Having moved from Council to USQ, I’m still getting everything set up. HEAT is USQ’s call logging tool, which is supposed to be I guess analogous to ITSM. I must admit that ITSM was one of the least most favourite tools, a sentiment shared by many colleagues, with it failing to work multiple times, losing work, being plain unavailable as well as requiring ‘administrator’ intervention. ITSM was originally planned to be delivered via a web interface but that quickly died when we realised that every time you selected a drop down box the entire page reloaded (the typical incident form has a minimum of 6 drop downs that need to be selected). ITSM however was typically relatively easy to get up and running presuming you had the .Net Framework installed and had admin rights to set up the privileges to let the thing install properly.

HEAT appears to much easier. After a first few attempts the IT technician wasn’t able to get it to work. He disappeared and returned about 4pm and managed to get it to work by copying HEAT’s files from his own computer. Ouch. Fortunately the team I’m in has a habbit of closing those jobs in HEAT and transferring them to our own long term tracker in Gemini. This is similar to how I would have liked more longer term issues to be handled at Council, except we used ITSM and I had a Bugzilla instance that I deployed. The HEAT interface doesn’t look as smooth as ITSM’s .Net look and feel but if it works that’ll be an improvement. We will see what happens sooner or later.

More ePrints fun today trying to get everything into Subversion. It took me a while to get access to the repository (eventually got control of the server first) and then I found out that the servers didn’t actually have Subversion either. So I put the Subversion client on the development and test servers. From there I slowly managed to get both development and testing branches some what into sync though they’re still not there they mostly look similar and I don’t have any major problems so far. Once I’ve done this I’ll try to get everything cleaned up and then have a look at ensuring that on disk test and prod are in sync. At that point hopefully I’ll be happy enough to implement new changes. Much more fun and its only Monday!