Basics:Ticket masks vs IDs
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
If you’re new to Cerb4 you will immediately notice two “types” of ticket numbers — the ticket ID and the ticket mask. Ticket IDs are just incremental numbers such as “68″, while ticket masks come in the longer, hybrid form of a few letters and a string of numbers, “JKB-49992-311″.
Ticket masks are used everywhere
As you explore the features of Cerb4, you’ll come to realize that many public-facing operations default to the ticket mask as the primary option.
- In ‘group setup’ -> ‘Mail Preferences’, the toggle to “include the ticket’s ID in the subject line” actually uses the mask and not the ticket ID (don’t let the term overlap fool you).
- This change lets your clients see the mask in the subject line of your ticket replies.
- When opening a ticket from the Support Center, the clients are handed a ticket mask too…
- And if they go back and look at their Support Center ticket history, same thing.
Once our new Cerb4 users see all these different cases applying the ticket mask instead of the ticket ID, they naturally start to wonder. Why have both numbers? Why not rely on a single ticket number -- preferably the ‘ticket ID’ since it’s the simpler of the two? This is especially true considering both are “identical” references that can be used to quickly find tickets. Entering either one in the ‘Ticket ID’ Quick Search doesn’t make a difference (again don’t let the term overlap fool you), and typing either directly into the URL
- cerb4/display/JKB-49992-311
- cerb4/display/68
loads up the same ticket conversation in your browser. So why not just pass around “68″ to your workers AND clients for tracking purposes?
The developers have written about the subject before in a Cerb4 Knowledgebase article, a resource that many people tend to forget is available. So to answer this fundamental question for a larger audience, here it is once more.
Ticket masks obscure your internal ticket IDs
This is important because:
- Market competitors can measure your helpdesk e-mail volume by sending you e-mail every couple days and plotting how many other messages have been generated.
- Your community tools are more secure if your internal IDs aren’t provided. It’s a lot harder to guess a random mask (with ~1.38 trillion combinations by default) than to simply add or subtract from a known valid ID.
- Masks are portable. Ticket masks allow so many combinations to reference a ticket that you have a fair assurance of uniqueness when you combine multiple helpdesks into one or perform imports. A good example of this is moving tickets from Cerberus Helpdesk 3.x to 4.0. If you did any evaluation testing in 4.0 then your internal ticket IDs will likely have consumed some IDs that were used by your original data. This means any original tickets that you import will end up with a different internal ID than they used to have. This shouldn’t matter unless you’re giving that ID to customers as a reference (which by now we hope you understand is a bad idea!).
Adapted from a Cerb4 blog post.
