post with screenshots for you to see in your RSS reader!)

Finally here it is, go ahead and bookmark it for your reference: http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/HOWTOs

-joegeck@wgm

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Happy 2010! Save $125 on 5-pack licenses as Cerberus Helpdesk turns 8; Cerb5 in 2010

Community, Open Letter January 4th, 2010

posted by Jeff Standen

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.

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New to Cerb4? Independent Companies article now updated for 4.3

Documentation, Tips & Tricks November 23rd, 2009

posted by Joe Geck

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

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New to Cerb4? Sticky Notes vs. Comments

Tips & Tricks November 23rd, 2009

posted by Joe Geck

Regardless of their distinct appearance, sticky notes and comments serve the same general purpose — to leave notes behind for yourself or other workers. Either one can be used for a variety of purposes, whether it’s telling another worker to send an invoice right away or to simply jot down a phone number for later. So when do you use comments over sticky notes and vice versa?

Sticky notes should be used when you want to highlight, or “respond” in context, to a specific message (e-mail) in the conversation. Conversely a comment is for ticket-wide feedback that isn’t dependent on a particular message. Now keep in mind these are not hard & fast rules, but the few functional differences in behavior do complement my suggestions, and generally speaking it’ll make sense to use them appropriately.

Let’s start with sticky notes

To see how they work in practice, pick a sample ticket with multiple messages. By default (“read all” turned off), only the latest message will be expanded and the remaining ones will be collapsed with only the From:, To:, and Subject: showing.

Find a collapsed message, click ‘maximize’,

then click the ‘Sticky Note’ button to create a note.

Fill in the text field and save changes (we’ll discuss ‘Notify workers’ at the end).

As you can see, the sticky note is appended to the bottom of the message. Now try refreshing the ticket page. Notice how the sticky note expanded the message it’s attached to, so it “sticks out” from the crowd immediately.

I’ll give you an analogy for how to take advantage of sticky notes — sticky notes are very akin to Post-its®. A college student litters their textbook with Post-its to bookmark certain pages with study notes. When it comes time for midterms, they can skip through the book and review just those pages. Cerb4′s sticky notes work the same way, allowing you to jump past irrelevant messages and review just the important messages.

Here’s an obvious use case for sticky notes. Let’s say after a long and grueling sales pitch that lasted several e-mails, the customer finally writes in and wants the sales guy to call him and finish the deal, but he also has a few more general questions that anyone can answer. Ironically your sales guy just left for the rest of the afternoon and you don’t want to leave the customer’s other concerns hanging. What you can do is post a sticky note on the message as a heads-up to Tim in sales, “Call Mike @ 555-1212″, and then continue the conversation yourself. By the end of the day, after so many back & forth replies, the original sales e-mail has gotten buried near the bottom. However because you forced the message to stay expanded it will be instantly recognizable to your sales guy the next morning, and he can finish up closing the sale right away.

It’s worth highlighting that the disposable nature of scenarios like this are perfect for sticky notes. Now that the order is done, the sales team can delete the “call customer” note and the attached message will no longer be auto-expanded.

Next up… comments

Comments are created in the dedicated ‘Comments’ tab, seen to the right of the ‘Conversation’ tab. Much like sticky notes, jot down whatever information you want and save. All comments will appear in this tab in reverse chronological order, but are also shown in the ticket ‘Conversation’ tab as well. They will filter in chronologically with the appropriate flow of the surrounding messages, whether it’s newest to oldest or oldest to newest (“read all”).

Unlike sticky notes, comments are not attached to individual messages and will not expand any messages. So it’s usually a good idea to write comments when the information you’re recording does not pertain to a specific e-mail’s contents.

An obvious use case for comments would be storing a customer’s order number for quick reference, just in case another worker assigned to the ticket needs it down the road long after the original sales e-mail is no longer important. That way if workers don’t want to scroll through an extended ticket conversation, they can hop over to the ‘Comments’ tab and find the order number immediately.

Not that comments can’t be deleted, but I personally like to think they’re useful for storing more permanent information that lasts the life of the ticket. “Call Mike @ 555-1212″ is a temporary task well suited for sticky notes, but “Order #996″ makes a good comment since it’s for reference after the purchase has been completed.

Tips, Tricks, Gotchas, and Options

Please refer to the following screenshot for the next two bullet points.

  • These two ‘Mail’ options are available in the ‘my account’, ‘General’ tab. As mentioned before comments are shown in the ‘Conversation’ tab. This is the default option, but can be turned off for each worker through “Show comments in the conversation”.
  • The “read all” option sorts the conversation oldest to newest and auto-expands all messages, regardless of whether or not sticky notes are in use. While reading a ticket you can flip this option on temporarily with the ‘Read All’ button, or make it the preferred reading method on a per-worker basis via “Always use ‘read all’ mode (expand messages and sort chronologically)”.

Please refer to the following screenshot for the next four bullet points.

  • Sticky notes can be deleted by anybody. Comments can only be deleted by who wrote it or the administrator.
  • If you delete a worker, the Helpdesk will delete his or her name from all their sticky notes. Comments will not be affected. e.g. (Deleted Worker) vs. john@example.com .
  • Adding multiple sticky notes to a message stacks them in chronological order, allowing you to read them in the order they were written.
  • Time Tracking entries are shown via comments — if you don’t see the comment right away, try refreshing the page. Most people new to Cerb4 don’t get this, but remember a time tracking comment is like a picture of what was saved; they are a static piece of text separate from the actual time entry. In other words, deleting the comment in the ticket does not delete the actual time tracking data. Similarly, modifying a time entry in the ‘activity’ menu does not edit the ticket comment itself. If you plan to delete a time entry in ‘activity’ you probably want to go back to the ticket first and delete the comment.

Last screenshot and bullet point!

  • Every ticket in Cerb4 has the option to “private message” another worker through either comments or sticky notes. So what you can do is leave a note on a ticket, and then choose to notify another worker. This is great because you don’t have to actually assign them the ticket — simply use it to get their attention, have them assist you, and keep the ticket for yourself to finish up. To use these “home” notifications when writing your message, click the ’Notify workers’ toggle, and select one or more Helpdesk workers. The notification they receive will appear in their ‘home’ area and consists of a copy of the message and a link back to the ticket.

-joegeck@wgm

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New to Cerb4? Things you should know about disabling a worker (why not delete?)

Documentation, Tips & Tricks November 16th, 2009

posted by Joe Geck

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

Ins & Outs
  • Login to the Helpdesk is locked.
  • All existing “Next Worker” assignments (tickets, tasks, … , opportunities) stay intact, but the worker is removed from the assignment dropdown everywhere else. This way no one can assign him more work. i.e. ‘John Smith’ will still be set as the “Next Worker” for tickets he was already assigned to, however his name will not be available to select from for tickets he is NOT assigned to.
  • If the disabled worker was chosen for a ‘Worker’ custom field, that field will be unset (no selection). Just like “Next Worker”, ‘John Smith’ will no longer be a selectable option.
  • Watcher (E-mail Notifications) and Home Notifications are turned off and they will not receive any notifications. You don’t have to disable each one by hand.

When to use

Workers can be re-enabled later and everything goes back to normal (with those couple of exceptions I noted). Even things like Workspaces are not purged and will be there in the ‘home’ menu upon returning. Basically take advantage of the disable function when a worker needs to take a leave of absence but is expected to come back to work one day.

But be careful if they are gone for an extended period of time. As mentioned before, tickets and tasks are not released back to the ‘anybody’ pool so don’t let them go unanswered. It’s very easy to forget about timely tickets since they don’t appear in the unassigned areas of the ‘mail’ section, like Workflow and Overview’s ‘Open’ sidebar.

Deleted

Ins & Outs

Deleted workers are pretty much everything disabled is, but permanent of course.

  • Can no longer log in.
  • Unlike disabled, all assignments (tickets, tasks, … , opportunities) are dropped.
  • Any objects in the Helpdesk that utilize and display the worker id will lose their referential integrity in the interface. You will no longer see their name, and in its place will be a substitute to imply removal. Remember this only affects the owner label and the actual content and date of creation will NOT be purged. Here are some examples.
  • Sticky Note -> (Deleted Worker). For whatever reason, Comments are attached to the address id and thus the owner label will not be wiped.

  • Audit Log -> (auto). Therefore who made or created a property change on a ticket is lost.

  • 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

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New to Cerb4? Mail Filtering article now updated for 4.3

Documentation, Tips & Tricks November 6th, 2009

posted by Joe Geck

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:

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

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New to Cerb4? Fetch & Retrieve tutorial now revamped for latest versions

Documentation, Tips & Tricks November 4th, 2009

posted by Joe Geck

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

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Cookbook! Sent Mail

Cookbook October 16th, 2009

posted by Scott Luther

We get questions all the time about how to use Cerb4, and whether x workflow can be done, or y configured in a certain way. The truth is, it’s very difficult to build a piece of software that meets everyone’s needs ‘out of the box’. To combat this, we’ve built the software with a ‘Toolkit’ mentality. We talk a lot about this toolkit mentality, and while it is a great feature it leaves a single pitfall – documentation! It’s difficult to apply the ‘regular’ type of documentation to a piece of software that can be used in so many different ways. That being said, ‘Cookbook’ is our attempt at such a feat! Instead of explaining each and every little thing (we like to leave that to our excellent Screen-by-Screen articles), we instead explain a way to accomplish specific workflows and patterns. These Cookbook recipes are not our attempt at the be-all-end-all style of documentation, instead we want to enable you to understand the software on your own to the point that you will be able to create your own workflows without needing our guidance at every step. Without further ado, I present to you our existing Cookbook recipes. We have several recipes currently, and we are working hard to add more. Our latest cookbook recipe covers setting up a worklist for Sent Mail. Keep checking back on the blog for more Cookbook news!

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Hidden Gems! Saving your “sort by column” preference

Tips & Tricks October 5th, 2009

posted by Joe Geck

Saving a worklist’s “sort by column” preference is an interesting feature because while the concept has been around forever, technically it just came out officially with the 4.3 release. What do I mean exactly? Well the “sort by” preference has always been available in Cerb4 for those who were lucky enough to figure it out; often in the forums I would explain how it works for anyone asking. However there was a catch, I always had to preface my tutorial with it doesn’t work everywhere. Not only could you expect to see things like the Helpdesk reverting your Overview preferences between sessions (logins), other times Cerb4 wouldn’t even remember your setting when you clicked away from a tab.

Well the good news is the developers fixed the entire system in 4.3 and now this Hidden Gem! should work as advertised. And even though we simply fixed a bad “bug”, I like to think of it as a brand new feature that we can actively promote now for the first time… maybe ever!

Customize and Save

So here’s the deal. To save your “sort by” preference for THAT worklist, start by changing the sort order of one of your available columns. Just like traditional software, click the column name to change the up and down arrow to set either chronological or reverse chronological order.

The important part people forget, and why this is such a good “tip”, is the change is only temporary until you click ‘customize’ and save changes. Note you don’t have to make any other modifications, just save.

The next time you log in, the sort order should stay the same.

Multiple Steps: Adding a new column AND sorting by it

For the record, “sort by” is one of three preferences that now successfully hold in 4.3, the other two are Columns and Rows Per Page, which you can tweak in the ‘customize’ menu you passed through earlier. As you know already, only a default subset of columns are used for each worklist. So what happens if you want to expose a new column and then sort by it instead? Unfortunately there is no shortcut and you’ll have to make “customize” a two-step process.

Let’s pretend I want to add the ‘Due’ column to the “Waiting” list and sort those “reopen” dates in chronological order.

Click ‘customize’, add your new column to the active list, and save changes.

Then apply the correct “sort order” to the new column by clicking the ‘Due’ column. To show the tickets ready to reopen first, the arrow points up.

Finally click ‘customize’ again, and save changes once more.

Not the most intuitive solution, as I’ll admit I often forget to “customize” twice too. Just remember you always need to save after you set your sort order!

P.S. As you can tell by my introduction, we have obviously had a bad track record with this bug. So please post any new “dead spots” you may find in the comments, and we will check them out immediately. Thanks!

-joegeck@wgm

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