Support Center 4.0 is released!

[jstanden]

Alright! I've committed the plug-in for the new 4.0 Support Center.

To enable:
Update from Subversion following these instructions:
http://wiki.cerberusdemo.com/index.php/Upgrading_to_Newer_Versions_of_Cerberus_Helpdesk_4 .0
Log in to your helpdesk.
Click 'Configuration' in the top navigation menu.
Click 'Plugins' from the configuration sub-menu.
Make sure the "Community Tool: Support Center" plugin is checked.
Click 'Save Changes'
Click 'Communities' in the top navigation menu.
Add a 'Support Center' tool to any of your communities.
The configuration of this tool is self-explanatory. Go ahead and tweak it to your liking and 'Save & Continue'.
Click the 'Installation' tab at the top of the tool configuration.
Copy the provided index.php file to your desired location on *any* PHP-enabled website. If you're using Apache, you should also copy the .htaccess file so your URLs are a touch friendlier.
Navigate to the appropriate URL in your browser and ogle.You can see an example of our live Support Center here:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/support/

I've temporarily enabled customer logins, so feel free to register and poke around your ticket history. Eventually we'll probably disable logins on our instance.

A good example search is "LDAP", which will return hits from our project portal (JIRA) and documentation (Mediawiki) through F&R.

The additional things I'd like to do with this:
Authenticators: Allow customer authentication through LDAP, vBulletin login, etc. This is great because a lot of people don't want yet another login.
Search History: Allow customers to not only display their support history but search it with flexible criteria (date ranges, content, status)
Themes: Using CSS and external URLs it's very easy to allow custom themes without modifying the underlying code. This should be a quickie in a subsequent update.
F&R Fine-tuning: Right now, any Fetch & Retrieve resources you expose to the portal will be searched by the user. Ultimately it makes sense to allow customers to specify the sources they're interested in to narrow down their results.Additional ideas and feedback are welcome! Enjoy!

[netwrkr]

Jeff - when you get a chance could you upgrade the online demo to the latest build which includes support for the support center? I would love to kick the tires a bit.


Also

Public Knowledgebase (Community Tool Example):
URL: http://demo.cerb4.com/kb/


That link yields 'Tool not found.'

Tom

[jstanden]

Hey Tom,

Yeah I'll definitely put an SC demo where you can change the configuration and see it reflect on the live copy. Good call!

On the "Tool Not Found", someone probably deleted the tool in the demo. It's easy to fix. I'll do that at the same time.

Thanks!

[cfan]

Is there a way to display the top 10 most viewed articles on the kb front page (with the number of views), as in cerb 3.x? This is very useful as the most popular article appears to be the most helpful.

[jstanden]

Jeff - when you get a chance could you upgrade the online demo to the latest build which includes support for the support center? I would love to kick the tires a bit.

Alright! The KB demo is restored and I've added a Support Center demo:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/online_demo.php

In a future commit I'll make sure the DEMO_MODE setting also locks down the ability to delete community tools so we don't have to keep setting these back up.

Thanks!

[jstanden]

Is there a way to display the top 10 most viewed articles on the kb front page (with the number of views), as in cerb 3.x? This is very useful as the most popular article appears to be the most helpful.

I've been meaning to do that for a while. All we'd need is a new RSS feed produced by the KB which shows the most viewed articles. We don't track views at the moment, but it's very easy to implement.

Additionally I'd like a feed of 'Recent Changes' which workers could add to their RSS readers. This would keep everyone abreast of the available, and reusable KB articles.

I'll see if I can get those feeds in the public KB in the next day or two. From there you'd simply add the RSS URL to the Support Center configuration in the "community" menu item.

Thanks for the feedback!

[jstanden]

Alright! My latest commit added the ability to use a 'Recent Changes' or 'Most Popular' RSS feed from the KB on your Support Center.

[FranHIS]

Jeff,
we are currently testing:
Cerberus Helpdesk™ © 2002-2007, WebGroup Media™ LLC - Version 4.0 RC1 (Build 480)

Is it possible to restrict the ability to add/delete community tools to users with administrator privileges?

/Fran

[jstanden]

Is it possible to restrict the ability to add/delete community tools to users with administrator privileges?

Absolutely! We should probably just move the entire 'communities' area into Configuration anyway.

[Hank Freid]

Is there a way to display the top Popular articles on the front page? So This is very awesome information. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

Regards:
Hank Freid

>=<((((('>

[mfogg]

Hi Hank,

If you've created an external knowledgebase public tool, there is a link to an RSS feed for the most popular articles. If you put that url in the community tools setup of the support center under "Home Page" then the most popular articles will be displayed on the support center front page.

[tvcnet]

Hi.
My support center looks nothing like your support center shown here:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/support/

I checked all the plugins to "on"
I created the standard /support directory
I put the files shown in the tutorials in the directory
I go do the directory but all I see is this yuc looking minimalist portal (with home and open a ticket).

No knowledgebase stuff is listed and formatting is totally different looking than your demo.


Is there some step by step process to make our support center look like below:
http://www.cerberusweb.com/support/
?

Thanks,
Jim

[Hildy]

Add a couple feeds, and it should look more like the referenced link. See http://www.cerb4.com/forums/showthread.php?t=974 for details on how to do that.