Ticket Management System (TMS) - Features

TMS provides:

•  a Trouble Tickets management system (Ticket Management Subsystem),that creates basic funcionalities for dealing with external ticket calls (typical situation of a project manteinance) and/or internal ticket calls (useful for project creation, work planning, requirements and bug tracking). This system implements:
  • ticket interface differentiated for ticket creator user class (they can be Supervisors, Operators, Customers, Help Desk Operators...);
  • extended ticket searching possibilities, complete historical archive, sorting and browsing shortcuts. Scoping and visibility: private (dev team only) or public tickets;
  • ticket evaluation tools, allowing for categorization, versioning, priority assessment and assignment to the appropriate operator.
  • timing evaluation (response time, time requirements estimates and actual time completion data, resource use) with automated and manual timestamps tied to the ticket's life cycle, and personal evaluation based on the Supervisor's experience;
  • reports, allowing for toDo printouts, project status with resource use, resource assigned on customer basis, on category basis, version, and much more....
  • an hierarchical system, allowing for organization of complex work with dependancies between tickets and activities (see below for the Activity Management Subsystem).
    
•  an Activity Management Subsystem, providing additional specialized automatism for manteinance and customer care focusing on external activities done with internal personnel but not strictly project-related (training, hardware malfunctions, and so on). The Activity Management Subsystem allows for:
  • scheduling and organization, either centralized or distributed, of systems activity, technical assistance, training and system manteinance;
  • evaluation of temporal data, efficiency and use of resources with timestamps very much like those of the Ticket Management Subsystem;
    
•  a complete internal messaging system, allowing for communication excange and ticket-wise discussion. Messages can be either public (for everyone) or private (for development team only).
  
•  complete integration with email or SMS systems for Ticket Management System, for automatic alerts at critical moments of a ticket's life cycle.
  
•  complete support tables management (users, projects, customers, categories...)

  Moreover, the advanced, web-based, java-powered technology used in the making of TMS allows for interesting personalization and future developments, only a handful of which are presented here:

  • integration with versioning and configuration management tools (like CVS);
  • creation of open forums and portals, project-based and ticket-fueled;
  • integration with legacy billing systems for semi-automated invoice generation based on TMS data;
  • support with the latest in personal communication (palmtops, smartphones, GPRS and UMTS standards, J2ME support);
  • internationalization support (currently TMS is avaiable on English only);
  • quick personalization of user interface (completely independant from business logic) for better integration of TMS in legacy web servers or customer care tools already at disposal.

http://tms.inera.it