From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki

Cerb4 v4.2 was released as a stable update on June 1st 2009 and contains over 106 improvements from community feedback.

This page will highlight the most interesting changes. You can find the full changelog in the forums.

Contents 1 Highlights of the 4.2 Release 1.1 Support Center (SC) 1.2 E-mail Notifications (Watchers) 1.3 Group Inbox Filters 1.4 Mail Routing 1.5 Pre-Parser Filters 1.6 Custom Fields 1.7 Performance 1.8 Address Book 1.9 Knowledgebase (KB) 1.10 Fetch & Retrieve (F&R) 1.11 CRM 1.12 Web-API

Highlights of the 4.2 Release

Support Center (SC)

• You can now customize the CSS for each Support Center instance. (See the Support Center page)
• New Support Center modules (e.g. licensing, billing history, chat, server monitoring) can now be created or integrated as plugins using Devblocks.
• You can now reorder the menu options per Support Center. The first menu item will act as the homepage.
• You can now choose which modules are displayed per Support Center. For example, you can now have a Support Center which only exposes Announcements and Knowledgebase and ignores functionality like Tickets.
• You can now require registration before customers can open tickets or browse the knowledgebase.
• You can now add custom HTML to the 'Home' module.
• All lists in the Support Center (tickets, articles, etc.) now offer Ajax-driven paging and sorting.
• Customers can now search the public knowledebase from the Support Center. Previously this happened through Fetch & Retrieve and was more difficult to configure.
• The knowledebase RSS feeds are now provided from the SC. You can now combine SC+KB into a single support portal.
• Customers can now search their ticket history when logged in to the SC.
• All Community Portals (like the Support Center) now pull their properties from Cerb4's cache system rather than the database. This is a big performance boost for busy sites.

E-mail Notifications (Watchers)

• You can now configure e-mail notifications like mail filters with flexible workflow: date/time, incoming/outgoing, custom fields, ticket masks, assignment, etc. (See blog post: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2009/06/02/changes-to-the-42-e-mail-notifications-interface/)
• You're no longer restricted to a single group+bucket per notification.
• Notifications are now inherently stackable, meaning all matching notifications will send out e-mail; but only one notification will be sent to each unique e-mail address per event.
• You can now receive watcher e-mail notifications when new comments are added to tickets.
• You can now use all the ticket-based criteria to decide which assignments you want to know about, and what e-mail addresses to notify on a match. This allows new workflow like receiving ticket assignments by SMS when you're out of the office.
• Mail that is moved into new groups will send notifications as if mail was just delivered.

Group Inbox Filters

• You can now use date and time as criteria when creating inbox filtering rules. This allows you to sort off-hours or weekend support differently.
• You can now use message content as criteria for inbox filters.

Mail Routing

• Mail routing can now use any of the filtering functionality: sticky, stackable, message headers, date/time, message content, read/set custom fields. Existing rules will be converted to the new format by the update script.

Pre-Parser Filters

• Pre-Parser Filters can now use more filtering functionality: sticky, date/time criteria, multiple 'To/Cc:' patterns, message content.
• You can now use sender address and organization custom fields as criteria on Pre-Parser filters. This allows functionality like bouncing mail sent to a mailbox (911@*) w/o an SLA.

Custom Fields

• Added a new Worker custom field type. This allows you to create 'assignments' for any kind of helpdesk content, whether officially supported or not. This is especially helpful for plugins.
• Added a new URL custom field type. This will treat any content as a hyperlink in lists.

Performance

• Devblocks (our framework) has been tweaked to be far more efficient about how it loads content from plugins. We strive to run as little code as necessary to return responses quickly.
• We phased out several Zend Framework modules that weren't providing the kind of performance vs. bloat that we would have liked: Zend_Date, Zend_Translate, Zend_Locale. We wrote Devblocks-specific replacements that are much slimmer and faster.
• Major performance optimizations for lists of all types, but especially for ticket lists with thousands (or more) rows. Tested against 100,000s of rows.
• Custom fields used as displayed columns in all lists are also now far more efficient to retrieve.

Address Book

• Added a new .CSV (comma-separated value) file importer to the Address Book. You can also import arbitrary data into custom fields set on organizations and addresses.
• The Address Book has been converted to plugin-driven tabs (like the rest of Cerb4 as of 4.1).

Knowledgebase (KB)

• The KB is now an optional plugin that can be disabled to reduce bloat if you don't need it.
• KB topics can now be managed by non-superusers (with proper permissions) while browsing the KB, rather than always needing superuser intervention.
• Improved the ability to search the KB while replying to tickets.
• You can now add new KB articles from the Reply screen on tickets (saving a lot of back and forth work). This is especially useful if you add articles immediately that you can't find while searching.

Fetch & Retrieve (F&R)

• Replaced F&R with the new Google Custom Search plugin. This removed all the requirements for custom drivers to do multi-resource (blog, forums, wiki, Twitter) searches. (See the Google Custom Search Plugin page)

CRM

• Added a new .CSV (comma-separated value) file importer to CRM/Opportunities. You can also import arbitrary data into custom fields set on opportunities. It also has flexible duplicate record detection, where you can specify any combination of fields for flagging duplications (rather than forcing email addresses to be unique, for example). There is also an option to mass assign all imported records to a particular worker (which is handy for workers who import their own leads). This should make it much easier to build lists of opportunities from external sources like mailing lists, trial signups, etc.

Web-API

• Any /search.xml actions from the Web-API will now also return attributes with the counts for 'page_results' and 'total_results'. This makes it much easier to know when there are additional pages to display (and how many).