Due / ticket followup [Archive] - Cerberus Helpdesk Forums

pciccone

11-28-2007, 07:03 PM

What does the Due column do? I know ticket follow-up's can be specified when they are closed but what if you need to set a follow-up or a due date with an open ticket?

I see support for this function since we have the Due column, but I cannot seem to figure out how to use it.

Example: I have an open ticket with a Due / Follow-up date set 7 days from now. In 7 days something should happen to that ticket. Change color, alert, etc.

Thanks.

Phil

jstanden

11-29-2007, 05:24 AM

Hey Phil!

Yeah, you have the right correlation. The "due" column is a bit of a misnomer, but that's the date you're setting when you reply to a ticket and want to make sure it's reopened on a specific date, even if nobody writes back in the meantime.

There isn't a "due" feature like Cerb 2.x/3.x, because after a lot of thought we really favored the 'Service Level' prioritization over arbitrary due dates. When every ticket has a due date things get really murky, it becomes a worker's responsibility to keep advancing the date when replying, and a huge majority of the helpdesks I've logged into in past years end up ignoring them.

There's also the issue of needless complexity on setting up schedules so a due date doesn't land off-hours or on a weekend. That's something we did in past versions, but it's moot when a specific due date won't mean anything if nobody is around working when it's due. And if somebody is around, it's usually much simpler, and more effective at drawing attention, to either:
* Put the ticket in a specific bucket (seen from overview)
* Assign the ticket to a specific person (seen from overview)
* Give the sender a Service Level (seen from overview)

What would be much better is a reminder/task type system which could have a date, a note, and be linked directly to a ticket/contact/org. That's something we're going to absolutely do, and for the same reasons you're talking about: sales follow-ups, canceling a client on a specific day, waiting on an upstream precursor task, etc.

I don't have a solid ETA, but this is something we're starting to need pretty bad on our end too. But it should be much nicer being able to look at tasks independent of entire tickets/ownership/etc. You'd also be able to get a simple e-mail reminder leading up to a task being due.