#7: Improve support for "helpdesk" scenario

Contents

1. Motivation
2. Proposal
3. Risks

Proposed by

optilude

Seconded by

gkirk

Proposal type

User interface, Architecture

Assigned to release

• Poi 2.0 (Unreleased)

State

rejected

Motivation

If Poi is to be used in a "help desk" scenario, where issues may be submitted on behalf of others, or where users may be much less technical than the typical software scenario, Poi may not be optimal.

This is not the core use case. We must carefully evaluate how much additional complexity we would introduce. Poi does not aim to become an all-purpose issuse tracker for everyone. However, there may be some quick wins we can do, that may benefit the core use case as well.

Proposal

Gerry has come up with a few ideas:

Mark some responses private

Some responses are useful only to the support team and not to the submitter of the request. In fact, some responses may create confusion, or have sensitive information that the submitter should not see.

On the Add Response screen, add a checkbox to mark a response private. This response would not get emailed or be visible to the submitter of the issue (unless the submitter is a manager).

Separate issues submitted by support team on behalf of others

The My Issues list shows all issues assigned to me as well as all issues I submitted. That makes sense if I am the originator of the issue. However, I end up adding a lot of issues to the system that I receive by email. Since the system records them as submitted by me, they all show up in the list of issues for me to monitor, but I don't need to monitor them unless they are assigned to me or are unassigned.

This is an important consideration when support requests come by way of email, phone as well as the web.

Proposed solution:

• expand the submitter information to include name of original person
• a checkbox to indicate that issue is being submitted on behalf of this person
• filter out issues submitted on behalf of someone else in the My Issues list

Risks

In line with my last comment on PLIP #2, I'm not sure I want to put this into Poi core either. Poi was never a generic helpdesk solution, and should we should aim to modularise and make it easy to customise, rather than put too many features-and-switches into the core product. Poi works because it's lightweight and focused. It's aimed at a simpler use case than, say, PCNG or trac, and should stay that way.

The idea is to make it easy to re-use Poi for your own use cases, though, and hopefully to be able to have a set of standardised customisations e.g. for the helpdesk scenario that leverage Poi core. That will probably mean that this particular proposal disappears from the core, though.