poster -
19 eDesk Online - - Internal Development and Deployment of HelpDesk Management Software
Charlie
Hitlin, Washington and Lee University
After four years of operation, the HelpDesk at
Washington and Lee University, previously a student-run, student-centered
operation needed both to become more reliable and to serve a wider audience.
The HelpDesk has about 2,700 potential clients, including undergraduate and law
students plus faculty and staff. As the
new first resort for our user community it needed to be able to track jobs, do
trend analysis, and otherwise capture and use data. Commercial software for
those purposes was too expensive and often geared for other sorts of
institutions, so we decided to see what we could develop ourselves. Over the
course of about six weeks we created the foundation of "eDesk," our
online database.
eDesk consists of an Access97 back-end with a web
front-end. It uses Visual Basic Script to communicate with the database, which
resides on an NT 4 server running Information Internet Server (IIS), and
utilizes Active Server Pages (ASP).
eDesk is available from anywhere to any platform via web browser. It
provides multiple levels of access, managed via a login process that associates
users with various functions in the database--job tracking, notifications about
major service interruptions, emailed job status updates, and trend analysis.
eDesk continues to be a work in progress and has gone
through several version changes during the year. This summer's plans include an
end-user interface. Once this is
complete eDesk will become freeDesk, available to any educational or non-profit
institution interested in a copy. The moral of this story is that the in-house
development of this tool was incredibly useful, gave us a great if not perfect
tool, and provided functionality University Computing never had before.
Proposed Poster The poster would include live
demonstrations of eDesk utilizing a laptop. Printed documentation describing
its implementation and use, and a CD-ROM with freeDesk available to all
interested parties. We would take an inside-out approach to present eDesk. This
would include an under-the-hood view of the database and web front-end,
demonstration of basic functionality and features, and be available for any
questions about the product.
Intended Audience User service managers or support staff involved in client support with an interest in HelpDesk management software, call tracking and how an online database can dramatically increase end-user support.