SimpleTicket Workflow Part III (Pending/Contacted Que)
In part three of our description of the Architel workflow we will detail the pending and contacted que found in SimpleTicket. As previously stated, the workflow for SimpleTicket was developed to meet the needs of Architel, a small IT support company located in Dallas, Texas.
What is the Pending Que? We call ‘new’ tickets ‘pending’ tickets within SimpleTicket. Basically, the idea was that these tickets are pending - i.e. they need to be resolved. Pending tickets must be addressed within 30 minutes or an alert is sounded in our Network Operations Center. In our system pending tickets are not necessarily new. In general they represent new trouble tickets entered by end-users; however, in some cases they are not. When they are not new they are called ‘contacted’ in our system.
Why are their some tickets marked as ‘contacted’ within the pending que? Often an engineer would open a pending trouble ticket and realize that he needed more information from the end-user to begin work. He would call the enduser and when he could not reach them he would leave the ticket in his ‘open’ ticket que. More frequently than not, the end-user would call back and leave a message for the engineer (he would be busy working on other issues); however, there was usually someone else available to talk to the end-user. So instead of needlessly making end-users speak to the engineer who just happened to open their ticket (but not begin work), we decided to have the engineer place the ticket back into the ‘pending’ que only to mark the ticket as ‘contacted’. When they are placed back in the pending que they are not bound by the 30 minute rule. If the end-user calls back, whoever answers the call can pick up the ticket. Saving the end-user time and more efficiently using our resources.
January 8th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Can SimpleTicket Tag (or label) or categories be customized for tickets, groups, etc … I understand that simpleticket was originally design for internal support. However, different organization have different ways of processes and workflow. Is there or will be be a plugin like system for Simple Tickets so that the community can contribute.
Looking forward to this product for testing. I was testing a few simple open source help desk / ticket system. The ones that interest me are oneorzero.com or request tracker until I found this site while reading topics on Ruby on Rails and Ajax.
January 8th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Of course you can modify the code in any way that you wish. Once the code is released broadly I suspect that it will morph into a few variants for various workflows.
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:18 am
Hi
Can the user email in thier ticket request?
Thanks
BK