[thelist] Customer/Project Management with Support Tickets - [OT?]

Chris Dempsey evolt at cubeit.co.uk
Tue Sep 4 12:19:07 CDT 2007


Hi,

We need to find a solution which allows us to work in a more integrated
fashion.  We've tried various products including dotproject [php based
solution], Digger IOS, Outlook Tasks, paper based systems etc. but none have
worked all that well.  I previously tried ACT but didn't get to grips with
the GUI.

Does anyone know if any of Microsoft's offerings such as Dynamics or
anything else that's on the Action Pack subscription are suited to small
scale project and customer management? By that I mean a team of 4-6 people
and a Client base of around 300 with projects ranging from text updates to
£10k web projects.

I like the idea of a solution based on what's available in the Action Pack
if we could drop something on a network server, offer access to everyone who
needs it and for all our software packages [Outlook, Office etc.] to
integrate with each other.

Dynamics looks like a huge piece of software and I'm struggling to figure if
we could use the 5% of the features we're interested in without getting
bogged down with the rest of it.

One explicit requirement is for customers to be able to lodge support
tickets via a web interface.  Other than that we need some basic CRM
functions and a way of quickly mapping projects out.

The other thing I've requested a demo on is SigmaPro Draconis from OnyaTek
for DotNetNuke.

Anyone got any suggestions or links to reviews/discussions on this theme?

Thanks,

Chris.

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Fred Jones
Sent: 04 September 2007 17:46
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [Spam] Re: [thelist] SQL: finding "new" records in a table

Judah McAuley wrote:
> I'm trying to do the heavy lifting at the database level. When I have 
> the csv file, I transfer it over the network to another machine. The 
> files aren't huge, so I'm not terribly worried about that. But then I 
> have to read the csv file in and loop over it, checking to see if each 
> is a new appointment (do an insert) or an existing appointment (do an 
> update). I'd like to minimize the size of the file I'm looping over for 
> efficiency sake and I'd also like to minimize the number of updates I'm 
> doing.

I would consider connecting directly to the main DB yourself every hour 
and loop through an SQL result set, instead of the CSV.

> What's the most efficient way to take care of that? Right now I'm just 
> doing an update if the appointment exists in the destination database. 
> That's not bringing the system to its knees or anything. But as it 
> grows, I'm worried that too many updates to the same table will cause 
> contention locks and slow the system down, so I'd like to minimize the 
> number starting now before it gets bad.

I am no expert over here, but I would suggest that the only alternative 
is of course to compare the records, that is the CSV record versus your 
DB record, to see if an update is necessary or not.

Fred
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