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With Zexer’s Addressbook you’ll have access to your contacts from any internet-connected computer in the world. Whether you are at a cafe, in a library, at work or at home Zexer.com lets users log in, input data, and update information… ALL ONLINE!
“In the nine years since Jobs returned to Apple, his unique modus operandi has sparked broad changes in the world of music, movies and technology. Now, Jobs is stepping into the Magic Kingdom. On Jan. 24, Walt Disney agreed to pay US$7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar Animation Studios, where Jobs is chairman, CEO and 50.6 percent owner.” Read more here.
“A court hearing that could pave the way for a shutdown of the BlackBerry e-mail system has been set for Feb. 24. Meanwhile, BlackBerry customers continue ramping up contingency plans in case of a shutdown, much to the delight of BlackBerry’s competitors. Research In Motion, creator of the BlackBerry, has a lock on 70 percent to 80 percent of the mobile e-mail market, a service that’s increasingly indispensable for executives.” Read more here.
Free and Cool
“Atmosphere Lite enables you to bring the sounds of nature to your desktop. You can choose from various sourroundings such as tropical, thunderstorm, nighttime, summer, fireside and several others or customize your own soundscape from the sounds provided.” Check it out here.
Wombat Help Desk was first released by Boardtown Corporation in 2001 as an enhancement to the Platypus Billing System. In April of 2004, Tucows purchased Boardtown in order to acquire both solutions.
Bill Ford was President of Boardtown, and has stayed on at Tucows as Product Manager for Back Office Services. Tucows’ aim in acquiring his company, Ford says, was to be able to offer its customers billing and ticketing systems to go along with other software. “If customers have a solid back office as far as billing and ticketing go, then they’ll be much more able to accept and deploy new services,” he says.
Wombat is fully integrated with Platypus, and works exclusively with that system. However, Ford says some customers�those who were specifically interested in acquiring a ticketing system rather than a billing system�have simply chosen to purchase the minimal billing product so that they could run the ticketing system. And, of course, that’s fine with him.
The central idea behind Wombat, Ford says, is to provide total accountability for customer care. “Without a ticketing system, you end up with e-mails from customers and sticky notes stuck on a monitor�and nothing to force an issue from the minute it’s reported all the way to its resolution,” he says. “That’s what Wombat’s goal is to do.”
Proactive, not passive
All e-mails and phone calls that come into an ISP, Ford says, reach Wombat as the first point of entry. “For e-mails, it looks at the e-mail and attempts to categorize it based on a number of factors,” he says. “Once it’s categorized it, it can create a ticket and assign that issue to the appropriate staff person based on their skill set and their workload.”
By automatically routing each communication to the correct recipient, Ford says, Wombat ensures that nothing falls through the cracks. “From the very beginning, from the minute the customer has sent you a communication, Wombat is going to take it and force it all the way through, until a resolution has been reached and the issue is closed,” he says.
The Wombat interface has a built-in e-mail client, which ensures that all e-mails to and from the customer are attached to the appropriate ticket�phone calls are logged in the same way. “It’s all in one place, so you can go back and see everything that’s happened regarding an issue�attachments sent to the customer, knowledgebase articles that are related; all those things are tied to this one ticket,” Ford says.
Rules set up by the customer can ensure that Wombat automatically alerts the right people as a ticket starts to age or escalates in priority. “Again, the Wombat system is forcing this issue to get resolved, as opposed to just storing the fact that there are tickets,” Ford says. “It’s actually escalating the ticket, it’s communicating with people, making things happen.”
Once a ticket has been closed by a staff member, Wombat can send a survey to the end user, asking them to rate the service they’ve received. “If the customer wants to reply back and say, ‘Actually, I don’t feel like this issue is closed,’ then the ticket will be automatically reopened and put in the person’s face who closed it,” Ford says.
Beyond the help desk
And Wombat isn’t just appropriate for help desk services�Ford says Tucows uses the system in its development department as well. “It’s good for any sort of structured environment where you have numerous issues that are assigned to people that need to be resolved,” he says. “Our development team uses it to track the things that need to be put into the system.”
The software includes a project tracking feature that can be used to drive any multi-step process. “You can define a project template for recurring projects,” Ford says. “For a company that provides DSL service, there are multiple steps that have to happen to deploy a DSL line; or for a webhosting company, there are multiple steps in deploying a big web project�and when they create those projects, they’re based on a template, and they have all these pre-defined tickets ready to go.”
The next release of the software, Wombat 3.0, is expected in the first quarter of 2006. The key enhancements in that release, Ford says, will be the ability to categorize tickets and employees in departments, and to customize the ways an issue can be escalated. “Right now, out of the box, it escalates based on ‘first in, first out,’” Ford says. “But people want to have escalation based on more sophisticated things�they may want things of this category to be escalated faster than things of that category.”
Pricing for the solution is listed on Tucows’ website�it begins at $650 for up to 1,000 subscribers, including one year of technical support and upgrades. Alternatively, a leasing option starts at $29 per month, with no startup fee�and Ford says the company is currently in the process of developing a hosted version of the solution as well.
In terms of scalability, Ford says the software should be perfectly comfortable managing 500,000 subscribers or more, although he says most of his clients are Tier 3 or Tier 4 providers. “The guy that’s going to call tomorrow, he’s going to have 20,000 customers and 50 to 100 employees,” he says.
Wombat runs on Windows, though Ford says a number of his clients are Unix-only shops and they have no problems managing the solution through its online interface. “For Wombat, the web interface has virtually all of the functionality�so you can get away with using it pretty much anywhere you want to,” he says.
Flexible�and cheap
Brian Becker is President and CEO of semo.net. semo stands for “Southeast Missouri.” The company began using Wombat upon its release in 2001. Since it was already using Platypus at the time, Becker says, Wombat was an obvious choice. “The integration between our billing system and the ticketing system was a no-brainer for us,” he says.
The flexibility of the system itself, Becker says, has proved to be a key strength. When a customer sends in an e-mail requesting a wireless site survey, for example, Wombat automatically creates a ticket containing everything from the customer’s contact information to the signal levels they’re requesting. “It’s very easy for us to handle any and all situations that our company faces as far as needing to track projects or individual incidents,” he says.
Becker says the company was recently asked to provide fulfillment services on a client’s behalf�and he says that’s been easy to manage using Wombat. “As soon as an order is created, that order sends an e-mail to a POP account which is checked by Wombat every minute,” he says. “When it sees an e-mail in there, a ticket is created, three different people are alerted that the ticket has been created�and they can interact with the customer and with each other to make sure the product is fulfilled and shipped out the door.”
Considering the product’s flexibility and functionality, Becker says he’s surprised at how little it costs to maintain both Wombat and Platypus. “Our support contract is nothing compared to some of the other products that we have to pay support for that don’t impact us as greatly as Platypus and Wombat do,” he says. “So from my standpoint, it’s a very economical solution.”
http://www.isp-planet.com/services/trouble_ticket/wombat.html
Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That’s the basic idea behind Windows Live. So the things you care about - your friends, the latest information, your e-mails, powerful search, your PC files, everything � comes together in one place. This is a brand new Internet experience designed to put you in control. And this is just the beginning � you’ll see many more new services in the coming months.
NASA is making plans to privatize cargo flights to it’s space station. NASA is planning to spend 500 million dollars to fund the initial steps of this program. Read more here.
Scientists have decoded the DNA of the first dog, a boxer named Tasha. Scientists hope this will help explain why both humans and dogs suffer from such diseases as cancer and heart disease. Read more here.
Could gold be used to help relieve Arthritis sufferers? A procedure where gold pellets are injected into muscle tissue was recently applied on a Lion in Rome. Read more here.
A possibly new species of large Carnivore was spotted in Borneo. Read more here.
XmailHardDrive directly connects with your Gmail account to then turn it into a portable virtual hard drive that you can access from anywhere in the world. You simply enter your Gmail username and password, just like the other third party software, and then using the username and password combination it authenticates with the Gmail servers and connects you to your personal account.
Google’s at it again. Google Scholar, which is now available for use as a public beta, limits search results to scholarly articles. This can search engine can be very helpful for anyone who is currently doing research on a given topic.
Try out Google Scholar here.