New Changes
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
Many of the features discussed here, while still part of the latest Cerb4 builds, have changed dramatically since this documentation was created. We will update this document in the future to remove old references, but for the time being please keep this in mind when evaluating, testing, or using the Helpdesk you have installed. One notable example that has come up repeatedly is the Public Knowledgebase which no longer uses the tag system. Thanks for your patience.
Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 is here!
Many of you who have history with the Cerberus Helpdesk project are probably familiar with our development cycle by now. Occasionally we'll enter a phase where we're a deeply introverted R&D company with tight-lips and big ideas (replete with anxious people wondering if we're dead). A few months later we emerge from our labs as zealous users advocating the latest improvements.
However, in these R&D sessions over the past 5 years we've expended a lot of energy trying to avoid rocking the boat. It was our feeling Cerberus should work on almost any server arrangement from cheap $5/mo hosts to beefy dedicated clusters. This open invitation was great to bring attention to the project, but in the long-run spending so much of our time trying to "shoehorn" Cerberus into antiquated server environments has drained some of the innovation and agility from the project. Those qualities are what really made the project special, not our ability to run on servers that haven't been patched in half a decade.
In the 3.x versions there are also several aging concepts, mingled in with new concepts, which together no longer give a clear coherence to the project.
So for the past 9 months we've been in another deep phase of R&D and contemplation. It's now time to give birth. Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 changes everything.
Version 4.0 is a completely new project: new code, new concepts and new possibilities. Our enthusiasm is recharged. Things are new, but naturally have been heavily influenced by the lessons of the past 5 years.
If you're screaming "Entirely new?!" in your head right now, we understand. Be assured after a very short adjustment period you're going to realize how much more you can get done. We've removed the needless obstacles – those hoops we all jumped through simply because things had always been that way.
For example, in the past you wouldn't see the workload of other teams, but you still had to consider how they organized their work when handing something off to them. Now you can simply toss a ticket into another team's inbox and let their virtual assistant automatically sort it according to their preferences. Therefore, teams now have more confidence over what's been sorted, and everyone (you and your customers) will feel more dependability when issues in the inbox are seen by a real human and not buried in an obscure mailbox by someone outside the team.
Another major usability improvement is the 'super sort' option on any ticket list or search results. This feature will allow you to group common tickets by sender address, sender domain or any e-mail header (subject, mailer, etc. -- use your imagination!) Once your common work is presented in these piles you can quickly choose a destination or action which affects similar tickets throughout the entire list. In our own import we sorted over 80,000 tickets in a couple mouse-clicks. It will spoil you – there isn't anything else like it.
Scalability was another key focus in Version 4.0. We now have complete support for advanced caching. Through tuning we've also reduced the e-mail parsing process to mere milliseconds per message (our own average is 15-20ms).
Behind the scenes we've also built a new development framework, Devblocks, which has brought an incredible amount of agility back to the project. Devblocks provides the ability to let anyone build extensions for Cerberus Helpdesk while still maintaining forward compatibility with our core development. This allowed us to build a very strong and focused core project -- even to the point Version 4.0 works amazingly well for one-person web-mail. The rest can be provided by both us and the community.
This has just scratched the surface. Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 should really be experienced in its element, with all the e-mail you can throw at it.
So let's get started!
- Jeff Standen, Chief of R&D, Cerberus Helpdesk
http://www.cerberusweb.com/
PHP5
As of Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 we require PHP 5.2 or greater. To help encourage wide-spread adoption of PHP5, we join with the GoPHP5.org movement in our intention to cease supporting all lesser PHP versions by February 5th, 2008.
http://wiki.cerberusdemo.com/images/gophp5.png
Beta Testers Needed!
Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 is an ongoing project. We'll be constantly implementing feedback and tweaking the workflow. While anybody can pull the latest version of the project out of Subversion, official beta testers will be notified about ongoing development and included in community decision-making.
If you aren't already a member of our Beta Mailing List you can join it here: http://groups.google.com/group/cerb4
You can report bugs and feature requests to our development portal: http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD
Installer
While Cerberus is marketed as an application with no specific industry ties, we've had a hard time shedding our web-hosting and software development roots to truly be accessible to non-technical audiences. The installation process in previous versions has likely been the biggest hurdle in expanding the Cerberus Helpdesk community.
In Version 4.0 we've built a browser-based, guided installer. Our fundamental goal was to provide a setup process which didn't require editing files or jumping through configuration hoops. The installer is a friendlier way to introduce new users to the concepts of Cerberus Helpdesk and guide them through how their business and processes map to the software.
Steps of the installer currently include:
- Requirements check (e.g., PHP version and extensions)
- Database setup/connectivity
- Database initialization
- Outgoing mail service/testing (SMTP)
- Incoming mail service/testing (POP3/IMAP)
- Users & Groups
- Default mail routing
Overview
A major complaint in 3.x involved the emphasis on each worker maintaining their own custom dashboards. Many managers argued, rightfully, that their people shouldn't have to concern themselves with building lists of tickets -- that all this should be handled by the software.
We completely agree. In Version 4.0 we've addressed this legitimate criticism by introducing Overview. This workspace is generated automatically and shows:
- Open Tickets (by Service Level)
- Unassigned Tickets (by Group/Bucket)
- Assigned Tickets (by Worker)
Overview also makes it easy to quickly filter work by group or bucket, which saves you the trouble of jumping back and forth between searches.
The "Last Action" column of a ticket list will quickly show you which tickets are new and which are outgoing/incoming replies. An inbound reply will show the name of the worker who is being responded to, for example: "Inbound reply for Jeff Standen".
This simple process helps replies be handled by the same person when possible, reducing the amount of research needing on ongoing issues. By avoiding lazily assigning tickets to a worker and just hiding the customer's issues, the Group is able to pick up where any worker left off when appropriate.
The "Next Action" column of a ticket list documents what needs to happen next to advance the ticket toward completion. This simple change is an incredibly effective tool for shared ticket lists, as each ticket is explaining why it's still open in a few words. There's no longer a need to click into each ticket trying to remember why it's hanging around unresolved.
Service Levels
Service Levels are an improvement on the SLA concepts in Cerb3. The original SLA functionality used due dates and schedules to prioritize work, but this solution wasn't very effective because it required constant juggling of due dates each successive reply. As well, when all tickets had a due date, according to SLA defaults, there was nothing to distinguish privileged senders from anyone else.
Presently in Cerb4, you can define a simple 'Service Level' which acts as a contact group (for example: VIPs, Paid Support, Management, Friends, etc). You can prioritize these Service Levels so you know your workers are pulling work (through the new 'quick assign' feature) in 'service priority' order.
Since Service Levels aren't sharing the priority space of due dates with non-SLA tickets, it's a lot more effective now to know you're handling paid work (or internal management work) first. It's automatic.
The totals for any tickets associated with a Service Level are also shown on the new Mail->Overview screen. So, if you log in occasionally at night or on the weekend to make sure nothing critical has been sent in, you can tell at a glance based on the service level totals.
Even if you're just using Cerb4 for a small organization, or webmail, the service level concept is a huge boon. You can add service levels for colleagues, friends and family and always know you're reading their mail first.
Piles (Super Sorter)
[Was this renamed to "piles"? Because I don't see any link to "Super Sorter" in our helpdesk (build 605), but there is a "piles" link that appears to be the same thing. TylerRick 02:21, 4 June 2008 (CDT)]
This is one of the biggest time-savers in the 4.0 feature lineup. There are many situations that end with a big pile of work to sort: imports, long weekends, unimaginable success, and so on.
Nothing quite makes you feel like a robot more than manually sorting each page of tickets from a long list into various piles. So we've decided you shouldn't have to do that anymore! Sure rules try to combat this, but they're only useful if they are in place before mail comes in.
The appropriately named “Super Sort” feature will now do this mind-numbing work for you (and generally in seconds!). All you need to do is click the “super sort” link in the header of any ticket list, which generally will be a Group Workspace or a custom search. The Super Sort feature will ask you how to organize piles of tickets: by sender address/domain or by any e-mail header.
There are all kinds of uses for the Super Sorter. For example, importing new tickets into Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 from other systems is as easy as exporting them as raw e-mail with a couple custom e-mail headers (something we provide a simple tool for). Once imported (or even while importing) you can use the Super Sorter to organize tickets based on their “Import Source” header (which may be your mailbox name in 3.x or a competing product).
You could even defer spam checking to something like SpamAssassin header values, have the Super Sort move “spam” rated tickets into your junk bucket and create a rule to do the same in the future.
User meet Super Sorter. Super Sorter meet your new best friend.
Ticket Notes
In the past we had ticket comments, which threaded chronologically with ticket messages. At first this seemed like a good idea, but it became clear over time that it was nearly impossible to keep a sensible helpdesk-side conversation going through comments. Nobody wants to read the entire message history to figure out what's next.
In Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 we've created Ticket Notes. Notes apply to specific messages so if you need to reply to a note with another note they'll stick together creating a mini-conversation between you and your fellow workers. They also allow you to highlight which messages in a long ticket are relevant when you hand an issue off, for example you could simply note "Server login details here". Plus all noted messages are automatically expanded in the conversation history along with the latest message, saving you time as you examine the ticket. Finished with the noted issues? Simply delete the notes to de-emphasize a message then if need be, add a new note and pass the ticket on.
Anti-Spam
One of the most popular features of past versions of Cerberus Helpdesk has been the advanced Bayesian spam filtering. This functionality has been preserved and improved in Version 4.0.
Each Group is now able to set up their own spam preferences, which saves the hassle of all spam being collected in a global mailbox. The global spam collection caused a lot of headaches by not providing clues about where mail was originally headed if it turned out to not be spam. Moving this to the Group-level has been a big productivity-saver.
We've also added quick “Report Spam” icons to all ticket lists. If you hover over these icons you'll be given the spam probability rating along with the words Cerberus found “interesting”. Clicking these buttons will immediately get rid of any junk rows in the list, even if you're in the middle of selecing rows for another purpose (to close, to move, etc.) This lets you do two things at once, like some kind of super-human (maybe a part-human, part-Cerberus chimera).
Fetch & Retrieve
Your stored knowledge is all over the place -- forums, blogs, bug tracking, documentation, FAQs, articles, and so on. A lot of this useful information would save valuable time for customers and workers if it was just easier to find.
Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 reintroduces “Fetch & Retrieve” (F&R) with a much stronger emphasis on bringing this external knowledge into the helpdesk environment. In many cases F&R can leverage the existing search functionality in other applications which already provide relevant and optimized results.
In the past, replying to tickets resulted in a lot of browser windows/tabs for research. Now you can simply pop-up the “Find Answers” dialog while drafting your reply. Enter a couple keywords and let Fetch & Retrieve gather results from across your network (along with preview text and direct links).
This is really flexible. In some cases, such as FAQ, you may wish to simply copy the resulting content directly into your reply. In other situations where customers may participate in finding solutions, such as through forums or bug tracking, you may wish to send the customer a direct link to the information about their issue.
The best part is this no longer requires you to copy big blocks of content into the Cerberus Helpdesk internal knowledgebase. You can keep using your favorite software for various channels and your team's knowledge pool will grow automatically.
Contact Management
We hit a crossroads in planning the contact management functionality in Version 4.0, as it seems there are two major schools of thought in the community.
One camp uses Cerberus Helpdesk as their main repository of contact information and they have customized their helpdesk to store more information with each contact (product licenses and so on). The other camp has a specialized form of central contact management (Salesforce, LDAP, billing, etc.) and they feel copying information into Cerberus is redundant.
After some heavy brainstorming we came up with a flexible solution to accommodate both types of users with Version 4.0.
First, for the users who have a central contact repository. Contact and Address information can now be imported through comma-separated value files (.CSV) which can be easily generated from any source. Cerberus Helpdesk will even do automatic duplicate scanning so you can import up-to-date contact information from external sources daily if you desire. Using a simple, open format like CSV allows the community to step in and help build migration tools for even the most obscure sources.
Companies who use Cerberus Helpdesk as their main form of contact management have a lot to be happy about as well. You can now create plugins for contacts (products, assets, invoicing, time tracking, licensing, etc) using our new powerful and straightforward API. This lets you use your contact information in Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 as a platform for building mini-applications to do just about anything.
We've also simplified contact management. The information formally associated with a "person" (such as name or organization) is now stored per e-mail address. This removes the monotonous step of creating a record for each person and then trying to associate all their e-mail addresses to it, which served no real purpose. Different e-mail addresses for the same person generally have different contexts (personal conversation, side companies, hobbies, charity work, etc).
Scheduled Tasks
While previous versions of Cerberus Helpdesk had the ability to run scheduled tasks, the lack of a plug-in system really prevented the feature form doing much of anything truly interesting.
In Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 you can now create Scheduled Task Plug-ins which will run custom functionality on a schedule. You can do pretty much anything with this feature: sending out daily reports, sending out a helpdesk summary on Fridays at 5PM, automatically closing tickets with no custom reply in 48 hours, etc.
We use this feature to check your POP3 mailboxes, parse any pending messages and run nightly maintenance (purging tickets, optimizing the database, cleaning up attachments, etc.)
You can provide the heartbeat for scheduled tasks from an external cron (using wget/lynx in Linux) or a scheduled task (using wget on Windows Server) – which is the ideal solution. For environments without access to any form of scheduled task, you can simply keep an extra window/tab open in your browser which will constantly refresh. If your host doesn't provide the ability to configure scheduled tasks, it's time for a new host. How about, *ahem*, WebGroup Media the creators of Cerberus Helpdesk?
If your scheduled tasks aren't run for a while, they will automatically sync up when they're started again (if they miss 7 days, they'll run once and roll back the 'last ran' clock to when they should have run previously). If your PHP has a time limit the Scheduled Tasks will leap-frog and take turns running.
Importing
People have asked for importers into Cerberus Helpdesk from just about everything, from Thunderbird and Gmail to competing helpdesk applications. Of course, this isn't a process that should be invented for every combination of third-party application and Cerberus Helpdesk.
Due to the robust design of Version 4.0 imports from any source were actually really simple to implement. In 4.0, by intentional design, the POP3 Downloader and Parser processes are separate. This means mail can enter your helpdesk in a variety of ways (import, POP3, IMAP, piping, synchronization) and be parsed in exactly the same way regardless of source.
So a universal importer was as simple as creating a couple tools which dump tickets back to their original message source (attachments and all) with a few custom headers. Desktop e-mail applications generally provide mail in this format automatically, and web-mail applications like Yahoo! or Gmail provide POP3 access to retrieve your raw message sources.
This means you can import from any number of sources into Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0. Version 4.0 is even nice enough to preserve imported ticket masks in the same format of the source, so your customers can still refer to their issues by the same reference number.
You don't need to deal with any complex mapping during this process to move your imported tickets into your new Groups and Buckets. Use the “Super Sorter” and sort by the “X-CerberusImportPile” header (which on imports from Cerberus Helpdesk 3.x will be the original mailbox name).
Bulk Update
Another common criticism in Version 3.0 regarded the monotonous chore of applying the same set of actions to tickets while working with dashboards. For example, in order to remove spam a worker may be required to "set status to deleted", "block sender" and "mark as spam". These actions would have to be selected each time you wanted to remove spam.
In Version 4.0 we've introduced Bulk Update to Group Workspaces which allow you to quickly perform the same actions on the entire list, selected tickets, similar subjects or similar senders. The subject and sender options allow wildcards and will scan an entire list for matching tickets even if there are hundreds of pages – a major time-saver (and sanity-saver).
Bulk updates on sender and subject patterns may also be turned into Group Inbox Rules which will automatically apply the same actions to all matching mail in the future. Group Inbox Rules will automatically reorder themselves based on how often they're used, which provides a substantial performance boost when you have a lot of rules. You can view rule popularity from any Group Control Panel.
Community Tools
Before and during Cerberus Helpdesk 3.x, our peripheral tools such as the Support Center were provided as separate applications that simply shared the database. Naturally this leads to all sorts of problems involving keeping both applications in-sync during upgrades and database changes. Additionally many helpdesks run in different environments than an organization's customer-facing websites, and administrators often loathe (and rightfully so!) to set up remote database access to the official helpdesk under these conditions. This has been a problem in search of a solution for a long time.
So we developed Virtual Community Tools – easily one of the greatest innovations in the Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 feature lineup. The premise is simple, we wanted the ability to create various tools (as plugins) which could be deployed to multiple websites and customized for each one.
The result is tools that are incredibly easy to deploy on almost any webserver. Even if you host your helpdesk with us at WebGroup Media you can now deploy tools on your own website (on a different server, even one still using PHP4). You simply copy 1-2 files to your server by FTP and place them in any new directory (/support, /help, /survey, etc). Cerberus Helpdesk will even pre-configure these files for you so you don't have to edit a thing!
Configuration and customization of Virtual Community Tools occurs from inside Cerberus Helpdesk and changes are reflected immediately on the remote webserver without external database access or the transfer of files.
We have plans for dozens of Community Tools as 4.0 evolves and matures. It's incredibly easy to just download a new tool from our website or forums, add it to your helpdesk environment and then deploy it to your websites.
(For the technically-inclined, we've developed a software proxy which communicates directly with our development framework, Devblocks, over an HTTP connection. Devblocks will adapt to the needs of the proxy client and automatically rewrite all URLs relative to the remote website.)
Contact Form Builder (Community Tool)
A simpler variation of the Support Center, the Contact Form Builder focuses on providing the ability for your customers to submit new tickets from their browser. The form is optionally protected by a CAPTCHA image to help prevent annoying abuse by spammers.
You may now quickly create contact situations, such as "I would like more product information". Each situation may be assigned any number of follow-up questions to ensure your team gets the appropriate information on first-contact without wasting time on back-and-forth "email-tag".
Public Knowledgebase (Community Tool)
The new public Knowledgebase is a great example of our vision for community tools.
The primary purpose of the knowledgebase tool is to make your articles publicly accessible for a variety of uses. One of the more obvious uses is customer self-support through the web. A less obvious use is pulling RSS feeds of your articles by specific tags and displaying them on your website to point visitors in the right direction for common problems and questions.
Prior to Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 all knowledgebase content was stored in rigid categories in just a single catalog. That meant you had to create sub-categories for various projects or departments to isolate specific topics. The new knowledgebase has returned to the concept of tagging for organization which allows your readers to approach your content from any angle -- Product->Installing->FAQ, FAQ->Installing->Product, Installing->Product->FAQ. All that really matters in that example is "FAQ", "Installing" and "Product", the order is irrelevant. Clicking "FAQ" should allow you to choose another level of specificity, and so on, until you're happy with the results. It shouldn't matter what descriptive term a reader begins with, they should all lead to the same place. Rigid categories didn't offer that.
Often a reader will have some specific notes to guide their search for content in your knowledgebase. Tagging is great and it offers a lot flexibility, but no content directory can compete with a well-designed search engine. The new knowledgebase search is incredibly flexible, supporting booleans, grouping, term proximity, term boosting and fields.
The creation of knowledgebase content has also been streamlined to allow editing from the public interface, and you can delegate article management to editors outside the helpdesk -- such as industrious members of your community.
The new RSS feeds also allow you to use content in other tools, applications, readers and mashups. You can generate RSS feeds from any search, any tag browsing combination or individual articles. This means rather than trying to shoehorn the 3.x Support Center into your beautiful website design, you can now simply pull atomized content from your knowledgebase and display it seamlessly on the appropriate project website. This is especially useful for things like FAQs, billing questions, installation questions -- anything you can quickly isolate through tags for a specific use as a section of your website.
It's also MUCH easier to use your knowledgebase content in Fetch & Retrieve now. Rather than Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 considering your knowledgebase to be anything special, your article hits will now be returned along with hits from your forums, documentation, bug reporting tools, etc.
You can see WebGroup Media's public knowledgebase in action here:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/kb/
Support Center (Community Tool)
The Support Center allows requesters to:
- Open new tickets
- View ticket history
- Search multiple support resources (e.g., forums, wikis, blogs, FAQ, KB)
- Update contact information
You can see WebGroup Media's Support Center in action here:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/support/
Mail Routing
One of the major concepts that started to make less sense in Version 3.0 was assigning e-mail addresses directly to mailboxes. This was inflexible -- it didn't allow for wildcard addresses (e.g., support@*, *@company.com) and it required people to keep a mental map of how the helpdesk treated incoming mail.
In Version 4.0 mail routing is no longer restricted to full e-mail addresses, now you can quickly map a wildcard address to a specific Group Inbox.
We've also improved upon the previous "Catch-All" functionality, which caught undeliverable mail through complicated rules, by introducing the concept of a Default Group. For example, you may choose to designate a "Dispatch" team which is responsible for distributing or removing any mail that isn't cleanly assigned to a specific team -- such as spam or misspellings of inbound addresses. You may also choose to just assign everything to Dispatch and forgo automated routing. This is something that has been requested several times in the past for companies that have formal SLA rules to enforce before allowing their workers to commence action on a ticket.
Assist Mode
We're big fans of new technology coming out that allows the simple creation of feature walk-through videos in Flash, etc. The problem is such content is rendered obsolete in really short order around here by new development.
We finally caught on that the best way to be explaining how to use the product, in a way that will always be current, is by putting the tour inside the product itself. Assist Mode will follow you around the helpdesk pointing out useful functionality and providing tips. You can enable/disable this feature from your Preferences.
Preview Mode
One of the most annoying things about handling tickets in previous versions of Cerberus Helpdesk was having to click into every ambiguously titled ticket to check if it was spam or not. With 4.0 you can now preview the latest message on any ticket in a list without leaving the list.
Combined with the quick "spam" action for each row you'll find cleaning up a ticket list after a long weekend is no longer as painful as it once was. No more checkboxes!
(I'll let you in on a secret, double-click the preview window anywhere to close it quickly. It beats hitting that "X" close button perfectly by your 200th message of the day.)
Quick Assign
Quick Assign enables you to grab available tickets from any worklist. This is especially useful when you configure custom worklists to watch the Groups/Buckets you're active in.
Audit Log
The Audit Log tracks ticket property changes by date and worker.
Worklist Copy
In prior versions of Cerberus Helpdesk you had to configure your own workspaces (formerly dashboards) from scratch. In Cerb4 you can click the 'copy' action at the top of any worklist to save it into your private workspaces. This works best when combined with search results or an auto-generated list from the Overview screen.
Display Ticket Next/Prev
Many people have requested the ability to page through a list of tickets without leaving the Display Ticket screen. We're happy to say this has been implemented in 4.0.
Now, after replying to a ticket, you no longer need to keep hitting 'back' to return to your workspace or search results -- hoping to find your place in the list again. You can continue on to the next ticket without needless extra steps.
Undo
Ever accidentally click the wrong action for a list of checked tickets? If so, the result was probably you digging through custom searches to try to recover your tickets and applying another action to change them how you originally intended.
With 4.0 that headache is over, you can now easily undo any action from a ticket list! The confirmation is also a nice touch to assure you that tickets didn't just disappear off into the void, but were indeed moved, closed, etc.
E-mail Templates
E-mail Templates allow you to save fragments of text for reuse in future e-mail messages. Templates may contain placeholders, such as Customer First Name or Ticket Subject, which will automatically insert the correct values for a particular e-mail response.
Templates may be organized into Folders which allow simple sharing between Groups.
You can select, create or edit templates as you're writing an e-mail message, so you never have to leave the Reply screen.
Watchers (E-mail Notifications)
You can now create e-mail notifications for three different types of mail events: Incoming mail, Outgoing mail, Incoming+Outgoing, or Replies from customers to you.
- Incoming mail notifications are obvious, you'll get an e-mail each time someone writes in to the helpdesk. You can reply to that e-mail directly from your e-mail client/handheld device/etc. The helpdesk will proxy your reply as if you replied from the web interface -- meaning it will replace you as the sender with the proper helpdesk e-mail address (based on the ticket's group+bucket).
- Outgoing mail notifications can be used for quality control, managerial oversight, training, etc. This will send you a copy of any worker replies leaving the helpdesk. You won't receive copies of your own replies.
- Replies to you will only send you copies of e-mail where a customer is specifically replying to you (e.g., you are defined as the ticket's "Next Worker"). This is especially useful for handhelds where you need to reply to important tickets on the go, but you don't want to be inundated with copies of all e-mail.
Another interesting thing, compared to the 2.x/3.x watchers functionality, is the new ability to create official alternate e-mail addresses for your worker account. The helpdesk will send a confirmation to confirm the worker owns the e-mail address, and then that address can be used for any notifications. Registering alternate e-mail addresses like this allows for easy handling of replies from any worker mailbox/device.
Interactive Reports
This plugin is aimed at the requests of people who needed a way to see how many replies each worker was doing over a specific time period (for commission, etc.)
The Reporting plugin currently shows two sets of metrics:
- New Tickets (by group/bucket, by range)
- Worker Replies (by worker/group, by range)
Simulator
The Simulator plug-in is a great example of our ideal solution: It's simple to the point of almost being obvious, but its introduction solves several long-standing problems in a very clean way.
With the Simulator plug-in you can create any number of high-quality sample tickets in various "flavors" such as Retail or Spam. This lets evaluators immediately experiment with how the helpdesk works as well as development testers easily create new tickets to exhaustively tune upcoming functionality.
But we've even taken the simulation a step further making this invaluable for testing -- if you reply to these sample tickets using the helpdesk, an automated agent on our servers will write back with a simple response (such as, "Thanks!" or "I'll check that out!"). This makes it easy to experiment with incoming and outgoing e-mail, rather than sending in a flurry of disjointed "test" messages and writing back to yourself.
Mobile Interface
Another long-standing feature request has asked for an alternative, slimmed-down interface appropriate for mobile users (cellphones, handhelds, dial-ups, etc).
Version 4.0 includes a mobile plug-in which provides an interface free from Javascript, Ajax and CSS. This interface presents a worker with a list of their assigned ticket tasks and allows quick responses or actions.
Once it's enabled, you access it from "cerb4/index.php/mobile".
