Basics:Owners
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
5.1
If a worker is assigned to something like a task, he or she is referred to as an Owner. The term "Owner" can be a little deceiving depending on how you interpret it, but the most important thing in Cerb to remember is the owner is not necessarily the same worker who created it. Let's say John Smith created a task to call a customer; he can make himself the owner, or he can make me (Joe Geck) the owner. With that line of thinking good synonyms for Owners might be assigned or responsible for, so "Joe owns a task" would be the equivalent of:
- "Joe is assigned a task"
- "Joe is responsible for a task"
If this sounds eerily familiar, it is. "Worker assignments" is an old Cerb staple that's been around since 4.x and was carried over as-is into 5.0. But the few areas it was lacking in, Owners as a whole should fix; Owners is set to be the universal assignment feature Cerb has been missing for a while.
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Advantages of Owners
Time Tracking
Assignments were once limited to tickets, tasks, and opportunities, you assigned a worker to be responsible for one of those three and he or she could resolve or close it when finished. The following is a time tracking entry which did NOT support assignments originally -- all you had was the worker who logged the time.
Owners is a step up. The new design replaces the old ticket, task, opportunities system and is extended to include time tracking. With owners you can assign a worker any individual time tracking logs they may need to process.
Notice how in both systems Joe Geck logged the time he spent on the phone. In the new system however I assigned the time entry to John Smith after the fact, so he can proceed to bill Richard for the tech support.
- The only "objects" still NOT assignable in the traditional sense are feedback entries and addresses. Address Book Organizations can "simulate" the effect with worker links (more on that later).
Multiple Assignments
Long-time Cerb users might be familiar with "Next Worker" -- Cerb's way of telling you something was assigned to someone. If you haven't heard of it, the literal phrase "Next Worker" only appeared in the Helpdesk when referring to tickets and even then only in a few specific spots.
- Peek (Properties) and ticket list column
Cerb4's (peek).
- Bulk Update
Cerb4's Bulk Update.
- Top of a ticket page
Cerb4's ticket.
A few others hinted at it but phrased it differently, it's still the same thing though.
- Inside a ticket (Properties or Reply): "Who should handle the next reply?"
To be clear, "Next Worker" is still just a plain old ticket assignment and it's really no different than assigning a task or an opportunity. But the reason we focus on the terminology so much is it implies one worker for one ticket. The Next Worker dropdown (picklist) only lets you select one worker, once you assign a worker, it's theirs until they pass it off or release it back to the "anybody" (unassigned) pool.
The Owners system tweaks this workflow and lets you assign multiple workers to one ticket. You no longer have to release a ticket to assign it to another worker, you both can be responsible for the ticket together. The Owners label (and "+" button) replace most of the "Next Worker" ticket assignment options.
It also replaces any of the plain worker dropdowns for assigning things other than tickets, such as tasks, opportunities, as well as the newly added assignment options for time tracking.
- When replying to tickets, we still use the convention "Who should handle the next reply?" but added just the "+" button. Still works the same way, don't let the lack of a literal "Owners" label fool you.
Using Owners
We're going to stick with ticket examples the rest of the way, but remember owners applies to lots of other Helpdesk concepts. I like to explain features through tickets as a general rule, because they tend to have the most robust layout -- plenty of tabs for other concepts and a lot of different ways to do the same thing (you can set an assignment on a ticket at least three different ways). So we'll start with a ticket that has two assigned workers already and add two more, all the while going over the new interface in the process.
- First find a sample ticket from the usual places (mail, Search Tickets works) and then click INTO the ticket.
Observe how you can tell immediately whether or not a ticket is assigned. At the top of the ticket under the title, there are a half dozen fields; the first row is Status, Group, Bucket, Mask, and Ticket ID. In the old system when a ticket was already assigned, below the other fields would be a "Next Worker" field; in the new system you'll see an Owners label, and the worker(s) assigned to the ticket. If you don't see "Owners" the ticket is unassigned.
- To assign the ticket click the 'Edit' button, it's the new button you see at the front of the "action" row (also in the same screenshot above).
New Properties tab
Notice inside the Edit window is the old Properties tab that used to sit next to the Conversation tab in the ticket itself. In previous versions we would have used the 'Properties' tab to change "Next Workers", but from now on everything "property"-related is done using 'Edit'. This is a global change throughout the Helpdesk, EVERY 'Properties' tab (except Organizations) was moved into the 'Edit' window. Objects that used to have a dedicated page like tickets, such as tasks and opportunities, no longer have the standalone Properties tab, and others like time tracking that used to only have a pop-up window, now have their own pages and the Edit/Properties combo.
Even with the added complexity of appending multiple workers to the ticket, everything is done using the Owners "+" button, whether it's assigning an unassigned ticket to a worker OR assigning a second worker to an already assigned ticket. Go ahead and click 
to bring up a second window called "worker chooser".
Choosers are a new sub-system in Cerb that lets you run searches (filter presets?) to quickly pinpoint items you want to add to whatever it is you're doing. In this case we want to select, or choose, a few workers and add them as owners.
- Checkmark a couple names and click 'Add Selected'. Here I've chosen Brian Davis and Debi Taylor, notice their names appear as "selected" and can be removed individually should you make a mistake (blue trash cans).
Finish up by clicking save changes to close the "chooser window" and that should put you back on the Edit window (Properties tab). The two new workers are waiting to be added as owners for a total of four owners, go ahead and save changes one more time. At the top of your ticket you should see your two new names next to the Owners field.
Who's replying?
Because of Owners and the new Drafts system in 5.0, there was a change with how assignments work. If you used Cerb4 you may remember a basic "lock & key" design with replies to assigned tickets. The idea was the first worker who started a reply was automatically assigned the ticket, and any workers who tried to start their own reply while the other worker was still writing would get a red warning.
Once the original worker submitted their response, the ticket would be "released" (assuming they decided to leave the "Next Worker" empty, the default is "anybody" or unassigned). On the other hand, if the worker stopped mid-reply and wanted to scrap it, there was a 'Discard & Surrender' button at the bottom of the reply box.
The reason I went off on this little tangent is because the whole lock & key system, including the auto-assignment on reply AND the 'Discard & Surrender' button, were removed back in 5.0. And even though this predates the Owners system in 5.1, the lack of a lock & key system is something you need to watch out for now that multiple workers can be assigned to a ticket. The potential for duping replies is a real possibility (or simply wasting time with a needless second reply before you catch yourself).
To counter this take advantage of the visual cues drafts provide. Drafts are treated just like a reply would be and are "attached" to the original message and threaded chronologically in the conversation; at the top of the ticket will be the timestamps of any pending replies, click the dates (3m ago) to jump to the message. Use these tools to figure out who's writing back when you have a ticket assigned to a handful of workers.
- Remember since the auto-assignment feature is gone, you will not become an owner automatically when you click 'Reply'; if you want to assign yourself the ticket while replying, make sure you do it the old fashioned by "taking" the ticket beforehand. 'Take' adds you to the ticket owners, it will not pry the ticket away from everyone else and make you the exclusive owner.
Recognizing owned tickets
So when looking through open tickets how do you know who's assigned to a ticket and how many people are actually assigned to said ticket? In the past when we had a singular "Next Worker" concept, we had a couple of ways to figure that out when browsing around the Helpdesk. We'll compare the old Next Worker style against the new Owners method.
Owners "column"
In 4.x you could always expose the 'Next Worker' column in your ticket list.
Unfortunately there's no plans to replace that column with an "Owners" column. If you do see an "Owner" column this is leftover cruft, and if you try to use it, you will get blanks. The column will be removed when you update your Helpdesk to latest (see CHD-2035).
In spite of that the nice thing about Owners is you really don't have to do anything, no columns to add and no special view settings; next to each assigned ticket in a list will be the worker names in smaller grey text (I've highlighted them blue).
Assigned Subtotals
Overview used to be the company-wide tab to see any assigned tickets. On the left sidebar there was a section for all 'Assigned' tickets broken down by worker.
The Overview tab is gone in 5.1 -- replaced by Search Tickets: a combination of Filter Presets and Subtotals -- and it has a its own sidebar concept. In the subtotals sidebar there is a worker category, clicking that will show you the assigned tickets based on your filters.
- Remember owners allow for multiple worker assignments per ticket, so unlike before there may be overlap in the numbers you see.
Peek and Bulk Update
(peek) works pretty much like the 'Edit' button inside the ticket; it includes an extra 'Message' tab, but the 'Properties' tab is identical.
"Bulk update" also lets you assign multiple workers as owners in a similar fashion, however it has a unique "-" (minus) button to unassign tickets the same way the "+" (plus) button is used to assign tickets.
John was out on vacation this week, so I processed the new orders for him. I'm releasing the tickets (from myself) and adding John Smith as an owner so he can handle any follow-ups when he gets back.
Links
As much as Owners is a brand new feature, it's really a smaller change built on top of a much larger feature called Links. Links is one of the biggest sweeping changes across the Helpdesk in 5.1, a standalone feature in its own right but the backbone of Owners and several other systems.
Links lets you literally "connect" two Helpdesk objects together -- could be two of the same objects, like a ticket to a ticket, or a mix of any of the others, such as a ticket to a task or a task to an opportunity. Once two things are linked together they can be reached through each other, so inside a ticket there would be a link to a specific task, and inside that task there would be a link back to the ticket.
Its primary use is for basic project management, but because it's so tightly integrated into the Helpdesk it's created a new way to do a lot of old practices. For example tasks no longer get their own tab in a ticket, they get their own worklist in the Links tab next to Conversation. This 'Links' tab is also what binds a worker, or owner, to a ticket (which is why we need to talk about it here).
When you assign yourself to a ticket, behind the scenes you are linking you, the worker, to the ticket. Observe how we have a task worklist and a worker worklist, the worker list includes the four owners from before, effectively these are the "owner links". Now when we assigned the ticket to us originally, those four links were created seamlessly in the background. The same effect works in reverse; we could have added us as four worker links through the 'Links' tab, and upon saving the "owners" would have been created for us immediately.
- Take a look at the "call Richard" task in the screenshot above, it's assigned to me (Joe Geck). Remember things other than tickets, like tasks, opportunities, and time tracking entries also support owners, and those "owners" will be captured in the respective page's 'Links' tab. Meaning if you click "Call Richard back for troubleshooting" (same as if you went to 'activity', 'Tasks' first), you will see a Task PAGE with a 'Links' tab just like you saw in our ticket example.
- Feedback and addresses do not support owners because they do not use links; neither has its own page so there's no 'Links' tab. Click around in 'activity', 'Feedback' and 'address book', 'Addresses' and you'll see what I mean.
- Address Book Organizations on the other hand technically support owners, but not exactly in the same way. The Organization's page gets its own 'Links' tab where you can link workers like normal, you won't however find the "owners" label displayed anywhere.
