Strange Behavior

[DBowsky]

Okay,

This one is pretty weird. I'll try to break it down as best I can.

We have 4 teams using Cerberus. Let's just call them A, B, C, and D. With only two exceptions, there isn't any crossover in the teams. In otherwords:

Team A can only access tickets in their group.

Team B can only access their tickets.

2 people in Team C can only access their tickets, and 2 people in team C are the only people who are on Team D.

Wheew.

Anyway. Let's say someone from Team C (me) sends a ticket to Team A through external email to Cerberus (not logging a message and assigning it to that team). Team A sends me back a reply (setting the ticket as Waiting automatically). When I respond back to Team A - the response is copied back to my own mailbox, and the ticket remains in "Waiting" status.

This also happened when someone from Team B used external mail to generate a ticket for Team C: Replied copied to the senders mailbox (Cerberus not set to do this from what I can tell) and the ticket does not shift from Waiting to Not Waiting.

Any clues at all on what would cause this, or where I should start looking?

[Hildy]

Cerberus handles worker replies differently than normal emails, and having worker email addresses route into the helpdesk (and having the helpdesk essentially sending itself email) causes problems also. Your best bet is probably to not have crossover between workers and requesters in terms of email addresses.

[DBowsky]

Originally Posted by Hildy

Your best bet is probably to not have crossover between workers and requesters in terms of email addresses.

Sorry, but it is unreasonable to expect that someone in IT will never need to send a ticket to our Facilities team; or that our Business Intelligence folks will never have an Info Tech or Facilities problem, or that our Facilities guy will never have a computer problem (IT team).

There needs to be the ability for these people to generate tickets for other teams and have waiting/not-waiting and replies operate correctly.

[DBowsky]

On second reading, none of my examples are "having the helpdesk send itself emails." I stand by original comment. We should be able to have person in Team A request help from persons in either Team B, C, or D without threading issues.

[joegeck]

I think the root cause of this is already bugged as CHD-570. Where basically a Worker e-mail address is treated differently than a standard address. This bug pointed out that incoming/outgoing addresses were being switched around which according to the writer:

"For me that poses a problem because a ticket sent from a worker who is only in the Corp-IT group to the Facilities group won't behave the same way as a conversation between a regular customer and the same group but it should."

DBowsky, does this sound like the same general problem you were concerned about? I know it's not the exact same scenario but I think if the developers can treat Worker addresses who send e-mail to the Helpdesk just like customers then both problems would be solved.

With that said, I'm going to transcribe the specific problem in this forum thread to the comments section. Anyone wishing to give more feedback, please comment at:

http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-570

Let me know if that is satisfactory, DBowsky. If not we can create a separate bug, otherwise please vote that issue up. I'd do it but JIRA won't let me because I wrote the bug

[joegeck]

Originally Posted by DBowsky

Okay,

This one is pretty weird. I'll try to break it down as best I can.

We have 4 teams using Cerberus. Let's just call them A, B, C, and D. With only two exceptions, there isn't any crossover in the teams. In otherwords:

Team A can only access tickets in their group.

Team B can only access their tickets.

2 people in Team C can only access their tickets, and 2 people in team C are the only people who are on Team D.

Wheew.

Anyway. Let's say someone from Team C (me) sends a ticket to Team A through external email to Cerberus (not logging a message and assigning it to that team). Team A sends me back a reply (setting the ticket as Waiting automatically). When I respond back to Team A - the response is copied back to my own mailbox, and the ticket remains in "Waiting" status.

This also happened when someone from Team B used external mail to generate a ticket for Team C: Replied copied to the senders mailbox (Cerberus not set to do this from what I can tell) and the ticket does not shift from Waiting to Not Waiting.

Small announcement: CHD-570 is fixed and included in stable build 890.

As the rest of this thread explains, this whole scenario was most likely a result of the behavior seen in CHD-570. Q/A verified all the original "problem" scenarios, including the team ABCD setup, and from what I can tell the desired outcome is what is actually delivered.

That means you should be able to send tickets across departments with no unexpected results, tickets waiting statuses will be accurate and replies will thread in the proper order. So if you're still with this, update your copy of Cerb4 to version 4.1 (build 890) and let us know how we did!