If you've read my column before, you've mostly seen reviews of software development tools for WebSphere. This column is a bit of a departure from the usual. All of us have experienced calling a support desk for help, and afterward feeling more frustrated than before the call. Support people struggle with limited, uncorrelated information and slow, unreliable tools.
The main thing missing is the ability for the responder to efficiently correlate existing information pertaining to the user's problem. In almost all cases, customers must call in to report the problem and then sit through additional calls to find a solution. Major angst can build up on both ends of the phone line, and once led me to do something kind of radical.
I joined forces with three other software developers about 10 years ago and started a company. Our goal was to create and sell a Web-based help desk. Of course it consisted mostly of static pages with batch-processed content. Our Java app generated new pages overnight from a defect tracking database and allowed CSRs to enter all the information that managers required. Unfortunately, our Web application never caught on.
We thought we failed to capture the market because we were ahead of our time. A short time later, we concluded that the Internet was not a suitable medium to host our sort of application since a thin-client solution could never compete against client/server apps that did the same things in a much more user-friendly way. Eden Communications, Inc. however, has now proven that we were wrong in deducing our reasons for failure.
IT PowerPAC WS Service Management Suite (ITPP WS), a thin-client help desk by Eden, has an impressive user interface by any standards. Even more impressive to WebSphere fans is that the system was created using WSAD and runs on either WAS 5.1 or WAS Express. It also runs compatibly with all the major database systems including MySQL.
IT PowerPAC WS goes far beyond the rudimentary Web-based help desk we created a decade ago. It is actually five related applications integrated into one. The entire system has a consistent look and feel and information can be shared smoothly between applications.
The first application is an incident manager, otherwise known as a help desk (see Figure 1). From here, users can log and respond to help tickets from customers. Help tickets submitted by phone or e-mail can be routed to an appropriate specialist or team, or automatically solved at first contact.
The incident management page is a gateway to the other functions of the system and facilitates automatic e-mail notification to technicians or teams, routing, reassignment, and escalation of a problem. In the course of these actions, database elements pertaining to resource and asset management, along with problem management, are updated.
The next tab on the main page takes a user to the problem management function. Here users can track defects as well as initiate and track change requests/upgrades. This functionality provides an integrated solution for the Quality Assurance crew since fixes and upgrades can be routed for QA verification.
