I want to create a small helpdesk ticket control system at work, that would allow users to enter a help request ticket; these tickets would then be assigned to a technician to work on, and the technician would mark it as “FINISHED” after the job is done. The requesting user would then be able to confirm and “CLOSE” the ticket, so that a Help Desk supervisor can keep track of response times and other stats based on the ticket details. Nothing too complicated, using .NET and SQL Server.
I am not sure if I should develop this as a Web application or a Windows application. This application would be used in the plant floor, so it would have to be easily available in the LAN. But we currently host a list of Windows applications via Citrix, so deployment would not really be an issue here. I don’t really have experience creating winapps from scratch (though I’ve modified quite a few), but it feels like a web application would not look as “solid”.
What advice can readers provide that could guide me into deciding the better architecture for this purpose?
EDIT
Thank you all for your thoughts! Given that this is a very simple application, I could go either way. I decided to go with a Web application, as our local Citrix setup still has some quirks that need to be fixed.
If you develop a web app you can pop it on your local intranet and your users can use either their browser within Citrix, or via the browser on their terminal.
However, if you’ve got the infrastructure in place, then perhaps a Windows application would be easier to develop and deploy. The only limitation with a windows application would be that if you were to move away from a Citrix environment, or were to expand to wanting to use the system externally to the plant floor, then it’s harder to deploy and maintain your installations.
You can use Web Deployment with Windows applications which is quite nice as it updates itself whenever you publish a new version, however it is a bit of a faf for the users and you’ve no guarantees that the user will allow the update to occur. So if you had a critical update, the users could, in effect, choose to ignore it.
That’s where the web application gets its bonus points. One installation and one point of access. If you update it, then all users are instantly on the latest version.
Personally, I’d go with the web application for future proofing and ease of acccess. It’s slightly more work than a windows application, but the payoff usually exceeds the extra time required for the web application.