RE: Advice sought: Is Roundup right for this? And, how to config?

The other packages I evaluated before choosing Roundup were
Issue-tracker and Bugzilla.  I settled on Roundup because it was the
simplest of the three, and fit our simple needs.  Either of the other
software packages may be more suitable for you, just try to figure out
their nomenclature.

IIRC, Issue-Tracker allowed setting up several "Products" for
development and "Groups" of users.  This may correspond to your Schools
and user levels.  I did not need this complexity.

Bugzilla was even more complicated, I think, with projects, components,
sub-components, development groups and teams and such...

http://www.issue-tracker.com/
http://www.bugzilla.org/
Both have live demos.

It sounds like what you need can certainly be accomplished with Roundup,
but you'll need to know a bit of Python and HTML.  OTOH, the end result
will be exactly what you want.

Also, I'd like to commend you for taking the initiative to set this up.
This kind of centralized issue-tracking is a great idea and everyone
will thank you.

Alex

-----Original Message-----
From: Mitchell Marks [mailto:mitchell@xxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 8:21 AM
To: roundup-users
Subject: [Roundup-users] Advice sought: Is Roundup right for this? And,
how to config?


Hello Round-Uppers,

I'm hoping the participants of this list will help me out with some
advice about whether Roundup or some other package might be best for a
helpdesk-like application or job-tickets system (detailed below); and
if Roundup is right for it, then I'd also much appreciate some hints
on getting started with the config and mods.  I've done trial
installations of some 3 or 4 programs, and while Roundup clearly has
the greatest flexibility, that also makes it the most daunting in
terms of local configs and maintenance.

We are a project within a University's Community Relations department,
working on Educational IT with the surrounding group of about 25
public schools, from a much larger school system.  (For more
background, see http://cuip.net/cuip/)  We work with them on both
enduser
support and hardware + networking support.

At each school there is a key player, called the Technology Coordinator,
employed by the school system and in most cases a certified teacher.
They  run the show  at their own schools in terms of managing the
support
and maintenance. They have a variety of resources, including: their own
time and abilities; other teachers; in a few cases a contracted service;
some help from the school district central office; and help from our
program, in the form of our fulltime employees who cover a half dozen
schools each plus for some schools a student from our college who goes
to
a single school for 6 to 10 hours per week.   Some schools get two or
more
of our students as helpers with different areas of emphasis (educational
projects vs. hardware/OS support, say).  Some schools also have their
own
students able to help out, through a computer club.

Each of these schools has its own system through which teachers and
office staff report computer problems (or request related assistance)
to the school's Tech Coordinator. In many of the schools it isn't
really a system, just a matter of word-of-mouth and informal
requests.  In others it has been formalized as a notebook in the
office in which requests are written, or a slotted box for a paper
form.  /One/ school uses email.

So I would like to offer them participation in a web-based helpdesk or
service-request system, which we would set up on our server and
maintain, while the Tech Coordinator for each school would be the main
manager for the issues entered for her school.  I expect 4 or 5
schools might want to participate the first year.  Since this is
something we are offering, not imposing (we don't impose anything!),
to some extent we can just say "Here's how the program works, take it
or leave it."  But I would far rather be able to offer variations that
can decide on, independently, for what would work best in their school
context.

Here are some criteria or at least desiderata:


        1. Each school's issues should be private, visible only to the
people listed for that school.

        1A. People affiliated with multiple schools should not need
multiple, separate registrations with the system.  And when they log
in, they should see whatever issues are open to them from all the
schools they are affiliated with.

       ROUNDUP QUESTION: Does point 1A militate against using separate
Trackers to handle each school?


        2. We would seem to need four levels of user: a)
administrator, who can modify whole system; b) school admin or
manager, who can assign issues to helpers for that school; c) helpers,
who can take issues to work on but don't assign to others; d)
endusers, who can create or submit issues but not assign them or work
on them.

        2A. It would be desirable to have those roles flexible per
school. In particular, some might want to assign all tasks rather than
have helpers take them; also some might want to have all issues
initiated by the manager or helpers.


        3. Some schools would expect general endusers to be registered
with the system before they can submit issues (fearing a flood of
trivia, perhaps); while others want all parties to be able to start
issues.

        4. Probably we do NOT need to have per-client flexibility for
the priority levels and issue categories/topics.  It would be acceptable
to define one set of these that would apply to all schools.


Again, my overall questions: Would Roundup or some other package be a
better basis for this?  And if you say Roundup, what hints would you
suggest for getting started on a configuration?  (E.g., how would the
different schools fit in -- as Trackers, or Topics, or Categories, or
...?)


 Thanks very much,

 Mitch Marks


P.S.  FYI, if it makes any difference to your advice, the packages
besides
Roundup that I've started on trial installations are:

  http://hotopentickets.sourceforge.net

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/myhelpdesk/

  http://helpdesk.oneorzero.com

We also use Mantis in another context, so have considered but have not
made a trial installation of "Mantis Help Desk Continued"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mhdc/




-- 
Mitchell Marks
CUIP & WIT Tech Coordinator
CUIP: Chicago Public Schools / Univ. of Chicago Internet Project
WIT: Web Institute for Teachers
http://cuip.net/cuip  http://tech.cuip.net/  http://wit.uchicago.edu/wit
5640 S Ellis Ave  AAC-045, Univ of Chgo, Chgo IL 60637

Phones: Area 773  (O) 702-6041  (F) 702-8212  (H) 241-7166 (C) 620-6744
Email: Primary address: mitchell@xxxxxxxx
        Alternate UofC addresses (use especially to report problems with
CUIP\WIT mail!):
           mitchell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and mmar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
        Off-campus (ISP) address: mmarks@xxxxxxxxx

Tentative supporter: Can this young a student really learn trigonometry?
Gruff skeptic: Cosecant!
 (Yeah okay, the other math joke is better.  But this one is newer!)



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