Cerb5 Blog

Cerb5 (5.4.4) has been released with 24 improvements

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:01:57 -0700

We've just released 5.4.4 as the 4th maintenance update of the 5.4 release. It includes 24 minor features, usability tweaks, and fixes based on community feedback.

You can read the full list of changes on the forums here:
http://forums.cerb4.com/showthread.php?t=3264

Email Relay

The email relay can now include attachments at the discretion of each Virtual Attendant behavior. Mobile clients with limited data plans probably don't want large attachments, but desktop workers that never log in to the helpdesk most likely do.

Workspaces

Added a new 'In Groups of Worker' virtual filter to ticket worklists. This makes it much easier to restrict a list to tickets that are visible to a specific worker based on their group memberships. Unlike manually setting group filters, this will automatically adjust when they join/leave groups.

Notifications / Virtual Attendants

Added a new {{url_markread}} token to notifications. This will provide a URL that will automatically mark the notification as 'read' when it is clicked. {{url}} will continue to display the actual destination URL.

Web-API (REST)

Implemented the ability to manage registered contacts through the Web-API for the Support Center.

You can now search tickets in the Web-API using 'requester', 'first_wrote' and 'last_wrote' filters.

Noteworthy Bug Fixes

Fixed several browser issues with Firefox3, Firefox4, and Internet Explorer.
Knowledgebase attachments can now be downloaded from the Support Center by visitors who are not logged in.
Worklists will now show the proper available columns/filters.
Each relayed email will now have a unique message-id header.
The '|date()' modifier in snippets will now use the local server timezone instead of always using GMT.
Fixed the extra button padding issues in Firefox.
Email will no longer be relayed with a blank personal name in the From: header.
Fixed notification RSS feeds so they properly display a title.

Updating

You can update your site using the following instructions:
http://cerberusweb.com/book/#upgrades

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Cookbook: Adding more information to the subject line of watcher relayed mail

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:00:00 -0700

Note: This is also available with much better formatting in the knowledgebase.

Introduction

Often, watchers who receive copies of new helpdesk messages want to filter those messages in their email client. In earlier versions of Cerb5, the subject line for these messages was hard-coded to include an "incoming" or "outgoing" tag, and a ticket mask. As of 5.4.3, the subject line for relayed mail defaults to the ticket subject, but you can also customize it through the interface using snippets.

In this cookbook recipe, we're going to add back tags and ticket masks to the subject lines of watcher email. With what you'll learn, you'll also be able to include any other information you want in either the subject line or message content. For example, you can append the ticket status to the subject, or you can even include a due date or organization name.

Implementation

To start, navigate to your Virtual Attendant by clicking on your name in the top right and clicking on the 'virtual attendant' link.

If you haven't created Attendant behavior for relaying messages on watched tickets, do the following (if you have, skip ahead):

Under 'Create New Behavior', choose 'New Message on a Watched Conversation'.
Click on the new behavior and select 'Edit Behavior' from the menu. Enter the title 'Relay messages to my email account'. Click the 'Save Changes' button.
Now we want to filter out any messages sent by yourself. Click on the new behavior again, and select 'Add Decision' from the menu. Add the title 'Sent by me' and hit the 'Save Changes' button.
Click on 'Sent by Me' and enter the title 'No'. Click the 'Add Condition' button and select 'Message sender address'. Change the dropdown from 'is' to 'is not' and enter your worker email address. Click the 'Save Changes' button.
Click on 'No' and select 'Add Actions' from the menu. Set the title to 'Relay email'. Under 'Add Action', select 'Relay to external email'. Select your desired email address from the list. If you haven't already, you can add additional email addresses to your account from your worker preferences page (click your name in the top right and then 'my settings').

At this point you should be seeing the same screen whether you already had email relay behavior or you just set it up. Now we want to customize the message being sent to us.

Set the subject to the following:

[{%if is_outgoing %}outgoing{%else%}incoming{%endif%} #{{ticket_mask}}]: {{ticket_subject}}

Click the 'Test' button to make sure you entered it correctly.

Here's an explanation of exactly what is going on:

The conditional statement {%if is_outgoing %} is checking whether or not the current message is outgoing (i.e. being sent by a worker). If so, the word "outgoing" is added to the subject. If not, the {%else%} section is providing "incoming" as the alternate text to display.

The {{ticket_mask}} placeholder will display the ticket's mask, such as "ABC-12345-678".

And, finally, the {{ticket_subject}} placeholder will display the ticket's subject.

This should produce a ticket subject for relayed email that looks like:

[incoming #ABC-12345-678]: I'd like to discuss pricing information.

More Things to Try

You could also add the sender's organization to the subject line, if you know it, by appending the following:

{%if sender_org_name}} ({{sender_org_name}}){%endif%}

Perhaps you'd also like to append the ticket's current status: open, waiting, closed, or deleted. Append the following:

({{ticket_status}})

In the above examples, the important information is the {{placeholder}}, with double curly braces on either side. I've also wrapped them in (parenthesis) for clarity, so you can tell them apart from the ticket subject. You can change this to whatever format you want, just make sure to click the 'Test' button before you save your changes.

You can do similar things in the content of the relayed message. I'll cover that in a future tutorial.

Leave a comment if you have questions, or if you would like to share more ideas about how to use this feature.

Thanks!

-Jeff

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The 5.4.3 maintenance update has been released

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:06:38 -0700

We've just released the 5.4.3 maintenance update for the 5.4 release. It includes 34 minor features, usability tweaks, and fixes based on community feedback.

You can read the full list of changes on the wiki here:
http://wiki.cerb5.com/wiki/5.4#5.4.3

Ticket Owners / Assignments

There were nearly 300 improvements in the 5.4 update, but only one of those changes led to some confusion and a small amount of controversy on the forums : the loss of built-in ticket ownership.

Prior to 5.4, Cerb5 offered the ability to assign multiple owners to a single record. In practice, there was usually a single person working on the issue at a time, and several other people were observing to receive notifications about events like new customer replies. With the much improved watchers feature in 5.4, the ability to observe records was detached from ownership, and we moved all owners to watchers. The objective was to remove the default behavior of hiding tickets with one or more owners, because there was no guarantee that owners under the previous concept were taking responsibility for completing work -- they may have just been observing.

As a result, this change removed ownership as a built-in concept, and for the past month we have been recommending that people add a worker-based custom field called 'owners', which can be used in conjunction with the subtotals feature to distribute work. By using comments, notifications can also be sent to workers informing them to look at particular records.

That process works fine for many organizations, and it leads to a more verbose chain of custody for a ticket in the historical activity log. However, there were a few helpdesk administrators who claimed, for various reasons, that this workflow was not sufficient for them.

As a compromise, we've added back a built-in owner field to tickets. Multiple workers can now watch a conversation, and ownership can be passed around to a specific worker like the flag in a relay race. One big improvement using this field over a custom field is that the owner will automatically be treated as a watcher for the duration of their assignment without them having to do anything at all. A notification will be sent on assignment, and recorded in the activity log.

Having an owner treated as an honorary watcher during their assignment is useful, because once unassigned they can continue to observe as a watcher if they desire, and otherwise they will no longer receive notifications without having to unsubscribe from every record they're involved with. The difference is simple: they either elect to "watch" something independent of being an owner, or they don't. During an assignment there is no difference.

To make sure your workers are aware of this change, the 5.4.3 update process will automatically append the 'owner' column to the mail Workflow worklist.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Virtual Attendants

Virtual Attendants have been widely praised as one of the best improvements in the 5.4 update. With 5.4.3, we've added several more improvements based on community feedback:

Added a 'ticket watcher count' condition to Virtual Attendants for group events (new message, closed, moved). This allows you to create outcomes based on the number of watchers on a ticket -- for example, if reply comes in to a ticket with no watchers then assign someone.
Added a 'ticket has owner' condition to Virtual Attendants for group events (new message, closed, moved). This allows you to create outcomes based on the whether or not a ticket is currently assigned to a worker.
Added owner conditions to Virtual Attendants for group events (new message, closed, moved): first name, last name, full name, title, email address.
Added a 'set owner' action to Virtual Attendants for group events (new message, closed, moved). This allows for auto-assignment, as well as functionality like automatically unassigning tickets when they are closed.
Added the ability to rearrange actions through 'drag & drop' in Virtual Attendant behavior.
Fixed an issue where a worker's Virtual Attendant behavior would not always trigger properly from the 'New mail on a watcher message' event.
Implemented the 'set subject' action on Virtual Attendants for group events: new message, moved, closed.
The Virtual Attendants snippet tester is now capable of displaying the output of multiple fields at once. This speeds up testing in places like 'relay mail' where both the subject and content of an outgoing message can use tokens.

Email Relay

The email relay will now properly use any modified content from the template.
Fixed an issue where messages sent to external workers through the email relay may contain extra whitespace.
The Virtual Attendant 'email relay' action can now provide a custom message subject to be sent to the worker. This makes it possible to replicate the '[incoming]' and '[outgoing]' tags in subject lines for mail sorting.

Implemented a split 'Reply' button on Display Ticket. Clicking the right side opens a menu that allows a per-reply decision to quote the original message or reply without quoting. The default behavior of the left side of the button can be set as a per-worker preference. This feature was sponsored by XILO Communications - http://www.xilo.net/
Implemented a 'Who should this be assigned to?' option at the end of the Reply screen.

Ticket Worklists

The ticket 'created' timestamp will now reflect when the message was actually processed, without regard for 'Date:' header (which is stored on the individual message record).

You can now search worker-based custom fields and Watchers by these operators: is, is blank or, is blank or not, is not. This makes it much easier to generate worklists like "things watched by me or nobody" which exclude things watched by someone else. This is also possible with worker-based custom fields like "owner" or "assignee".

Subtotals

Improved the usability of subtotals by not drilling down into a single subtotal as often when clicking totals to add filters. If a filter is using an operator that returns a single total, like EQUALS (=), then the subtotal will ignore itself as a filter. This means you no longer have to keep clicking to remove the last filter and you can simply click another total from the subtotals box to continue browsing.

Worker Preferences

Each worker can now set a different default status for each of: create ticket, compose, and reply. Previously this always defaulted to the 'waiting for reply' status, which required an extra step to change it in many workflows.

Usability

Fixed some issues with keyboard shortcuts on various browsers.

Updating

You can update your site using the following instructions:
http://cerberusweb.com/book/#upgrades

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The 5.4.2 maintenance update has been released

Wed, 25 May 2011 07:53:00 -0700

We've just released the 5.4.2 maintenance update for the 5.4 release. It includes 13 minor usability tweaks and fixes based on community feedback.

You can read the full changelog on the wiki here:
http://wiki.cerb5.com/wiki/5.4#5.4.2

Virtual Attendants / Activity Log

When setting up a mail relay on a worker's Virtual Attendant you can now choose the destination email address. This makes it easier to relay to a mobile device based on certain conditions.

We've also added a truncate modifier to snippets. This is useful when you want to enforce a maximum length in email subject lines or SMS message bodies. To force a placeholder to no longer than 140 characters, for example, use: {{placeholder|truncate(140)}}

There were also a few bugs cleaned up for Virtual Attendants. In some situations the actor was improperly logged with chains of behaviors (e.g. a group Attendant sending work to multiple worker Attendants). Some people were experiencing new tickets being created when a worker replied to relayed mail. The 'Move to Group' action wasn't fully implemented. Some people also experienced an error when relaying "watched" conversations from worker Attendants. Events triggered from the Support Center also sent out notifications with Support Center URLs, rather than links back to the helpdesk.

Full-text Search

The performance and memory-efficiency of the full-text search engine have been improved for large content. We had a couple reports of the search indexer stalling in 5.4 with email messages that had over 1MB of textual content. This happens when an entire conversation history is lazily quoted at the bottom of a reply dozens of times. While it should be unusual to have messages of this length, the search indexer does need to be capable of handling content of that size.

Updating

You can update your site using the following instructions:
http://cerberusweb.com/book/#upgrades

Enjoy!

-Jeff

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The 5.4.1 maintenance update has been released

Thu, 12 May 2011 15:13:00 -0700

We've just released the 5.4.1 maintenance update for the 5.4 release. It includes 17 minor usability tweaks and fixes based on early feedback from the 5.4 launch.

You can view the changelog on the wiki here:
http://wiki.cerb5.com/wiki/5.4#5.4.1

The only significant issue to be brought up from the 5.4 changes was losing the ability to assign other workers as watchers (which was formerly possible with "owners"). We added two new worker permissions for assigning and unassigning other workers as watchers. The watcher button was visible on worklists, peek, display pages, and ticket reply; and you can now assign or unassign other workers from those locations as well.

There are two variations of the watchers button. The condensed version only shows the number of watchers and an indication of whether or not you are watching it. The expanded version shows text for "Start Watching" and "Stop Watching", along with the count, and an indication of if you're watching it. As of 5.4.1, this is now a split button in both variations. On the right side of the split there is a button with a down arrow that will allow you to assign or unassign other workers. You can select workers from an autocomplete text box or a chooser. To save space (and clutter), the condensed variation of the watcher button will only display the split button when you hover over it.

There were a lot of major improvements in 5.4, but so far things seem incredibly stable. We'll continue to release prompt maintenance updates for any new bug reports or usability issues.

Enjoy!

-Jeff

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5.4 has been released with over 294 improvements from community feedback

Tue, 10 May 2011 07:01:08 -0700

The 5.4 update was just released. It's the culmination of nearly 4 months of continuous work, and it includes over 294 improvements from community feedback. Our development philosophy is definitely working.

5.0 was released on May 17th 2010 with 307+ improvements.
5.1 was released on August 23rd 2010 with 179+ improvements.
5.2 was released on November 9th 2010 with 46+ improvements.
5.3 was released on January 18th 2011 with 103+ improvements.
5.4 was released on May 8th 2011 with 294+ improvements.

Our goal has been to deliver major improvements every 3 months, but none of us expected the level of innovation that we accomplished with this update. Despite the nearly 1000 noteworthy improvements in Cerb5 over the past year, it's even easier to implement feedback now than it was a year ago. Instead of succumbing to feature creep, a refined maturity has taken place. The code is cleaner and more kludge-resistant with each update. And when I show the interface to non-technical people, it makes more intuitive sense to them than any version of Cerberus ever has.

Take a look at the highlights of the 5.4 release here:

http://wiki.cerb5.com/wiki/5.4.0

In the next couple blog posts I'll be delving into each of the major changes in far more detail.

-Jeff

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Using Virtual Attendants to send event messages to Campfire

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:52:00 -0700

In 5.4 we've added a new piece of functionality called Virtual Attendants. Virtual Attendants allow you to set up Decision Trees which define events to watch for, and actions to run when the event is detected. In addition, actions can be provided via plugins. We've created a plugin that interfaces with 37signals Campfire.

You can find the Campfire plugin in our repository on GitHub. Once you've downloaded the plugin, you'll need to enable it and then configure it with your Campfire API Auth Token and URL.

Once you've configured the plugin, you'll be able to setup Virtual Attendants to use the plugin to interface with Campfire. It will be available as a Virtual Attendant action anywhere in the helpdesk.

Here we've configured the decision tree to look for new tickets. As you can see in the below images, decision trees are broken down into two parts: outcomes and actions.

Here, we have our outcome configured to match any messages that have a subject that contains the phrase 'New Order' and is the first message on a ticket; in other words, this outcome will only trigger when a ticket is first opened.

As you can see, you can select the room to speak in, and you can specify the text you'd like to speak to the room. The text can contain snippets, which will be parsed when the event runs. Now, anytime this event occurs, a notification will be spoken to the selected room with the text you have defined.

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5.4 sneak peek: Improved tour mode for training new workers.

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:51:16 -0700

We introduced "Tour Mode" back in Cerb4 as a way to provide interactive training for new workers during their first moments using the software. A particularly interesting feature of the tour was the ability to provide callouts, where clicking the name of a point of interest from the tour information would display some text directly next to an interface element. This worked like contextual help.

However, from the tour's introduction in 4.x, and all the way through version 5.3, it was fairly tedious for developers to add new content to the tour. Creating new callouts required HTML placeholders to be scattered throughout the templates that construct the user interface. Human nature tends to optimize out extraneous and tedious steps, so the tour fell behind the current functionality of the app for several releases because nobody maintained it. Considering that the tour is one of the first things people see when they're trying out the application, it wasn't leaving the best first impression.

As of 5.4, we've revamped the tour into something we're again proud of. Rather than requiring placeholders, we can now quickly add new callouts using jQuery's selector syntax. That means we can simply say something to the effect of "draw a speech bubble pointing at the third button from the left in that particular group of things on that tab". Much cleaner!

Prior to 5.4, callouts also used our standard popup windows without any particular reference to which corner it was referring to (sometimes it even covered up the content). Now we've provided a simple system (by wrapping the qTip jQuery plugin) for drawing a pointer arrow from any side or corner of the callout, and connecting it to any side or corner of the target element. You can see an example of how well this works in the attached screenshot.

All of this new tour functionality is also available for use by third-party plugins.

Enjoy!

-Jeff

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