openinteract-help

[Openinteract-help] Job tracking system

[Thomas W. <trw...@ce...>]

Hi,

I want to implement a job tracking and database publishing system and it is
going to be a fairly large task.  Therefore getting started on the right
path in the beginning is important.

My company does short run 4 color digital printing.  Because it is short urn
we handle multiple jobs every day.  I developed an online bidding system; it
use Apache, mod_perl, and  mysql.  Now I would like to move to tracking jobs
online; first, for internal purposes -- it would make the workflow much
easier to follow -- and later for customers to view the status of their jobs
on the web.  Each bid has about 38 data fields associated with it and each
job will have a few more fields along with an image file in the form of a
pdf.

I would like to create the job once approved from the bid.  Then each job
needs to be tracked through production with operators at each stage being
able to update its status or add notes.  After the job is finished an
invoice would be printed to go out with the job.  Web based applications are
good for this because we use Mac's and PC's, and both must be able to have
access to that job.

I currently use Template::Toolkit along with a few other Apache modules to
deal with the bidding. I could do all the programming myself-no single thing
it is that tough, naturally though, it would be helpful to have an existing
framework within which to develop.  It would help me to know what users of
OpenInteract think about its applicability to this project.

Thanks,
Thomas Whitney

Re: [Openinteract-help] Job tracking system

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

Thomas Whitney wrote:
 > ...
> I currently use Template::Toolkit along with a few other Apache modules to
> deal with the bidding. I could do all the programming myself-no single thing
> it is that tough, naturally though, it would be helpful to have an existing
> framework within which to develop.  It would help me to know what users of
> OpenInteract think about its applicability to this project.

I don't see anything in your explanation that would preclude OI. 
The benefits I see for you are:

  * You're already familiar with the Template Toolkit, so 
creating a new display, or porting your existing one, should be a 
piece of cake. OI makes some of the framework functionality 
available to your templates so any modifications would be 
additions to get new features.

  * Handlers (what actually does the work) generally concentrate 
on a small group of tasks (e.g., CRUD for a particular type of 
record) and have very little to do with the view. This makes it 
useful to divide-and-conquer with multiple developers.

  * OI has a simple but useful security model. This can be 
extremely useful when you're dealing with external users -- a 
bid, once accepted, could be turned into a job that only members 
of a 'employee' group (or something) can see. No worries about 
exposing internal process data to the user.

  * Processes can be secured in the same manner. So only 
employees could execute tasks which actually change the status of 
a job, for instance.

  * You don't have to deal with all the dispatching, 
authentication/authorization, session management, database 
management and other infrastructure items that can cause 
headaches. You're right that individually they aren't tough, but 
tying them all together can introduce some complexity.

As for similar applications I'm aware of: A German organization 
working for Bertelsmann created an IT trouble ticket management 
system for internal use. I've never seen it, but Andreas tells me 
it's pretty nifty [1].

Hope this was useful,

Chris

[1] 
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=557672&forum_id=3222

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.