I just finished going through the workflow with Kevin and I am very excited to say it works. There are a few tweaks required, but it works. We will be able to test in production all week, demo on Saturday (BarCampDallas) and release that night. There are going to be some missing parts:
- Stats - this section is going to be important for Architel so expect it soon.
- Search - I think everyone is going to need this section, we will be asking the community to complete it I suspect (or one of our Big in Japan developers).
- Client/Engineer Edits - adding or deleting clients and engineers is a fairly manual process now, we will be creating a simple new client wizard and engineer addition list.
The tweaks? First, there are a few auto-populate features that are necessary to make the software easy to use. Next, we need to streamline the ‘take ticket’ workflow to remove a step (i.e. deliver you to the update screen immediately). Finally, we need windows to close after an action is taken on them, right now the previews stay open after actions are completed. Anyway, congrats to Kevin - bang up job before the ‘end of the day.’
January 24, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Trouble Ticket , Bugs , News , Rails , Architel , IT Support , Ajax , Ajaxian , Ruby on Rails , barcamp , barcampdallas , beta , Biginjapan | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
Lots of people develop in lots of different ways, and I’ve found none less varied than the methods used by those who develop in Rails. Most Rails developers write on their local machines, with local implementations of Ruby, Rails, Gems, MySQL/PGSQL/YourFlavorRDBMSHere, and WEBBrick. I was cajoled and poked and prodded into using this methodology lately, instead of my normal methods.
In fact, I was kvetching on a list recently about how much I enjoyed and hated using TextMate to develop in, and wished it had SFTP support so I could work like I normally do… Development instance up on my server, source on my server, editing tools local. Most of the people on the list reminded me that good developers wreck their own computers first, servers second (after releases and stuff).
So, I moved to the Mini that I use to code on (and for my everyday desktop). Wow. Talk about S-L-O-W. I mean, Wow. I was reminded of coding in Pascal in High School on my NEC V20 based PC. We are talking 1985 binary sort slow. Wow.
I persevered, pushing on, coding against my own PC. Update javascript, press F5 - dah-dum-dah-dum-dah-dah… check email… hmm hmm HMMM hmm hmm… test code.
I have moved back to coding with Dreamweaver against my server. Its not in production yet, and ligHTTPD is sooo much faster. Maybe I am too ‘Instant Gratification Generation’ ( give it to me now, give it to me now! ).
What do you code in, readers? How do you setup your development environment?
January 16, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Rails , Architel , Ajax , Ajaxian , Ruby on Rails | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
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
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
SimpleTicket was written specifically for one company (Architel) who has very specific needs. I thought it might be helpful to describe our workflow to help you understand how SimpleTicket was designed. Agree?
First, it is important to realize that we have help desk technicians who can remotely resolve 3-10 issues for end-users per day. Endusers contact us by creating a trouble ticket in our system and our help desk technicians see these new ‘PENDING’ tickets. Our objective is to have each ticket addressed within 15 and 20 minutes. To address a ticket an engineer changes that status to ‘OPEN’ and determines how to proceed. If the ticket requires additional information from an end-user that ticket is placed back in the ‘PENDING’ que, but is identified as ‘CONTACTED’
In the meantime end-users are receiving emails indicating that we have opened their ticket and that we are working on the issue. Assuming we had to leave you a voicemail, we send you another email indicating we called and asked you to update the ticket yourself with the required information or to simply call us back.
Second, assuming that our ‘contacted’ end-user was able to reach the instigating engineer he could detail the various issues that face the him. If possible he attempts to resolve the issue immediately from his nice cosy chair in the NOC. If he can, he notes this in the ticketing system and closes the ticket. Next the enduser recieves an email indicating that their issue as been resolved and that their ticket is now closed (giving instructions for reopening it if necessary). 80% of the time this is the workflow. But in 20% of the cases we must dispatch an engineer to the client location to resolve the issue. The ticket is then moved into the ‘SCHEDULE ON-SITE’ que. Our engineers then visit the site, resolve the issue and then close the ticket.
Workflow Part I Diagram:
January 6, 2006 |
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Tags: SimpleTicket , Open Source , Trouble Ticket , RSS , Tags , Rails , Architel , IT Support | Bookmark on del.icio.us | Digg It
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