🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2t0npk$9of@nyx10.cs.du.edu> chowes@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Chester Howes) writes:
>From: chowes@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Chester Howes)
>Subject: Suggestions on how to run a help desk please
>Date: 6 Jun 1994 20:59:00 -0600

>I've just moved into our small computer / LAN management shop to help
>plan for our LAN's future, both in the physical layout/media/capacity
>and customer support/service areas.  I've found documentation about the
>LAN's physical plant or operating charistics sadly lacking.  The techs
>in the office have done fairly well in maintaining the inventory of the
>PCs and documenting what software has been licensed to which machine.
>They have NOT done any type of service call tracking other than the "I
>remember doing this on that machine to fix the problem" personal
>memories routine.  Their memories have worked fairly well for our
>current 200 users of 150 PC's on a stand alone Novell 3.11 LAN but, some
>things are getting lost every so often.  As we ramp up to over 600 users
>on 500 machines, along with an Internet link, I doubt very much that our
>personal memories will be sufficient to keep track of calls (waiting, in
>progress, awaiting additional help, completed), and produce accurate,
>meaningful management reports.
> 
>Anyone out operating or supervising a help desk?  Can anyone suggest
>what package we should look at to automate our service/customer support
>calls?  I'm thinking we want something to open, assign to a tech, track
>open calls, close calls, and be able to show trends of common problems
>on a type of machine, type of board, program, operator, etc.

    You might not very like the answer, but we did a research about such 
packages for your office (>500 users) and found ou tthat it was cheaper to 
spend the time indevelopping our very own system than paying for third-party 
programs. We looked at several of them. All were >20K (CDN)......

    We decided to write our own. We decided to use VB3 along with ODBC for the 
database backend. We currently run on an Acess database, butplan to move on 
the Oracle SQL server...


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Jean-Francois Messier                            Windows developper
sysop of SuperByte 486 (819) 775-3471 v32/v42 (bis too!)

jmessier@hookup.net                        74370.340@compuserve.com

             Drag me, Drop me, Treat me like an object !
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