Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 (Cerb4) is a group-based webmail project that has been evolving since January 2002. We started the project because we couldn't find an existing PHP-based solution that seemed to be conscious enough about performance and usability. We didn't have a spectacularly large volume of e-mail to deal with at the time, but that only made it more surprising that the available solutions were failing us as badly as they were.

It has taken us six years of immersion, and tens of thousands of conversations, to really appreciate how much energy it takes to find elegant solutions -- concepts that are simple to explain, but remain flexible enough to be used in creatively unexpected ways.

What you see in the project today is a distillation of these elegant solutions from our six years of experimentation. If you're accustomed to complexity as a measure of software's maturity, things may look too simple at first glance. Don't let the simplicity fool you.

You only need to understand a few concepts to get started:

• A ticket is a specific e-mail conversation and all the related data about a question or issue. Each ticket has a unique identifier for future reference by anyone involved.

• The people on the originating end of tickets are called requesters. A ticket can have multiple requesters.

• The people on the answering end of tickets are called workers.

• A watcher is a worker who receives copies of messages. For example, a supervisor may be a watcher to monitor the quality of the messages workers are writing back to requesters.

• The helpdesk is a software hub for centrally managing and archiving tickets, and routing messages between workers and requesters. This allows several workers to receive and share e-mail without requesters writing to any of them individually.

• A bucket is a container for storing similar tickets. Common buckets are: Leads, Receipts, Newsletters, Refunds and Spam.

• A group is several workers who share responsibility for the same tickets and buckets. Common groups are: Sales, Support, Development, Billing and Corporate. These examples are departments, but groups can be related by anything.

• A worker in a group is called a member. A member with the authority to modify the group is called a manager. Groups can have any number of managers.

• Each group has an inbox where new tickets are delivered by default. These tickets are then moved into buckets either automatically by the helpdesk or by workers.

Ready for some examples? Start with the screenshot tour.

Partnership: We're a small, passionate company. When you work with us, you're always talking to decision makers.

Innovation: We're a company of full-time, battle-tested support and development teams that aren't interested in cloning and rebranding ideas from other projects; we want to take innovative risks to raise the bar on software usability and simplicity, with our successes and failures judged by the user community rather than our accountant.

Source Code: Even our free versions come with source code. Business users are trusted to respect the software license, and are encouraged to make and share changes with the rest of the community. Cerb4 carries this collaboration to a new extreme by providing an application development framework (Devblocks) with a vastly simplified process for the creation of plugins and custom functionality.

Free Versions: We believe a working application that you can personalize is the best demo we can give you. We don't hide our software behind marketing signup forms. We don't hold major functionality hostage.

Cost: Most of our projects are commercial open source software -- with as much energy as possible spent working to further open source collaborative ideals, while still being able to pay rent and feed our families. In exchange you can count on a dedicated support and development partner standing behind our software and incubating the best feedback.

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• Using the Knowledgebase to share resources the way you want [Part 2]
• Cerb4 (Build 809) is the Latest Stable Release: Worker Notifications, Attachments Cleanup, RSS Everywhere, & Tons of Feedback
• Turn your team into a well-oiled machine with Global Worker Notifications
• The difference between e-mail watchers and notifications
• Recover Disk Space with the Attachments Cleanup Tool
• Mailbag: Can I monitor the Cerb4 parser for problems?
• Using the Knowledgebase to share resources the way you want [Part 1]
• Cerb4 (Build 787) is the Latest Stable Release: Time Tracking, Translations, and More
• Mailbag: What are your CRM plans?
• Open Letter: Why you should sponsor Cerb4 development.