Incident / Problem Management Application

[Chris128]

Hi Guys,

Maybe this isnt the right place to ask but I just wanted to gather some people's opinions on what should be in a good incident/problem logging program.

I'll explain.

Basically I have been working in IT for about 3 and a half years and have always worked for IT support companies, i.e. providing support for other businesses networks/servers/workstations. At my current company we are trying to start following the guidelines laid out by ITIL but I have to admit although I did the ITIL v2 foundation about 8 or 9 months ago I dont remember that much of it and wouldnt class myself as being competent when it comes to ITIL processes etc.
Now, I am also a keen programmer and love helping the IT Pro (and programming) community in any way I can so I have recently started making the odd little free application to help IT pros such as myself. More to the point - I'm not keen on the ticket logging application that we use at work and so with my programming knowledge I am intending to try and make a superior application that we can use to log incidents/problems and hopefully if it is a success then I would add additional modules for it.

This was originally going to be a completely customised app just for our company to use but the more I think about it, the more I want it to be available (for free) for anyone to use in their organisation if they like it. So, I figured I should try to make it as 'ITIL aware' as possible and include Incident/Problem management sections instead of just a plain old "ticket" system that has no concept of problems and incidents.

So thats why I am here, to try and see what people would like to see in such an application. Again, please note that this is going to be completely free and is purely being made to help people, I'm not going to make a single penny from it (there arent even any adverts on my website or in the application) so please dont just dismiss this as someone trying to get other people to do their work for them. I'm doing this for the type of people that are on forums like this, so I'm hoping this is a good place to ask

So if anyone would be kind enough, could you give me some examples of features that you think would be great in an application like this and also perhaps things that you really dont like about similar applications that you have used previously?

Oh and here's a screenshot of how the Incident Logging section looks at the moment (please bear in mind that this is no where near finished so it might not look anything like that in a months time and obviously there are lots of things missing at the moment):



Thanks in advance

[MBU]

Download the top 5 products on the market, understand their concept(s), crib the most valuable for you and try to implement this in your tool ....
would be an useless approach.
Honestly, ask the Top 10 guru's here in the forum and you'll get 10 different answers (no, "it depends" is always correct).
Hmm, try to refresh what you've learned, have a look at v2 & v3 books and let this fit somehow together.
_________________
Michael B.

"I can't say it'll be better if it changes, but I can say it has to change to be good"
G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)

[metman]

Hi there

Last September my company upgraded from version 4 to version 7 of one of the top Service Desk applications.

Version 7 is all singing all dancing, ITIL out of the box but some of the design could have been so much better !

I would suggest that the important factor to consider is not just what it can do, but how good is the user interface.
Also there needs to be plenty of options for easy configuration to meet individual company requirements.
_________________
John Wright

Problem Manager

[Timo]

If I were you manager I'd ask you to implement it on your own time.

Seriously, why reinvent the wheel when any more or less recent web based ITSMish app can be customized and sliced and diced to fit what you need.

My bet is that your users don't need anything fundamentally different than millions of others that use 3 party vendor apps.

[thechosenone69]

Chris,

We will be supportive. As someone previously mentioned you can check tools that are already in the market. Check the tools already available in the market. A good reference for tools is pinkelephant website. You can start with incident management process and progress by time. Let us know when you have a beta we will test it and report the bugs back to you, or at least I will

Good luck mate and keep the good work going

[vimprash]

As already stated by our other forum members, you can analyze the top tools available in market. There must be tool comparisions already available in net, you can also make use of those.

I am ready to test your application.

All the best, good luck. Happy learning