Cerberus Helpdesk 1.4.1 Released, GUI now Opensource!

Junior WebHelper Joined: 07 Feb 2003 Posts: 6

Cerberus Helpdesk provides enterprise-level e-mail management with a web-based interface that is both visually and functionally optimized for extensive daily use. By indexing e-mail correspondence in a database, an accumulation of past support experience is at your staff's fingertips in whatever format you need.

This provides several benefits over traditional e-mail, such as:

* Tracking all communication with your customers in a single location. No more digging for past responses from your customers or your staff in your personal e-mail client. No more quoting an entire conversation in every response, or forwarding replies to a dozen people just to keep everyone in the loop on an issue. The Cerberus e-mail parser acts as a proxy, making sure all new responses are directed back to the support system rather than directly to your individual staff members.

* A new staff member can immediately pick up where another left off and be fully up-to-date on any given issue with information provided by the system. An audit log of past ticket actions and ticket correspondence history is available on all tickets. Know instantly what has been done, and what needs to be done next.

* The ability to quickly search for past or present tickets based on common criteria, such as: sender, subject, status, queue, content & more.

* You can store your own custom data and information with individual ticket or requestor (e-mail sender) records. No more mental or scribbled notes in various places -- your whole team will have access to this critical information for use in quickly responding to a customer in a personalized manner.

* Providing a uniform corporate image and brand(s) to your existing and potential customers. All the helpdesk tools can be branded with your company logo(s) and blend together to provide a support experience that keeps the focus on your company.

After much internal testing the 1.4.1 update is ready for release! New functionality and fixes are outlined in the ChangeLog below.

http://www.cerberusweb.com/
http://forum.cerberusweb.com/

You read the title right, Cerberus Helpdesk GUIs beginning with 1.4.1 are now opensource! We'll be bringing up a public read-only CVS server in the next few days so you can sync our continued official development with your customization/integration.

ChangeLog:

[+] Satellite Functionality added to the GUI. This will be explained later with the xSP Master GUI (for ISPs/MSPs/Webhosts) release. This allows a core group of support team members to manage dozens or hundreds of helpdesk installs using a single parser. This also allows the ability to control remote helpdesks and receive ticket summaries from all satellites in the master GUI. More info to follow.

[+] Added a "Who's Online" system to the home page of the system

[+] Added the ability to hide ticket statuses in your custom homepage ticket views. The default will hide resolved and dead (the previous default). You may now choose to hide: on hold, fixed, resolved, dead for a 'Needing Attention' view, or hide everything but 'new' for a 'Only New Tickets' view.

[+] Tickets will now list what other users are browsing them, commenting on them or replying to them. If a user is replying to a ticket you are looking at, it will be denoted in the "Ticket Vital Signs" box in the top and will be marked in red. This is to aid in preventing ticket/user collision and double replies.

[+] Added the ability to set a group to the "Core User Default" group. Remote users from a master GUI will be automatically assigned to this group by default -- if set (and applicable).

[+] Added new group privileges (can optimize tables, can manage groups, can edit views, etc.) There are now multiple bitfields in the database, and source users can create their own bitfield groups to define thier own permissions for their extensions.

[*] Parser header parsing completely rewritten for RFC compliance.

[*] Parser heavily tested for mem leaks and performance.

[*] Parser POP3 support for remote mail hosts fixed for Win32 and Unix-based platforms.

[*] Rewrote the entire ACL (access control list) group/privilege system to use bitflags. This is a *lot* cleaner, and will make it very easy for GUI source users to add their own privileges to extend the system. No database changes will be required. NOTE: YOU WILL HAVE TO SET YOUR GROUP PRIVILEGE RIGHTS AGAIN AFTER UPGRADING TO 1.4.1

[*] All new tables will now be optimized with the Config:Maintenance->Optimize tables action.

[*] Tweaked the default colors slightly for the Requestor Custom fields.

[*] Brought down the text size of the requestor and ticket custom fields to be able to fit more data on a single screen.

[*] "Hide Requestor Address" group option now works for all elements of the GUI.

[*] "New Ticket in..." now only lists queues the logged in user has 'write' access in.

[*] Rewrote the queue access handler on user create/edit. Plain vanilla PHP 4.2.3 installs didn't like how the previous code was passing the values as an associative array. This was preventing some installs from changing queue access rights.

[*] Fixed bug in the deleting a single queue address process.

[*] Fixed bug with Purge Tickets and Optimize table. The outdated 'recipient' table was being referenced when they should have been using 'requestor'.

[*] Restored knowledgebase link colors (from orange to dark gray) in the staff GUI.

[*] Fixed single and double quotes from being escaped when output if the server had magic-quotes enabled.

[*] Modified the session system & login handler to work with the new PHP 4.3.0 changes to session_register() and the $_SESSION object.

[*] Fixed a batch reply/comment bug that prevented the update screen from coming up on systems with register_globals off.

[*] Modified views behavior so a view without queues will not give errors -- it just won't show tickets.

Optimizations, features and fixes have been done to the GUI, DB and parser. It's strongly recommended you upgrade all three components -- the order does not matter, but DB then Parser then GUI is probably your best bet.

We'll probably have another maintenance release of 1.4.2 later in the month to make sure all known issues are resolved before moving on to the next massive functionality upgrade of 1.5.0.

Generate a free 30 day trial key and download the software here:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/trial_key_apply.php

Thanks!