Currently our company uses an escalation database within Lotus Notes. Our escalation database handles issues that can’t be solved by L1-L3 support and are therefore escalated to development. This database is used by the entire company and thus encompasses many departments (hardware, firmware, software) and products. Each department and product has specific information that is needed to help in debugging a particular customers problem.
Recently we have been having a lot of trouble with the Lotus Notes database in terms of performance and I’m looking for other options. As a company we are also moving away from Lotus Notes in the future. I was wondering what kind of workflow management software other people are using to handle something like this?
I’ve been looking around and haven’t found anything that looks entirely promising, and so I have been contemplating how to homeroll one should the need arise. My current planning path is to have completely dynamic forms that are stored in a database and as someone moves through the forms additional inputs are added based on selections they have made. I understand this is going to be difficult to do right and not confuse people as they add products and departments in the future. So another question would what major pitfalls would you encounter with the above design, and what to look out for? And if anyone has home-rolled a system before any problems that you have ran into?
I don’t know of anything to handle what your asking, although there must be an off the shelf solution for such a task.
If your considering Roll Your Own, I would recommend taking a look at CouchDB as it has many similarities with Lotus Notes and features that have greatly enhanced the whole experience.
http://couchdb.apache.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchDB
You would need to get up to speed with it, but since you are familiar with Lotus notes, should be an easy learning curve.
Hope this helps.