Support

Pre-sales

#28773 Does Akeeba Ticket Pro cover this scenario?

Posted in ‘Pre-sales and Account Questions’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Latest post by on Wednesday, 27 December 2017 17:17 CST

Monday, 20 November 2017 19:33 CST

webcoast
Hi, I have a client who needs a ticket system. They have a security business for bars/clubs which has 3 types of users... themselves (admin), the security guards (guards), and the venues (venues).

What they need to be able to do is create 'incident reports' when something happens at a venue. The guard would create the incident report with details of date/time, people involved, description of the incident, police involvement (yes/no), and the name of the venue.

In the backend of the site we already use Community Builder for the different user types. We have a Joomla user group for Venues (with the specific venues as sub groups), and a Guards user group.

My questions are these:
- if the police are called to the incident then they would like an email sent to the venue as well as to admin. Is this possible? We would need a field 'police called' as radio input yes/no to be able to check this.
- From the front end of the website, when each venue is logged in, they would like to be able to see each ticket which is associated with their own venue. BUT we DON'T want them to see tickets for any other venue except their own. Is this possible, and how would it be achieved?
- When guards are logged in to the frontend of the site they need to be able to view all tickets/tickets for each venue/tickets assigned to themselves. Is this possible?
- The venue needs to be able to edit the ticket if required. Is this possible?

Reference: https://www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/akeeba-ticket-system/component-menu-item-types.html

Thanks for your help.
Regards
Nicola

Tuesday, 21 November 2017 02:23 CST

nicholas
Hello Nicola,

I thought about it quite a lot. Support ticket systems are designed around the concept of threaded conversations where one or more experts (support staff) reply to exactly one client. The experts have control over the conversation, the client does not. In your case you want something where both parties can control the conversation and alter it after the fact. That's an abuse of the ticket system and negates a lot of the benefits of a structured conversation solution (ticket system) over a more fluid conversation solution (forum).

While you could abuse Akeeba Ticket System like that if you make everyone Support Staff for a private ticket only, access restricted category per venue I want to warn you that it is NOT designed for this kind of unstructured conversation. In the end of the day you'd have guards and venues free to change the entire conversation, delete posts or delete entire threads (tickets) altogether.

If you don't mind this kind of anarchy, sure, it's possible. Create one category per venue. Set Auto-select Private to Yes and Allow Only to Private Tickets. Create a user group for each venue and assign guards and owners to it. In the category of the venue give that group Support Staff privileges. Create a Joomla! view access level which includes only the venue's user group and the admin's user group. Edit the venue's Category and set the access to that new view access level. Create a custom boolean field "Police called". Again, I am not sure this is a good idea.

Before committing to anything I'd like you to take a copy of your site and install Akeeba Ticket System Core, the free version. You can create the entire structure and it'll work with everything except sending out emails. Play with it and see if this does fit your needs. Reply back with more specific questions if you need. What you're trying to do is tricky and I'm pretty sure your specifications will change one you prototype an implementation and have your client play with it and think about how it fits their existing daily operation scenarios.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Sunday, 26 November 2017 20:04 CST

webcoast
Thanks Nicholas, I spent some time last weeking looking at forums and other solutions, but ended up coming back to your ticket system because it is the closest match to what the client wants.

I've downloaded and installed the core system, and am currently configuring and testing for all the different types of scenarios. We did away with the 'Police Called' field, and will see how we can work around it.

Thanks for your help so far, I don't think I would have figured out how to configure it if you hadn't included the specifics in your response, so thanks for doing that. If I come across anything curly I'll be sure to ask.

Regards, Nicola

Monday, 27 November 2017 02:23 CST

nicholas
I am happy that I could help you :)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 27 December 2017 17:17 CST

System Task
system
This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.

Support Information

Working hours: We are open Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm Cyprus timezone (EET / EEST). Support is provided by the same developers writing the software, all of which live in Europe. You can still file tickets outside of our working hours, but we cannot respond to them until we're back at the office.

Support policy: We would like to kindly inform you that when using our support you have already agreed to the Support Policy which is part of our Terms of Service. Thank you for your understanding and for helping us help you!