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.

We're unconventionally structured; everyone here is involved with using, building, promoting, and supporting our projects. This keeps us oriented as users first and as a business second.

Our software has to become a super-human team member, since we humans have various other jobs to do on top of responding to e-mail. Everything we do is well-informed by our constant conversations with the community. We can't imagine having walls set up between the real world and our project decision makers.

As the project has grown, we've had an interesting arms-race between Cerberus Helpdesk and the ever-increasing number of people who write in to talk to us about it. This is our muse.

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