SimpleTicket is one of the sponsors of BarCampDallas. The event will be held on January 28th at our INFOMART location. What is BarCampDallas? Officially BarCamp is, “an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.”
If you are a computer, network, software or technology GEEK in Dallas on January 28th BarCamp is for you. The event will start around lunch (snacks will be provided) and last throughout the evening (dinner will be served). Want to spend the night? Brian has agreed to host a BarCamp sleepover in our data center for the out-of-town folk dead set on a sleepover (don’t unplug anything).
Kevin will be demo’ing SimpleTicket during his presentation. We figure that is the only way we will get him to release the software - i.e. have a hard deadline. We all have our fingers crossed that everyone will like it…
INFOMART
1950 Stemmons Freeway, Suite 2022
Dallas, Texas 75207
214.550.2002 Help Desk
January 14, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Trouble Ticket , News , Rails , Architel , Ajax , Ajaxian , Ruby on Rails , barcamp , barcampdallas | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
Update: Thanks to the posts, I stand corrected. Rails R Best. That is all!
Ok, this came up in discussion last night when we were hanging out at Cafe Gecko after the Refresh Dallas meeting. I like the speed and flexibility of writing against the ActiveRecord system, and inside the MVC model. It makes coding less work than the design, which is certainly new for those of us coming from old-school PHP and Python coding. Take this example:
There are four tables that are used regularly in SimpleTicket:
- Tickets
- Users
- Journals
- Customers
The tables are all tied like so; Tickets has_many Users, Journals. Customers has_many Users. etc. etc. etc. So when finding the name of a user who owns a certain ticket, I can write:
< %= Ticket.find_by_id(id).user.name %>
However, there is a minor concern with this. That simple statement, while fun to write, generates two SELECT statements against the SQL database. Seems kinda like overkill? It gets worse. There are many different ways that I use this model set to paint the pages shown in the admin utility, and the My Tickets page can churn out some really heavy SELECT statements, in large numbers. So while it is easy to code, how do you control the sheer dearth of queries to make your application behave responsibly? Yes, you can do things like create objects on the fly with find_by_sql and such, but that really takes away the power of the MVC model.
If any of you have any thoughts on this, I would love to hear them.
January 12, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Trouble Ticket , Ajax , Ajaxian , Ruby on Rails , activerecord , python , php , mvc | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
Several of our potential beta-testers have inquired about the client-side of SimpleTicket. I previously blogged about our decision to avoid Ajaxian effects on the client-side in the first release. The client is a very simple web client - i.e. just a simple webpage.
In our workflow we create a link on the user’s desktop that automatically fills in their username and password into the system. From the end-user’s perspective they click the button and see the tickect screen where they can complete their trouble ticket.
Shortly after we rollout SimpleTicket to the Architel client base we will be including a Visual Basic executable that will do two important things:
- Collect a quick inventory of hardware and software currently running on the machine.
- Retrieve the IP address of the machine (i.e. as they sometimes change we need the current one).
Architel will be using the IP address information to populate a small button on SimpleTicket that will automatically create a VNC session from the engineer’s workstation to the end-user’s workstation.
January 8, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Trouble Ticket , New Feature , Architel , Ajax , Ajaxian , Visual Basic | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
SimpleTicket has been developed using Ruby on Rails and as a result we are able to incorporate Ajaxian effects. The Ajax libraries for Ruby on Rails are quite extensive and we have tried to include effects when they add to the user experience. We have also taken note that not all users have browsers that will play nice with our effects so here is our Ajax strategy:
- Ajax in the backend. We have determined that the majority of IT support folks use a standards based browser like Firefox. Our effects help the workflow and are nice to look at.
- No Ajax in the frontend. Users simply hit a simple webpage, without the cool Ajax effects. Most of our end-users use IE and would have fits trying to get the effects to work with their browsers.
We expect that in the near future Microsoft is going to get on the clue train and release a standards based version of IE, but until then we are sorry buy your end-users won’t know how cool SimpleTicket really is.
January 7, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Trouble Ticket , Rails , Architel , IT Support , Ajax , Ajaxian , Ruby on Rails | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
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 7, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Trouble Ticket , Architel , IT Support | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
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