• Automatically filter and sort your mail in 3 steps

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

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

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

Despite all the confusion and questions we were getting about the old documentation and how to set up the Knowledgebase in versions 4.2+, I wanted to wait until 4.3 was released before updating the guide. The Support Center configuration page had a couple new module options (Everyone/Logged In/Disabled) that I wanted to account for. If I had tackled this project a couple of weeks ago I would have had to replace the screenshots yet again, as things were going to look differently in the near future.

So today 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. Here’s the new permanent URL. Please refer to this for all your Knowledgebase questions and ignore the old blog posts.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Using_the_Knowledgebase_to_share_resources_the_way_you_want

Thanks everyone for your patience and I hope the new guide serves you even better than before!

-joegeck@wgm

There really isn’t a whole lot of content in the ‘System’ tab and most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple of important sections detailing the current state of your Helpdesk worth visiting.

System Settings

Your IP address (127.0.0.1) is not authorized to update/debug this helpdesk (or run scheduler jobs). Your administrator needs to authorize your IP in Helpdesk Setup or in the framework.config.php file under AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS.

If it does, just go back to this section and add the IP address from the error message.

Storage Information

This is the one area of the ‘System’ tab you may need to browse regularly if you’re concerned about disk space. If you signed up for the on-demand hosted plan with us, we have three tiers primarily based around storage usage (5, 10, 15GB). I imagine shared hosting plans from other companies have a similar businesses plan, so use this information to your advantage.

When space becomes an issue, the easiest way to do some “spring cleaning” is to delete your old tickets and/or attachments. Remember attachments can be deleted separately without affecting their corresponding tickets from the ‘Attachments’ tab.

License Registration

Whether you went with a Community or Paid license, you’re going to register Cerb4 with whatever key we e-mail you. After you enter your license, the “free mode” information will be replaced with the name of the company and e-mail you registered with us, along with how many workers you’re allowed to have. Both can be handy if you ever need to contact us.

• e-mail address and license information from your order: Fairly obvious what we want here, except for maybe the serial key format. Make sure you include the BEGIN and END lines when copy & pasting.

That’s it! I told you it would be quick :D

Browse the entire series: Table of Contents, Previous: Scheduler tab .

-joegeck@wgm

For starters, don’t confuse this with the ‘Date’ custom fields you can create. This is an existing ticket field already set in every copy of Cerb4 and you’ll find it where you find all optional fields — in the ‘customize’ menu as a ‘Column’. From any ticket list click ‘customize’ and add the ‘Due’ column to your list of defaults.

Not what you think…

Now that we have a way to track “due dates” in our ticket lists, the next couple of questions to answer should be: A) How do I set due dates for my tickets? B) And what happens when they are overdue?

Answer: A) you set a time to resume the conversation and B) the ticket goes from a “closed” status to an open status.

Hopefully you’re scratching your head over that response. You see, here in lies the problem with the “overdue” concept — it doesn’t exist, at least not in the traditional sense. Cerb4 does not have due dates natively built-in as a standard feature you can just flip on. Instead we have a “Reopen” feature, and that is what you’re actually seeing with the ‘Due’ field.

The ‘Due’ field is set by creating a date to reopen a closed (or waiting for reply) ticket. Thus you cannot give an open ticket a ‘Due’ date to help find ones that are overdue.

When you reply to a ticket you should have noticed the ‘Next’ section, where you can take additional actions on the ticket after you send it out. Clicking the “Waiting For Reply” or “Closed” radio buttons will display, When would you like to resume this conversation?. Basically you’re telling Cerb4 when the ticket is due to reopen.

Now the ticket is closed and is set to reopen in two days automatically. Behind the scenes this happens during the next scheduled cron pass (specifically when the ‘Heartbeat’ scheduled job runs).

Note the same options are available in the ‘Properties’ tab if you don’t need to reply. And your choice is visible in the ticket ‘Audit Log’ too.

Some final notes about the how this system works in practice:

1. Since ‘Due’ tickets are not open, generally speaking they will be hidden from the default mail views. Mail Overview only shows open and waiting for reply tickets, while Workflow and the default “My Mail” Workspace are limited to just open tickets (the latter you can change of course).
2. If you really want to organize which tickets are due to reopen next, you’ll most likely need to create a dedicated workspace. Filtering non-open tickets by ‘Due’ date is fairly easy to do…

Give me overdue dates!

The moral of the story is the due dates probably aren’t quite what you expected. In reality, they are used when you want to “forget” about an ongoing ticket conversation for a while, clearing the worklist clutter for your more timely tickets. A good practical example is creating follow-up dates — close out the ticket temporarily and then schedule it to pop back in your lists when you need to write back.

So does this mean there is no way to mark open tickets overdue? Do you really have to close every ticket to get a more traditional “due date” workflow?

No, you do still have legitimate options at your disposal. But since there’s no native concept built into Cerb4, you need to use our “toolkit design” to create your own solution. For a walkthrough on designing a powerful, yet easy to implement overdue system within Cerb4, see our SLA example.

-joegeck@wgm

Simply tack on /index.php/debug or /debug (.htaccess users only) to the end of your root Cerb4 URL, and the page should load up.

As you can see it’s a very short list of tools, so let’s go over them one by one.

Requirements Checker

You probably won’t need to worry about this one after you get the install working, since the prerequisites page just double checks if your server environment is capable of running Cerb4. But if you’re missing some mandatory PHP extensions you can certainly find out here.

As far as I know this page is identical in function to the first page of the installer, and is also available as a separate file on the wiki page explaining how to install Cerb4.

In any case it’s duplicated at /debug/check for your reference.

phpinfo()

Creating a phpinfo page is something you should be familiar with if you’ve ever dabbled in PHP or possibly configured your own web server. Cerb4 has its own too for reviewing any of your current PHP settings.

To access it append /debug/phpinfo to your URL.

Debug Report (for technical support)

The one we’ve put off talking about until last, is probably the most valuable. As the title implies this is what the Cerb4 team is going to be interested in when helping you out. You can see that there’s all kinds of information on your Helpdesk install which we can use to spot possible issues. Everything from verifying your Unix permissions are giving proper read/write access to key directories, to whether or not you have set your PHP memory and file limits high enough to accept larger attachments.

With that said, I wouldn’t recommend you forward this data to us every time you write in for support. However if we request it, because it’s a block of plain text, you can easily copy & paste the information into your e-mail.

Since the ‘Debug Report’ is the one you want to keep handy in a pinch, try to remember it’s always available at /debug/report .

P.S.

Similar to the error you can get updating the Helpdesk, you may see this when accessing the debug menu for the first time.

Your IP address (127.0.0.1) is not authorized to debug this helpdesk. Your administrator needs to authorize your IP in Helpdesk Setup or in the framework.config.php file under AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS.

As usual, one way you can fix the problem is by logging into your Helpdesk as an administrator, clicking over to ‘helpdesk setup’, ‘System’ tab, and adding the IP address from the error message to the ‘IP Security’ section.

-joegeck@wgm (Thanks to RobertM for the P.S.)

Thankfully there’s a Hidden Gem! here you can take advantage of; the developers beefed up the “Ticket Quick Search” so it can handle both formats PLUS partial mask matches. (As unfortunate as it, you’ll just have to look past the confusing terminology on this one.)

As you know the two “types” have a very different format,

• Masks can look like JKB-49992-311 while,
• IDs can be as simple as 68.

Thus doing a quick search for ‘68′ or ‘JKB-49992-311′ will successfully pinpoint the correct ticket, and because of the partial match capabilities, ‘JKB’, ‘JKB-499′, and ‘JKB-49992′ will all return that one ticket along with any other potential matches.

I realize this isn’t some miracle tip that will save you a ton of time upfront. But because the “Quick Search” dropdown will remember you chose ‘Ticket ID’ for the remainder of the session, you can save yourself a couple of clicks each time and immediately copy & paste a mask from any ‘mail’ tab. (Rather than going back to the ‘Search’ tab and re-adding the “Mask” filter constantly.)

Even if you don’t find this practical, hopefully you can at least scratch it off your “I had no idea that was possible!” list :D

-joegeck@wgm

Now even if you’re relatively new to Cerb4 I reckon it will make sense as long as you’ve seen the Helpdesk in action. It’s fairly easy to spot what’s restricted in the free version as you click around the ‘helpdesk setup’ tabs. So what I’m going to do for these more seasoned, yet still new Cerb4 infants, is address upfront some of the common concerns I hear in live chat and in the forums. You guys can read the next section and skip the rest if you want, where I go over what the license differences are in more detail. At the very end I’ll explain how to acquire the Community license and how to activate a license.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can I try the software and then buy the Paid license later if I like it, without losing anything?

Yes, you can install and use either free version right away and later decide to upgrade. You won’t lose any data, have to re-install anything, re-tweak your settings, patch the code, etc. The only thing that will happen is any relevant feature restrictions will be removed.

• Ok, now if I decide NOT to upgrade, is there some kind of trial period or are the free versions good forever?

Good for the lifetime of Cerb4. Any “premium” features we may choose to add in the future of course will be locked, but you will not lose any of your existing features or data associated with them.

• Your site says if you fill out the survey you will be sent a free Community license. I haven’t gotten mine yet, did I screw something up?

No, as long as you “registered” the software with us by finishing the survey then you qualify for a Community license. The issue here is the license processing is not automated — all of the surveys are processed manually by the WGM staff. Therefore depending on what time of day you installed the software, our California-based company may have finished their regular workday. So be patient, the license may come within the hour or show up by the next business day.

• I noticed your buy page lets you buy a Single (+1 worker) license for $99. However I’m currently running one of the free 3 worker versions. To get a 4th worker can I buy a single worker license or do I need to buy 4 single worker licenses?

In this case a single worker license entitles you to one fully unlocked worker with all the restrictions removed. So basically to get a fully Paid license you should be opting for 4 single worker licenses. Although at this point it doesn’t hurt to suggest you buy the 5 worker pack instead at $375 as opposed to 4 workers at $396 (4*$99).

• An employee left and we disabled his worker account in ‘helpdesk setup’, however this did not free up a license slot? Can we “replace” him or do we need to purchase more workers?

Unfortunately the license applies to total workers (including inactive ones), so if you aren’t comfortable with the idea of deleting a worker out of the system it’s going to cost you. Deleting workers generally wipes all their statistics from the reports menu and releases all work assigned to them back to the “anybody” pool. Things like sticky notes, comments, or time tracking entries they created are NOT deleted.

• Our business is outgrowing a single Helpdesk, can I move Cerb4 to a different sever? Or maybe install a second copy of Cerb4 using my existing license?

Yes, and at no additional cost. From the On-Site section you’ll find a nice bullet point on the subject.

We like being fair and simple; the software is licensed to your entire company for use by a certain number of workers. We do not obnoxiously restrict you to specific e-mail addresses, URLs, IPs, or CPUs. You are permitted to run multiple copies for your own use.

For anyone reading this who may want to take advantage of multiple copies of Cerb4, but does not understand how you can “outgrow” your Helpdesk, it’s pretty simple. Say your sales and support teams are forced to share an increasing number of contacts and tickets. Normally not a big deal, unless you’re in the type of business where each department has its own distinct clientele. To help cut down on confusion and unneeded overlap, you might want to consider moving one of the teams to their own separate Helpdesk.

Understanding the three licenses

Ok Cerb4 babies (no offense!), you of course are usually the ones we want to make the best first impression with. It’s easy to assume on our part that you downloaded the software, demoed it, or are using the free version happily before you even think of upgrading your license. Unfortunately I know not everyone shops for software that way. Some may want to learn immediately about the locked features, and if their company can get by without making a purchase. After all if you can’t afford a paid license and you need these options, then it may be time to move on before you get attached! With that said, I know we are happy to negotiate pricing for your budget, so send us an e-mail first.

Let’s start by reviewing the feature chart:

We have three license brackets, a couple of “professional” features, a way to purchase 5 or more workers, and two free versions? Can be confusing for the uninitiated. So what I’m going to do is explain each benefit, show screenshots, and write in a way that assumes you’ve never logged into Cerb4. I’m also going to approach this from a different angle and not go over each license individually, since the above chart makes it pretty clear what’s in and what’s out. Instead I’ll break it down by each feature.

Groups (Community/Paid)

Just to be clear buying a Paid license naturally entitles you to both of the following benefits.

There’s two big changes that come with the Community (other “free”) license: uncapping the total number of Groups and removing the Cerb4 Tagline. With the traditional ‘free (non-community)’ version, Groups, much like Workers, are capped to a total of three. By default the Helpdesk creates a Dispatch, Sales and Support group but you can change the names as you please.

You can think of groups, in terms of teams or departments, in your company. Workers can become members of one or more groups, usually in an effort to pair them with others having a similar role (job).

Signing up for the Community license allows you to create unlimited groups, making it much easier to pursue a “divide & conquer” approach to answering e-mail. With more groups you can better recreate the structure of your internal operations, organizing your mail into smaller and smaller piles for each team of workers to pull from.

Cerb4 Tagline (Community/Paid)

Community benefit number two is removing the Cerb4 tagline. This is probably something you’re used to seeing in your own inbox once in a while. Basically we append OUR company advertisement to the end of your outgoing replies, below your signature.

Workers+ (Paid Only)

That’s it for the Community license, the remainder of this article focuses on the features that come with a Cerb4 purchase. The primary reason for most companies to go with a Paid License is typically to increase the Worker cap, as you can see our whole price structure is based on this. Both free versions restrict you to having three login accounts to pass out to your employees and administrators.

Note that workers have nothing to do with the number of e-mail addresses you can feed into the system. If you want to pull mail into Cerb4 from 10 different e-mail inboxes (support@, sales@, … , billing@) you can do so without buying a license. The worker count is strictly how many team members you can have actually log into the web interface. Your workers will need to login to do just about anything worthwhile such as assigning tickets to other people, moving tickets to other groups, or browsing a client’s past history.

So bottom line, if you have a large company and multiple people who want to work with Cerb4 on a daily and collaborative basis, you’ll need to purchase a license for however many logins you need. The buy page has more details, but currently we offer a single (+1) worker license, a 5 worker pack, or an Unlimited worker package. If you decide to start light, as your company grows you can simply buy more workers in small increments. Note once you reach 20 workers the license will automatically transfer to an Unlimited.

Opportunity Tracking (Paid Only)

Two other perks you get with a Paid license is unlocking two capped plugins: Opportunity and Time Tracking. Remember you need to first enable both from the ‘helpdesk setup’, ‘Features & Plugins’ tab.

With our software it’s almost easier to explain what’s taken away as opposed to what’s added, because with one exception every “locked” feature is fully functional but limited to a set number of uses. This allows you to get a solid feel for the premium features while effectively preventing use in full production. It’s very akin to a “try before you buy” system.

The key thing to notice here in that regard, is the statement “Limited to 10 (opportunities/time tracking) entries for evaluation with a free license”. To clarify you are capped at 10 active entries, which means once you have saved your 10th you cannot create another one.

You can think of the Opportunity Tracking as a basic CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. Any existing contact or e-mail address you can promote to an opportunity, typically so you can track that individual as a sales lead. You can give that person or organization a descriptive title and detailed notes for your team to use when evaluating sales “opportunities”, in deciding whether it’s time to get in touch with those interested clients (e.g. “on the fence, price conscious”). Once you’ve closed the sale you can mark them as “WON” and attach a dollar (monetary) amount to their order for your records.

Learn more by watching the Opportunity Cookbook video.

Time Tracking (Paid Only)

Just like the Opportunities plugin, Time Tracking is also capped at 10 active entries unless you purchase a license. However time entries are unique in that they can easily be deleted, so if you want to keep testing out the feature feel free to delete your existing data and replace it.

The feature is pretty self-explanatory, as you’re working on a ticket you can start a timer that runs in the background. When you’ve finished what you’re doing, stop the timer, jot down some notes (and edit the time to the nearest 15/30-minute interval if need be). You can see a summary of all your saved times in the ‘activity’, ‘Time Tracking’ tab or any of the available ‘reports’.

More information and a video can be found here, Sneak Peek: Time Tracking.

Itemized Worker Permissions (Paid Only)

Unlike the two plugins before, Permissions are NOT available for a “trial run” and will only be accessible once you purchase a license. The basic idea here is you selectively choose what a Worker can actually do from a long list of possible actions.

As you can see from the sample list there, it’s possible to prevent worker(s) from opening tickets on behalf of customers. When enabled, affected workers will not see the ‘Open Ticket’ button in the ‘Mail’ section.

After you purchase a license you can learn more about setup with our Permissions Explained article.

Signing up for the Community License

So how do you get a Community license? All you need to do is “register” your free version by filling out the survey at the end of the installation process.

The Community license is also completely free for the life of the product. You can think of it as a “gift” for not downloading the software anonymously, and giving us a chance to stay in touch for things like product updates and “how can we improve the product” surveys.

Licensing your copy

And I’ll finish off this tutorial by showing you how to upload your license. After you sign up for either the Community or Paid edition, we should send you a license by e-mail. Go to ‘helpdesk setup’, and at the bottom of the ‘System’ tab first enter the e-mail address you used in your order, then copy and paste the actual license (including the BEGIN and END lines).

With Cerb4 I realize it can be very difficult to make a licensing decision without test driving the software a bit:

• How many workers do I actually need?
• Are permissions necessary for our company’s operation?
• Is time or opportunity tracking something I can see my employees and administrators taking advantage of?

I’ll always recommend you install the free version and set up a test environment custom fit for your business workflow, as that’s really the only good way to decide what you need. But for those who can’t commit to “demoing all the features” and don’t have the time to spend evaluating Cerb4’s premium capabilities, I hope this walkthrough helps :)

-joegeck@wgm