As mentioned last night, I’ve put in a significant amount of effort into adjusting the interface to make people more productive with Shockey Monkey. Big part of that is a technology known as AJAX (for the most part its actually AJAH with very little XML) which allows me to update page elements without forcing you to load another page, popup another window, etc.
Upgrade Changelog
Rearranged ticket update interface. Information that is often updated (now including priority/escalation) is visible by default; To add extra information such as time and billing you can click on text to slide in a time entry panel.
Bumped up comment field for ticket updates to 80 colums. The new field allows you to see more of your ticket update as you are typing it in.
Added ability to insert both public (client visible) update as well as internal notes (private company / staff) update on a single ticket update. This is useful if you are updating ticket with additional information that you may not want to disclose to the customer.
Ticket display now supports filtering by company name (per popuar request). By default the Support tab will show all open tickets in the system, selecting a company under “Show tickets for” dropdown applies a filter and displays only tickets for the selected company. This value is persistent, meaning that it will filter across closed, urgent, new and assigned to me support requests. To show all ticket requests just adjust the filter to “All”
Updated color scheme to reduce puke-orange feeling you get while reviewing a request. While I did enjoy the contrast the orange brought to the blue site, anything that can be done to place the monkey in the stage of melancholy where they don’t become smartasses with the clients is good in my book. CSS will eventually be completely customizable.
AJAXified ticket listings so you can pan (or over) over the first column in the ticket row display and see last three ticket updates to the ticket without clicking on it. The details presented are users name, time of update as well as full text of update comments.
AJAXified ticket view screen to allow you to edit the subject of the ticket in case your customer provides a stupid/misleading ticket subject (as per Daryl M.); Hover over the ticket subject on the ticket view screen and double click on the subject. Input box will appear.
AJAXified new contact creation screen, the company field now supports autocomplete. Autocomplete is similar to intellisense technology on your PocketPC or for those of you familiar with Visual Studio, after the second character is entered it will run an AJAX search and display companies with similar names. This is to address an issue where staff members keep on creating accounts for users from the same company but with slight nuances in the company name listing, which then creates a separate company account and splits information. This autocomplete will hopefully let the user know if a similar company is already in the system.
AJAXified the search control. Much like the company autocomplete, the search bar will now run an AJAX search against users and companies in the database and give user an option. This is a PARTIAL search, it will match anything in the name, so if you’re looking for a company that you remember having “Tek” in it, the AJAX search will match “AsusTek”, “SmartTek”, “AvanTekNoligies”, “TekGuy LLC” and so on.
Updated SmartPhone application (/m.asp) to include ability to update priority and status on ticket update. Also added ability to add billable time (number of minutes worked)
Updated SmartPhone application to support “Signout” and “Recent Updates” functionality. Recent Updates only shows tickets that have been updated since the last login or signout event. Signing out of the application only stamps the session as having ended, because the login information is passed in the header you do not have to log back in when you access the application again. This is done by design because it can take a while to login to an application using the phone.
SmartPhone application now also supports time zone adjustments.
SmartPhone application now displays the corporate logo when accessed. I have no excuse, I was bored and this seemed easier than whatever other problem I was trying to solve at a time.
Updated Roadmap
I’ve made it no secret that I have wiped off my entire schedule for the second half of 2007. There are a lot of reasons for that but this is a major part: I am committed to delivering the whole platform by the end of September, roughly a year after Shockey Monkey launched as a helpdesk app. As you can tell from the roadmap, the next two months call for the integration of already stable WMI agent code, documentation and accounting modules as well as some extra management stuff.
July 13
- Finalized VoIP integration for TrixBox
- Finalized mail code for alerts, inbound mail, ticket generation
- Finalized AJAX interface
July 20
- Dispatch manager (geopositioning, Google Maps, directions and schedules)
- Support routing and SLA Manager (for example, autoescalate tickets after X hours without a touch)
- Shockey Monkey Mobile (WM5 Application)
July 27
- Finalized Documentation panel (for documents and forms such as network information, server information, ISP configuration, routing, accounts)
- Shockey Monkey WMI Agent
August 3
- Bug fix/check week
August
- Accounting integration work with GP, Office Accounting, Quickbooks
- Possibly an Outlook plugin but no promises
This leaves September for bug-fix work, October for reporting and finally November for commercial launch along with a virtual machine shipment so you can deploy Shockey Monkey in your own enterprise environment, on your hardware, behind your firewalls, etc. Basically, addressing 100% of the initial needs of the project when it was first put together.
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