Cerberus 1.5.0 Released! New Public Tools, Special Pricing.

Junior WebHelper Joined: 07 Feb 2003 Posts: 6

View the Release Announcement here:
http://forum.cerberusweb.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=631

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 1.5.0 update is ready for release! New functionality and fixes are outlined in the ChangeLog below.

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

Our special pricing is now extended through March + April 2003. For more details visit: http://www.cerberusweb.com/purchase.php

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

ChangeLog:

1.5.0 GUI:

[*] Sessions moved into the database. This should resolve timeout problems and provide a LOT more functionality. The sessions system was rebuilt from the ground up and no longer relies on PHP session functions or cookies. This opens up a lot of possibilities for WAP/handhelds and other systems that may not have allowed logins due to cookie problems (firewall/virus scanner/privacy policy/etc).

[+] New Search Index Engine for tickets -- supports wildcards (use * or %), room for boolean support and no longer requires MySQL FULLTEXT support.

[+] New Search Index Engine for knowledgebase articles. Minimum search word length is now definable (default 2 letters). Search is now case insensitive. Topic text now combines problem text, solution text, keywords.

[*] Search indexes can be manually reindexed from configuration. New privileges have been added to the group system.

[*] Configuration values moved from config.php to database (except for DB_* settings). They are now called global settings in config.

[+] Added Knowledgebase Article User-Contributed Comments. This will allow both public and private users to add helpful comments to existing knowledgebase articles. This functionality includes the ability to give helpdesk users the ability to approve/reject comments before they're visible, as well as edit/remove comments.

[+] Added Ratings to Knowledgebase Articles for staff + public GUIs. These ratings will show in search results and article lists and help direct users to helpful/popular articles as well as let your admin and managers know what articles need more work.

[*] Moved Product Key into new config menu called "Product Options". Added "Global settings" under Product Options. Renamed the Bug+Feedback menu to "Reporting".

[+] Added the ability to add/remove tickets from batch from the queue list/search results screen. Tickets already in the batch in those lists will be prefixed with an asterisk (*).

[+] Added the ability to use "next batched" and "prev batched" links on any ticket within a batch to quickly navigate through the batch group. This had already greatly improved workflow in our internal usage.

[+] Added HTTP headers to instruct the browser not to cache pages. Some Linux browsers (Konqueror,etc) were caching pages by default.

[*] Changed Verbiage on System Status of "Current Open Ticket" to "Last Ticket Viewed" so the purpose makes more sense.

[+] Added a new group privilege for editing global settings (used to be config.php values).

[*] Homepage ticket filter fixes (only show unassigned, etc.)

[*] Minor HTML fixes for Linux browsers (Mozilla/Konqueror/Opera).

[-] Zend Optimizer and PHP Session checks removed from installation verification page.

[*] When cloning a ticket, an audit log entry will be made on the new ticket as well as the ticket that was cloned. (Thanks to Scomolet for the suggestion in the forums.)

[*] When adding/editing a user who is not a superuser, a popup will now warn you if no user group has been selected.

[*] Fixed a bug where clicking "all" in the search results could lead to losing the ticket status search constraint.

[+] Added a message on the custom field data entry screen when no ticket or requestor custom fields are defined in configuration. The message will instruct the user where to add such fields. The 'submit' buttons will now be removed in these cases to prevent confusion.

[*] The customer support history will now restrict the history ticket list to only queues the logged in user has access to.

[*] Fixed some erraneous "access denied" errors where a user had permissions for a module in configuration (such as custom fields or parser mail rules) but the user was not a superuser.

[*] When listing tickets in a queue or search results, page and sorting will now be kept after a mass status change commit -- instead of resetting back to the first page unsorted as in previous versions.

[*] Fixed a bug where some blocked e-mail addresses wouldn't allow you to unban them.

[*] Changed the typo "requestors" to "requesters" in the English language resource.

1.5.0 PARSER:

[+] Added a new text indexing engine to the parser to index new e-mail messages in real-time. This index is used in the GUI search functionality.

[+] Added Parser binary support for OpenBSD 3.x platform.

[+] Subdomains for every domain in a key are now permitted automatically.

[*] A BCC watcher bug was fixed.

[*] MySQL max_allowed_packet issue fixed.

[*] When nested ticket IDs appear in a subject line, the parser will now use the right-most ticket ID (original ticket ID). This will prevent two Cerberus Helpdesks from adding correspondence to local tickets using eachothers remote ticket IDs.

[+] More tests and logging added for invalid keys. The parser should no longer core dump in these instances.

[*] A clearer error is now reported when the queue limit (from product key) is reached.

[*] Removed extra blank lines from the bottom of e-mail messages.

[*] Fixed a bug with parser mail rules.

Optimizations, features and fixes have been done to the GUI, database and parser. It's strongly recommended you upgrade all three components. For upgrade instructions, please view the release announcement URL at the top of this post.

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

Thanks!