[Zope] technical support dept. product

Jim Washington jwashin@vt.edu
Thu, 09 Dec 1999 13:27:49 +0000


I put one together several months ago where I was working at the time. 
It works on a MySQL backend with lots of small tables, and I probably
would redo some or all of the tables in TinyTables or ZClass objects if
I were to do it all over again.  It was hopefully replacing a
FilemakerPro product we developed in-house, but the convenience of
updating the Filemaker tables proved too big a hurdle to duplicate
within Zope in a short time.

Perhaps a bit of explanation will help to understand the product.  A
group of graduate assistants makes up the housecalls team for a
college.  People in the college login to a URL and identify themselves
and the problem they are having with their computer.  The members of the
housecalls team individually or in teams assign themselves to fix the
problem (this makes it a 'working' housecall). Then once the problem is
fixed (this may take several trips), the technicians close the ticket.  

Anyway, my product did some things the other didn't and had IMHO better
presentation.  It is still running in experimental mode, if anyone would
like to look.  I could probably package the code as a ZClasses Product,
though it was my first major look at Zope, and I would have done quite a
few things differently now.

The URL is http://psyche.ed.vt.edu/Zope/housecalls.  If you choose to
add a housecall, use the userid jburton.  Let me know if there is any
interest in an export of the source and a tables/fields listing. Warning
about that, though: the code all uses <!--#var blah--> syntax, and is
not too pleasant to the eye...

-- Jim Washington


Timothy Wilson wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Has anyone developed a Zope product designed to help a technical support
> dept. track repair requests, status, etc.?
> 
> -Tim
> 
> --
> Timothy Wilson       | "The faster you  |  Check out:
> Henry Sibley H.S.    |  go, the shorter | http://slashdot.org/
> W. St. Paul, MN, USA |  you are."       | http://linux.com/
> wilson@visi.com      |       -Einstein  | http://www.mn-linux.org/
> 
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