Database Reference
In-Depth Information
way. Today, it would be very surprising to see a help-desk system that wasn't compu-
terized, even if it's only a spreadsheet of issues with notes and statuses.
In this chapter, you attack the help-desk system with APEX. Before you dive in, you
need to clearly understand the problems you're trying to solve. If nothing else, you
need to review the current system.
Never a Clean Slate
Almost no computer system written today starts from scratch. There is almost always
something in place, even if it's just some loose guidelines or ideas.
For this example, let's say your company has a very basic system in place, but it's
no longer meeting the needs of your growing user community. Your goal is to create a
new system that will make the logging of issues and their solutions much easier for
everyone involved; however, to do that, you must understand the needs of the users and
the functionality of the system that is in place now.
A Broken System
In general, the users of help-desk systems can be categorized into two groups: people
who log problems (end users) and people who help solve the problems (technicians).
Depending on which user community you fall into, it's likely you have different needs,
but overall, the system should help the end users and the technicians communicate
about the problem or issue.
The first step is to understand how your help desk is being managed today and why
it's not working. Speaking to both the technicians and the end users can provide a huge
amount of information, but the challenge is that this information usually comes in the
form of complaints about the current system.
Quizzing the end users reveals that their main complaint is that they never know the
status of the problems they've logged. They can go days, sometimes weeks, without
communication from the technicians, and in the eyes of the users, no communication
means no one is working on their problems. Another user complaint is that the help-
desk technicians often don't know how to contact them to ask further questions or com-
municate progress.
On the other end of the issue, the technicians are overloaded. Ticket information is
kept in an Excel spreadsheet. Originally, the help desk was only one person, but now
there are several technicians working independently. While performing their daily du-
ties, each needs to update the spreadsheet with information regarding the tickets as-
signed to them. The increasing number of people accessing a single spreadsheet causes
