Helpdesk Gadget

[T_Noble]

Hi all,

Been talking to the rest of the ICT team here and we are looking at implementing a helpdesk gadget when we distribute windows 7 across the school. I am the lucky one faced with this project.

A bit of background to the gadget coding (as far as I understand it):

• Requires HTML Code
• JScript
• Gadgets Services to be running
• Stored in the "Sidebar" folder with a .gadget folder

So far I have managed to create something that loads up a small screen, that can be moved anywhere on the desktop, with our school logo in it. You then click a button placed within the window and get taken to a larger window with a form inside. I have placed basic HTML buttons for "submit" and "reset" at the bottom.

The things currently not working and the things I think need to be done to get them running:

• Submitting the information - JScript
• Going back to the original splash screen
• Sending information back to an SQL Server

What I have at the moment, even though it is just very basic base code and doesnt really do anything, is attached to this post.

Kind Regards

Tom

[p858snake]

What package/system do you use for your helpdesk?

[T_Noble]

We are going to be making one. At the moment I am just making the front end gadget, the basic bits that will communicate with the sql server.

[tommej]

Definately interested to see how this works out!

[machin05]

If you are using Spiceworks, then there is a gadget already available

Viewing Tickets in Vista Sidebar/Win7 Gadgets - Spiceworks Community

[T_Noble]

We are currently using spiceworks at the moment but finding it a very slow application to run. The loading times on the web interface aren't that good and a bespoke setup would have greater benifits.

[Danlewis3]

There must be something wrong if you are finding spice works slow we are running ours on a dell gx60 with 1gb of RAM and it works great! No slow even on the external connection. and we use that pretty much all the time for calls and resolutions!

[zag]

We are currently using spiceworks at the moment but finding it a very slow application to run. The loading times on the web interface aren't that good and a bespoke setup would have greater benifits.

Yeh I found the same, Spiceworks is total overkill and very bloated.

I wrote my own in ASP web and Access backend and its blindingly fast and simple to use. A gadget would be great, I wonder if you could find out the session username and display only their jobs in the gadget.

[machin05]

We are currently using spiceworks at the moment but finding it a very slow application to run. The loading times on the web interface aren't that good and a bespoke setup would have greater benifits.

What spec server are you running it on? Do you have anything else running?
We had it on a desktop pc running windows server along with a VMWare server, zimbra, and a print server and it ran like an absolute dog.
Since then we've bought some proper server hardware (Intel server board, 8Gb Ram, 800w PSU, 2TB Sata, Xeon Quad Core) and are running VMWare ESXi. We've setup a virtual server with 1 cpu, 1Gb Ram and a 40Gb HDD. This virtual server is running Windows server 2003 R2, and only has Spiceworks installed. It's also the print-server for approx 10 network printers. Spiceworks is now running like a dream! I searched for and installed the Spiceworks gadget after reading this thread and that too is running really well. I actually prefer the gadget interface to the one that runs in a web browser; it's more concise and less bloated.

[T_Noble]

Yeh I found the same, Spiceworks is total overkill and very bloated.

I wrote my own in ASP web and Access backend and its blindingly fast and simple to use. A gadget would be great, I wonder if you could find out the session username and display only their jobs in the gadget.

How long did it take you to make your own? Is there any chance that you could post the creation steps on here for me and so I can try and follow the same procedure?

You can of course find out the session name, this is done by looking at the username of the current user logged in. The "net.username" command works in .bat and VBscripts so I presume you can either make one of those to report back the username or put something similar in your backend.

Here is a code snippet that I am using for a web based login tracker that uses the above code:

' Gather required information 
strLUsername = net.username 
strLComputer = net.computername

We found that spiceworks is very resource heavy, it could really do with alot of the features turned off and then allowing you to turn them on when needed. We found there are alot of features that you can turn off, but even then they still load.

Kind Regards

Tom