ddkppp, what we do for this is we have only like 4 or 5 first level categories that indicate the user level:
aka guest, helpdesk, IT Staff, etc.
We then duplicate the simple subcategories of guest
aka Guest\
Won't Print
Computer Probs
Password Probs
Internet
into the higher level categories and add more granular / detailed subcategories:
IT STAFF\
Won't Print\
Bad Print driver
Hw Problem
Sw problem
Computer Probs
Ntwk connection
HW PRob
Software
etc, hopefully you get the point.
And then I have a validation rule that restricts anyone who is not in IT staff from changing to a category that contains IT Staff.
The categories that IT staff uses would not be hidden per se from the users, but they are not able to select them.
Oh, and BTW, I use the Category Spreadsheet that's on this site to export the categories and bulk copy them to create the IT Staff category tree, and then import them using XML.
Creating them by hand would be a major pain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ddkppp
I can't believe I didn't see it in here (maybe it was and I missed it), but isn't anyone else concerned that the current layout of categories is basically a text based match? IE, it's not broken down into any tables or anything. They are just run together text strings that use a split function. This makes it very inflexible. A good example of changing the structure of the way cat's are stored would be per role visibility. IE, "Visible to Guest". There are a LOT of cat's that we simply want to keep in there for IT reasons, but the "guest" cat's should be easy. A good example would be something like:
Public Cat: "Break-Fix / Unable to access Internet.
Private Cat: Break-Fix / BGP Peer / Outage
Or something like that. The user will report a certain symptom but the actual cause would be something IT would set later. The user wouldn't have a clue what a BGP peer was. To them their Internet access is down.
Also, by changing the way the cat's are stored will allow you to make rules that are independent of the wording. An example of this is we have a bunch of rules that we would now like to shift from being under "break-fix" to something like "IT Only". To do this means we have to change every rule we have in the system because it is text based matching. Break-Fix / Internet != IT Only / Break-Fix / Internet. It's a pain to move cat's around and keep the rules intact. If these were based on basically a GUID per rule, where it was stored would make no difference. All the rules could be moved without messing up any back-end rules.
Of course, maybe I'll get lucky though it appears Altiris has been trying to release a "new" version of the helpdesk since like 2005. 3 years or missed releases is pretty bad IMHO. I just hope they do better going forward because this product definately have a lot of good potential. It's just so inflexible.
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