Basics:Drafts
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
Like any good e-mail program our Drafts have two key components:
- An auto-save mechanism to backup those long-winded replies before catastrophe strikes
- A simple method for sending your messages out later, either individually or in bulk
If you're upgrading from a previous version there's no plugins or pre-configuration required, simply reply to or forward an existing ticket (or compose a new message via Send Mail or Open Ticket). Within a few moments you should see a yellow banner claiming a draft was saved.
This is the auto-save kicking in, and every 30 seconds the system will do it again (to indicate another backup occurred the time stamp refreshes periodically; if you chose to 'hide' the alert instead, it will reappear shortly). Once you're done working on your message you can click 'Send Message' to finish your reply like normal, or 'Continue Later' to quit and come back another time.
- Because replying to an unassigned ticket no longer auto-assigns it to yourself, you'll notice the 'Discard & Surrender' button from previous versions was removed. Therefore to avoid potential dupes, you'll want to eyeball the message history for any drafts your co-workers already started.
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Continue Later
When you want to resume your progress, or if there was a technical problem like your browser crashed, the 'Drafts' tab in the 'mail' section will get you where you want to be. This general-purpose tab has a list of all the drafts you've been working on in one convenient spot. Click the relevant subject to jump back into the ticket conversation (or send your reply out immediately).
Once inside, the system will place you at the top of the Conversation tab with another yellow banner. This instance is to show you the number of drafts remaining and includes a relative date corresponding to each one. Because drafts are interweaved in the message history just like a real reply would be, several of them might be offscreen. Click the appropriate date to jump to that draft in the ticket.
- Click the 'resume' link to get started again (or 'delete' if you want to get rid of it). If another worker's draft is there, you can not modify it.
Failed Deliveries
ALL messages remain in the draft-state until they are successfully sent out; even if you're trying to send a saved draft from the ticket conversation (resume -> send), it will stay preserved as a draft if there's a problem. Draft-compatible messages include the standard replies, forwards and compose, but also things like auto-responses and watcher replies.
Send your drafts in bulk
Using the dedicated ‘Drafts’ tab we checked out earlier, workers can “queue up” multiple drafts for immediate dispatch. This can be a good technique if you want to encourage manager reviews on outgoing mail -- your staff can save all their messages as drafts, and then have a manager come in later to go through the Drafts tab. With a couple of quick peeks they can verify each pending reply looks good, then checkmark, ‘bulk update’, and set the ”Do” status to send/queued. (Drafts can be CREATED in bulk too, see Broadcast.)
After you save changes the drafts physically change their status to queued and disappear from the list. These messages are caught in a go-between state and are awaiting to be delivered during the next scheduled 'Mail Queue' TASK (helpdesk setup, Scheduler) that will run as part of your advanced cron.
- This is what the message will look inside the ticket; while it’s queued you can not edit or delete it from the conversation. But if necessary you can revert it back to a draft from the ‘Mail Queue’ TAB shown below.
Queued?
All queued messages in the system can be viewed by an administrator inside the 'helpdesk setup', 'Mail Queue' TAB. Over time the cron should slowly attempt to deliver each message -- it might be a little backed up if you sent out a bunch at once. For whatever reason if a message is NOT sent successfully, you can check how many times it failed from here as well.
When multiple messages repeatedly fail, double check your SMTP settings in 'Mail Setup'. Then inside the 'Scheduler' tab manually 'run (now)' the Mail Queue TASK to see if the messages are sent this time.
If any of the queued messages died again it will say so in the output -- feel free to visit us in Town Hall or contact us by e-mail, so we can help troubleshoot.
