A while back I started writing a help desk script for online support. I got side-tracked in a major way and never got around to finishing it.

The idea is playing on my mind again. Does anyone have any comments?

Carsten (moyashi) was desperate for me to carry on with this idea. I had something really good going I guess so it would be a shame to waste all the work.

Is there a market for some decent help desk software, maybe with integrated payment processing for companies who charge for support, and also email integration?

I am interested. I can tell you that perl desk is looking real good now. I could wait to buy yours. The nice thing would be if it could by tied to community later on... But I think I can only wait a month or so...

Yes I've just been looking at perldesk. It does look a lot better than it did. I don't want to blow my own trumpet but I still think my effort was going to end up a little better. It had a full private messaging system and a plugin system etc. But I wrote it so of course I'm going to say it's better

Unfortunately though I don't think it will be ready within a month :(

What you say sounds good. But are we looking at something closer to six months than to two?

I couldn't really guess :(

I'd expect less than 6 months but more than 1. It then depends on what life throws at me in the middle

I do trust that yours willbe better. What about using it with community?

That's something I'd like to do - I'd probably use the plugin system to create an authentication plugin in the same way GT do for say VBulletin.

Well Paul, I hope you can write this hot one asap!!!

Are you sure you're not re-inventing the wheel? What would be your "strategic niche" theory? My suggestion would be anything that works better than most "help" systems. I would want something (never having used a help desk software) that would be end-user programmable - maybe with keyword input? I absolutely *hate* going to Microsoft and doing a search on one of their error messages and being told "no matches". We are looking at getting some kind of such software at my present job, so I may be in the market.

When I say helpdesk, I don't mean like a searchable FAQ although that will be included.

A helpdesk is a place where staff and clients communicate. Clients can login to a control panel and submit support tickets that staff can claim and then respond to. There will also be email integration so clients can send an email to support@domain.com and it will be inserted into the helpdesk system.

I'm glad you're going to restart this project

Oh.. you mean that kind of helpdesk. Would be interested in the searchable FAQ part, though. Most of our stuff is done over the phone (not computer related stuff) and the receptionist needs to be able to type in a couple of keywords or a phrase and come up with a "scripted" response.

TTFN.

I believe there are some IVR products on the market that transfers SPEECH to TEXT automatically and reduces the amount of time people have to type data. If I come across any of those products, I'll let you know.
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Buh Bye!

Cheers,
Me

Here's an example of where I got up to before hitting the "blip"

A web browser front end with CGI? Isn't that going to be slow for an immediate support ticket when someone is on the phone? How about a Perl/Tk solution, if you must code it in Perl.

- wil

well Paul, have you started yet?

Certainly have - I've been working pretty solidly on it for the past week. I'm just working on a huge SQL module collection like GT::SQL at the moment which is taking a lot of time :)

please keep me posted as I think I would like to wait (not to long) for yours as it likely be much better...

hi Paul,

any further progress?

Paul,



please don't tell me you gave up already?

Hi,

No I've been working on it a lot. Several hundred kilobytes of core modules takes quite a bit of time

I've managed to get most of them done so now I can start on the code for the desk itself.

The fire is still burning...

One thing we might need this to do is integrate with a shopping system.

For instance, we might want to pull data from an orders table or a customer table so that the customer could inquire about their order and have all their order data pop up in the submitted ticket. This would be incredibly useful.

Another thing would be to somehow preserve any session id so that the customer could jump from the shopping cart to the helpdesk and back to the shopping cart seemlessly. So, somehow the helpdesk would have to capture the session id from the shopping cart.

Would this be do-able?

Many thanks

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That is exactly what I am thinking of using this for