DPlace
Member
Mar 21, 2001, 12:18 PM
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Just a bit of history here, which I ran across from a follow up report I did last year to my management who wanted to know why we didn't run out and buy "Remedy",
"Vantive", "HelpStar 2000", or (I think it was "CallTracker" but I can't remember). I have edited this a bit but the main substance remains the same.
In 1999, we discovered that the system we used for taking cases in our dept.
(dated, internally produced, app) was not Y2K ready and the machines it was running on were slated to be sunset on December 31, 1999.
Side note: Our dept. consists of approximately 15 people which handles all the publishing access rights, troubleshooting of publishing tools/systems, off hours emergency publishing, as well as being intermediary between our clients (internal personnel (international and US based) and contracted advertisers and shopping partners) and close to 20 different publishing systems/tools development staffs for the largest Online/Media company in the world.
On 12/15/1999, the task to find a replacement system was given to me. The following guidelines were established;
- Replicate the minimum functionality of the old application - provide basic call tracking of tasks performed by dept. personnel.
- Look for a Web based solution, both on the customer and technician side (no installing ODBC drivers or UI interfaces) which
the old application was not.
- Provide automatic ticket numbers, which the old application did not do.
- Provide automatic confirmation of opening of cases, modification of cases, escalation of cases and closing of cases, not done by
the old application.
- Have the ability to assign cases to specific people or have them sit in a queue until picked up by a technician.
- Provide reporting, both ad-hoc and canned. The early reports were to provide information on open and closed cases. Reports for later phases were for reports by type and those by technician.
- The database of cases would be searchable, which the old application was not.
- Easily modifiable to add new products or functions as the dept. mission changed.
- Easy to use for users, with many pull downs and/or radio buttons.
- Have a main category and a sub category (where appropriate), and then have user complete request. An Example would be Main category of CATFISH and sub categories of Access, Support/Troubleshooting, and Feature Requests.
- Have the user enter their information once, validated by a dept. technician and then they would have complete access to the User portion of the system.
- There would be a notes field, which would not be visible by anyone whom wasn't a technician. It would enable a technician the ability to have additional notes or comments not visible to the user.
Most of the commercial systems we looked at required an NT server, mSQL database, a tremendous learning curve to setup and teach Techs to use and consultants to come in and make modifications to the system as we required them. These systems also ranged from between $30,000 and $60,000 before the modifications, NT Server and mSQL additions. Estimated modifications just to setup the base forms we already used (30 different forms for various request types and information gathering) was estimated at between $5,000 and $24,700 varying from company to company. We also discovered that most commercial systems were designed for Helpdesks in Internal Computing, Network or ISP type fields, which didn't help us at all.
I suggested that it might be in our best interest to find a non-commercial program that came close to our needs, such as a Perl program, and then go in and make basic modifications to that. While we did not find a non-commercial program, we did find a very reasonably priced (ok, dirt cheap at $500/$1500[SQL]), Perl based system called WonderDesk, which, while not fulfilling all our initial requirements, did give us a great base to work with and was totally customizable by anyone with a little knowledge of Perl scripting. It also freed us up to use our choice of computer OS, and MySQL so we were able to avoid the commercial and costly NT/mSQL combo.
The initial CMS (Case Management System) met and actually exceeded the goals we laid out, and did so within the timeframe given, (being online with the new system by April 1st, 2000). It is versatile, easy to work with for both our customers and technicians and has increased our productivity and effectiveness.
--[SNIP]--
Coming back into the present and as a side note, when I was given this project initially, I didn't know Perl (except for being able to use pre-made scripts). Now, a little over a year later, you probably wouldn't even know that our CMS code was based off of WonderDesk, except for the fact that throughout the coding and enhancements, the basic UI has remained similar. I also want to note that the folks over at WonderDesk have been extremely helpfully, courteous and responsive to our requests and much of my early modifications could not have been done in the time required without their assistance.
While this software package might not be the best for every application or company, it has served us well and in the last year handled over 20,000 cases while having no problems whatsoever.
David Place,
Publishing Support Engineer
(This post was edited by DPlace on Mar 21, 2001, 12:21 PM)
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