I've been seriously thinking about a career change for the last couple of month.
The mob I currently work for is killing me. We've just gone under administration, we've been bought out by another west coast ISP, and they're not keeping any of the technical staff.
I really did love what I do. I'm a systems administrator for an ISP. I put in 12 hour days because I actually enjoy being there. It's such a shame...
The only choice I'm seriously considering is the military at the moment. I figured I'd give IT another 6 months and if I've had it I'll enlist.
By far the best problem ticket/tracking system I've used was the internal one they designed at OptusNET.
It has all the important features... queues, prioritization of tickets, creating parent tickets and having child tickets depending on it... (good for those CMTS outages!), the functionality to assign tickets to a person and or queue... to lock tickets to yourself, and last but not least reporting functionality.
It is web based and the layout is suburb. Quick, neat, and simple. When opening up a queue you can immediately get a "feel" for what's been happening.
I believe it was originally written in Perl by the engineering manager there... it backends on to a database but I couldn't tell you which one for sure.
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One thing you could do if you've have the time is to design your own. I've been fairly unhappy with most of the commercial and free solutions out there at the moment so I've decided to write my own.
If you plan to do this, head on over to Freshmeat and search for "problem tracking" / "help desk", things like that. Look at what they've each done. In most cases they'll have a live demo for you to play with. Look at the features they have, they way they've done it... what works for your organization, what doesn't, and note them down.
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I've been seriously thinking about a career change for the last couple of month. The mob I currently work for is killing me. We've just gone under administration, we've been bought out by another west coast ISP, and they're not keeping any of the technical staff. I really did love what I do. I'm a systems administrator for an ISP. I put in 12 hour days because I actually enjoy being there. It's such a shame... The only choice I'm seriously considering is the military at the moment. I figured I'd give IT another 6 months and if I've had it I'll enlist.
Any OptusNET engineers floating about here?
By far the best problem ticket/tracking system I've used was the internal one they designed at OptusNET.
It has all the important features... queues, prioritization of tickets, creating parent tickets and having child tickets depending on it... (good for those CMTS outages!), the functionality to assign tickets to a person and or queue... to lock tickets to yourself, and last but not least reporting functionality.
It is web based and the layout is suburb. Quick, neat, and simple. When opening up a queue you can immediately get a "feel" for what's been happening.
I believe it was originally written in Perl by the engineering manager there... it backends on to a database but I couldn't tell you which one for sure.
----------
One thing you could do if you've have the time is to design your own. I've been fairly unhappy with most of the commercial and free solutions out there at the moment so I've decided to write my own.
If you plan to do this, head on over to Freshmeat and search for "problem tracking" / "help desk", things like that. Look at what they've each done. In most cases they'll have a live demo for you to play with. Look at the features they have, they way they've done it... what works for your organization, what doesn't, and note them down.
Minority Report.. and here I thought it was JUST a movie.
That other Michael decided to head over to Sydney and fix upOptusNET. iiNet's loss is OptusNET's gain.
Well... try it without the space. It worked for me. Just in case, here it is.