Shockey Monkey – Developer’s Journal
Shockey Monkey has been our major (development) focus over the course of Q1. We have found this experience to be very challenge, while also being very rewarding. The biggest challenge has been standardizing code throughout the portal. Some of these standardizations include areas of focus such as: (structure, formats, error handling, and security).
Why is this important?
This is important as we move forward, to help achieve a rapid development environment. We’ve actually been doing this gradually over the last few years and the process is becoming easier and easier. We have already seen the benefits of this design method, as you will see from the content and enhancements that have been produced in only a couple of months. This will also play a huge role when we push further towards internationalization of Shockey Monkey.
So what’s new?
Ticket Dispatch
This feature allows you to schedule technicians to a service ticket. You can have one or multiple employees assigned to a ticket and it will appear on their calendar.
Schedule Control
Every employee has a personal calendar that they can: (use, modify and share) and link into service tickets, to help keep them on track of their daily assignments. The schedule component is also HTML5 compatible, so it can be accessed directly from any HTML5 compatible smartphone.
Vendor Management
This allows you to keep track of your 3rd party companies. You can manage things like (documents, address information, primary contacts, sensitive information, etc.). It centralizes all of this information for easy access and management.
Career Management
This allows you to keep track of your employees (achievements, goals and reprimands).
Service Boards
This is by far one of the best features in my opinion. It allows you to configure (private & public) service boards for use within your portal. Public boards are presented to users when they open a ticket, things such as (support, billing, and sales). While private boards give your employees a way to sort & manage all the internal workings of the company.
Theme-able!
Yes, Shockey Monkey is once again theme-able. Taking advantage of Jquery UI theme packs and standardizing all of our (tables, divs, controls, elements), themes are now easily applied and have a consistent look between browsing platforms.
Experimental Features
This section has been expanded to allows up to give you immediate access to feature requests that you may want, however don’t really fit anywhere inside of the portal quite yet. Check it out periodically; we have already added 5 options to this section.
Hank Newman
VP, Development
hank@ownwebnow.com