By Dale Farris
Reviews Coordinator
Golden Triangle PC Club
August 2006

Program Overview

Cerberus Helpdesk is an enterprise-strength email management application.

There are so many obstacles to productively handling e-mail interaction between you and your clients. Junk mail. Viruses. Common issues that seem to pop back up every day -- things you swear your team has solved so many times before -- yet you can't find exactly where you left that "perfect" solution. Sound familiar? Maybe you're wishing the answer to reliably getting your customers the information they need was as simple as cloning your best people -- your knowledgeable experts. If you could trap their arcane knowledge inside a server, couldn't it just dish out solutions 24 hours a day -- nights, weekends and holidays?

A workflow-oriented interface keeps your team focused on the most important issues.

A branded, web-based support portal provides your customers with an easy-to-use self-help tool, online issue tracking & more! Cerberus Helpdesk handles mission critical e-mail management for over 13,072 companies worldwide -- from one-person startups to Fortune 500 giants.

During normal workflow, your experts are constantly feeding solutions into a pool of community knowledge. When any agent on your team -- perhaps a new hire -- is working on a newly reported customer issue, Cerberus will scan the knowledge pool to determine if any similar problems had been addressed in the past.

Any potentially helpful information is returned to the working agent, your new hire, who is even able to tell Cerberus whether each suggestion helped in solving the issue. This feedback process helps Cerberus become more aware of the different ways your customers ask the same question, and increases its ability to provide appropriate solutions.

Key Features

Fetch & Retrieve
Teach Cerberus to provide the best solutions from your experts

Adaptive Anti-Spam Engine
Actively combats spam and viruses, keeping your system clean

Web-based Support Portal
Allow your customers to submit issues through their web browser

Service Level Agreements, Schedules & Due Date Management
Set working hours and target response times for each department. Allow support contracts to prioritize support for specific companies.

E-mail Templates
Set standard responses and canned text for rapid responses to common questions

Knowledgebase
Document solutions to previously addressed issues

100% GUI Source Code
Extend. Integrate. Customize

10 Ways Cerberus Can Improve Your Company's Mission Critical E-mail Management

Store solutions from your experts in the company's knowledge pool, a global body of experience that puts proven solutions in the hands of even your newest team member

Save time by eliminating costly junk e-mail. Cerberus relentlessly combats spam and viruses -- it even adapts to their latest tricks

Increase productivity by giving each agent the tools necessary to view and manage their e-mail workload according to their special role.

Control your e-mail pipeline with due dates automatically set according to your schedules for each department.

Set response time targets to ensure your customers are receiving timely solutions that meet or exceed their expectations.

Prioritize the support needs of specific customers using fully customizable Service Level Agreements.

Provide your customers with a public, web-based Support Center which seamlessly embeds into your existing website.

Adapt and integrate the system according to your needs. 100% of the user interface source code is included.

Gain access to a highly constructive user community with direct access to the product developers.

Feel confident in your ability to grow with a system that has been load tested with over 4.7 million concurrent e-mail messages.

5 Reasons Your Customers Want you to Use Cerberus

They want to know their critical issue isn't sitting at the bottom of a single technician's inbox.

They want to ask questions or report issues through a user-friendly Support Center integrated with your existing website. They may not want to open their e-mail client or dig around for an e-mail address for the proper department.

When submitting a new issue, they want to be guided by a form which prompts them for all the information you need to address their issue quickly.

They want to browse a public knowledgebase of articles which answer frequently asked questions or provide solutions to common issues.

They want to know their issues are being worked on, and they can track the current status online -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Cerberus Helpdesk Features

Customizable Ticket Views
Teach Cerberus exactly what information you want and how you want it displayed. Your agents can choose their own important columns, custom data, queues, ticket statuses and more! Customized ticket views are saved for later reuse.

Adaptive Anti-Spam Features
Cerberus includes a highly adaptive and trainable Bayesian spam filter, which gives a probability rating on whether or not a given message is spam. A group of "interesting" words are sampled based on their deviation from uninteresting words found in your e-mail, by being either extremely innocent (e.g., your company name) or extremely spammy (e.g., viagra).

Custom Field Groups
Create groups of custom fields specific to your company and industry. Track groups of custom information by binding it to specific customers and their tickets.

Reporting System
Several powerful reports are included! Track agent performance, average response times, total handle times, assignments, logins, group and queue summaries, service levels, and much more! New reports are being added constantly.

E-mail Templates
Automatically merge custom data about your users into e-mail templates and canned text. Quickly respond to common questions and issues while maintaining a personal touch.

Integrated Knowledgebase
An integrated knowledgebase provides solutions to previously addressed issues, giving relevant answers to your company's agents.

Ticket ID Masking
Keep your e-mail loads private by masking with randomized, unique ticket IDs.

Multilanguage Support
Use your native language in the GUI or edit the language files for localization.

Customization
100% Source Code for GUI
Every version (even the trial!) provides you with the full PHP source code to the Cerberus Helpdesk GUI. Customize it for your needs or even contribute!

Template-based GUI
Integrated Smarty template engine for small, clean and powerful templates.

Stylesheet for Simple Customization of Scheme
Easily change colors, font styles & sizes.

Branding
Personalize the helpdesk with your company's own logo.

Technology
PHP
Full 4.2.0+ compliance. Does not require register_globals for added security.

Binary E-mail Parser
Utilizes a binary e-mail parser for unparalleled speed and stability. Parsers are compiled specifically for your platform to accommodate platform specific issues and optimizations.

MySQL Database Support
Supports the world's most popular open source database platform

Add-Ons
Public-User Tools
Customers can submit & track tickets from your website, or browse & search your public knowledgebase articles

Price

$995 - Enterprise Edition - Commercial/Government Use
$495 - Enterprise Edition - Small Biz/Non-Profit/Education
For 25 Allowed Users - $49 Per Additional User
Unlimited Allowed Teams & Email Addresses

$599 - Professional Edition - Commercial/Government Use
$299 - Professional Edition - Small Biz/Non-Profit/Education
For 10 Allowed Users - $49 Per Additional User
Unlimited Allowed Teams & Email Addresses

$399 - Standard Edition - Commercial/Government Use
$199 - Standard Edition - Small Biz/Non-Profit/Education
For 5 Allowed Users - $49 Per Additional User
Unlimited Allowed Teams & Email Addresses

$ Free - Small Team Edition
For 3 Allowed Users - No Additional Users
Unlimited Allowed Teams & 1 Email Address

System Configuration Requirements

Note that Helpdesk is designed to be a Web based service supported by a server. So, the system requirements are quite a bit different from what you would expect for a client application that is designed to run on one PC at a time.

WebGroup Media recommends BSD or Linux. If you don't have team members with Unix administration experience, Windows is supported by all their tools. Just keep in mind Microsoft tends to set their own standards, so you're likely to have a few minor roadblocks with Exchange/IIS/etc. butting heads with software that adheres completely to open standards (RFC822, etc.)

On the hardware end:

Memory and fast disk storage are going to be your bottlenecks with most web applications. The company recommends using as much memory as you can budget for (at least 1GB, preferably 2GB+). Their development machines use DDR400 with the lowest CL (latency) they can find. They prefer Corsair, though there are dozens of good vendors.

For disk storage, if you can budget it, they can't recommend a RAID setup (IDE or SCSI) highly enough. They have always found the biggest bottleneck on their servers to be disk access. Using a RAID-10 (mirroring + striping with 4 disks) made an amazing difference. 80-100GB drives are pretty inexpensive these days. With striping that's roughly 200GB partitionable, and the mirror provides a real-time backup for each disk that kicks in when needed (heaven forbid!).

That said, their average user can get away with a 30-80GB 7200rpm disk, assuming they have some backup process in place (mysqldump, replication, etc.)

For CPU, they have had a lot of luck with Intel Pentium 4 2-3GHz with 800MHz Front Side Bus processors with HyperThreading enabled. Xeons obviously work great as well. Some users prefer AMD Athlons, SPARC, etc. They can build a parser for most platforms, so it's not much of an issue. However, for compatibility with all their tools, i386 is generally recommended.

As for network bandwidth, it really depends on how many users you plan to have accessing the system -- both on the agent side and the public customer side. As a web service, it's really not much more bandwidth intensive than regular e-mail service. The GUI is lightweight, as is all the backend communication via XML.

About WebGroup Media, LLC

WebGroup Media is a Southern California based software development company specializing in e-mail response management (ERM) tools. Over 13,072 businesses worldwide, from one-person startups to Fortune 500 giants, utilize their products to better manage business e-mail.

Contact Information

WebGroup Media, LLC
451 Lambert Road, Suite 201
Brea, California 92821
714-671-9090
www.cerberusweb.com