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About The Author
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My name is Dan and I have been a computer hardware and audio visual technician for the local school district for over 8 years, and worked for a local university for a few years before that. I have seen and dealt with many of the things that make working in a technology job difficult. Working in that environment is difficult without the proper management solutions. When I started working for the school district, all of our work orders were handled on paper forms that were faxed over to the IT department and then given to a technician to process. Occasionally the forms would get misplaced, and technicians or other staff members would not know what ws happening with the request. This was a time consuming process for getting work completed because of the lack of organization in the process. I thought to myself, we need this information in a database to get it better organized. When I mentioned this to the secretary of the department, she said, "We tried that before and it didn't work." She had showed me what was tried previously, which was a simple Microsoft Access database which was primarily managed by the secretary. Managing this database, on top of the other work she needed to get done was too much. It was no wonder why she thought this system did not work. I knew we needed a better solution. After a bit of hard thinking, I also saw other areas of work in the department that could mesh together and work as one system. The first was our fixed asset inventory which we kept track of on paper spreadsheet forms in which all the information was hand written. I saw a lot of room for error. Another area was our software licensing. We kept the paper license forms filed in a drawer with no good way to tie the licenses to the equipment they were purchased for. Again I knew that we needed a better solution. For a few years I looked into different work order management and ticket processing systems. Most of them had some of the features we needed, but none of them had a complete solution to what I figured we were looking for. I don't think these other companies worked directly with a school district to know what was actually needed. We tried one work order processing database for a year that made things a little better, but it was still not the complete solution we needed. I migrated the asset inventory into an Excel spreadsheet, which again was slightly closer to, but still not exactly what we needed. I decided to jump in and teach myself MySql database design and PHP programming. I figured that this was a perfect case of necessity being the mother of invention. For over three years now I have been working on what I believe to be the perfect solution for all of our needs. I designed the system to be modular in design so that adding new features would be quick and easy. Many of the modules interweave and work together as a truly relational database. It has been designed to eliminate data redundancy to avoid errors. |