A Mind Lost

Because I can get spread pretty thin these days, I’m considering introducing a web-based support desk in the group. At the moment, everyone calls or emails with any problems and questions, some of which are urgent and some which aren’t. My phones often ring too regularly for me to focus for long enough on what I’m doing. Also we have two categories of calls, IT and financial.

I was looking at OTRS which looks like it would fill my requirements and is already widely used around the world. Ideally what I’d like to be able to do is to keep the two categories of support/contact seperate which may be straight forward within OTRS or it may need the ability to run two seperate instances of OTRS.

Since the support requests come from across the group I need internet access to the server so I’d either have to run it at one of our locations across the broadband link, which may be a bit too much of a cheapskate approach, or I’d be looking for either a virtual or dedicated server from a hosting provider such as 1&1.

When searching for info, I also came across JumpBox which claims to allow multimple instances of OTRS to be easily configured and run.

Also, one of the companies in the group would benefit from a customer-facing system of this kind for pre and post-sales support, so if a system gets implented, it may be duplicated for this purpose, possible on the same server.

While I do my research, if anyone has some experiences or advise to share, I’d welcome your input.

When I’m working on Windows, the one feature I miss from my trials with Linux desktops is the virtual desktops.  The ability to have a group of related applications open in one desktop and then switch to another with a different group of apps is very productive when you get into the habit of using it.  Even though I use dual 19″ TFT monitors as my desktop, It would still be handy to be able to switch between groups of applications without cluttering up the desktop with dozens of windows.

I recently came across a virtual desktop utility called Dexpot which provides Windows with this facility.  I’m only just touching the surface of it so far but it’s pretty impressive.  There seems to be little or no overhead on the system when it is running and I now have three desktops in use:

‘General’ – email, web browsing, word processing, putty etc.

‘Accounts’ – Sage, several spreadsheets, online banking etc.

‘Development’ – VB, terminals for perl and so on, mysql administrator etc.

I can switch between the desktops with Alt-1, Alt-2 and Alt-3 and I am in a different zone!  It helps to keep the clutter away from my desktop since I work in different functions and it’s almost like jumping from one mind-set to another.

The software seems robust and reliable and the only glitch I have so far, and which I haven’t investigated, is that if I have a spreadsheet open in Excel on the accounts desktop and then I switch to the general desktop and open another spreadsheet, it opens in the previous instance of Excel and then Excel jumps desktops from accounts to general.  There is probably a simple way to prevent this behaviour, I just need five minutes to find it!

  Last month I got hold of an Asus Eee PC which so far is proving its worth.  I work on three different sites, soon to be four, looking after the finance and IT for the group.  Normally, I would have carried my 15″ widescreen Lenovo laptop with me for accessing local files, internet banking and invoice finance statements, and for administering the various servers and hardware on each site.  Now I have the Eee PC which is so much smaller to handle and even with the basic desktop is ideal for my use.  I can access the web via the built-in wifi and ssh into the servers for updates and configuration changes.  Open Office suffices for the basic word processing and spreadsheet requirements.  I only have to revert to the Lenovo for more complicated Excel spreadsheets.

I bought a neat leather case for it which not only protects it adequately but looks good as well and a couple of 4Gb SD cards for data storage.  A bit of searching on the net got me instructions for installing Truecrypt so that I can have financial data encrypted on the SD cards.

All  in all, I’m pretty impressed with it.  At around £200 it’s a bit of a bargain as long as you appreciate it’s size and hardware limitations before you buy.  The only negatives I could mention so far are that the battery life could be a lot better for such a small machine with no hard drive and there are some heat issues with using it for prolonged periods.

  I’ve been away for a while, simply because I’ve been too busy at work to find the time to post.  In December I  carried out a data and systems migration for another company in the group and at the same time the companies subsidiaries were hived up into the parent.  This meant a new invoice discounting facility for the combined company.  All in all December and January have been quite a trial.  The upside is that I am now Financial Director for the company which means that I am now responsible for a combined turnover of £20m in two completely different markets.

Hopefully, once our financial year end is out of the way in the next few days (I hate stock-takes!), I’ll be able to resume a more normal service with the blog. In the meantime, I’ll be posting a few short tasters about what projects and ideas I’m playing with at the moment.