Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Luke — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:43:15 GMT

Did this ever take off? I've been searching for days for ideas and help on creating an internal phone list (from AD), a helpdesk (for AD users), - this is a great idea but I see your blog post is like 3 years ago.....does it really take this long to develop =D

All the best, if this is available please let me know where (or when if it's still in "production")

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Eric curtis — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:04:08 GMT

You Rock that is a great Idea. Anything that helps IT is always a great idea. You Rock dude. I hope to see something like this. In fact, I was searching the web for a tool that does just that. Please let me know if you create this.

Love the idea of the starter kit. I would love to see more starter kits in the Windows Forms arena

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Will Bradley — Mon, 16 May 2005 22:30:01 GMT

That's the best freaking idea I've ever heard. After all, that's what Sharepoint/Portal is supposed to be, right? Something to give the Portal a more company-centric, AD-integrated view (Help Desk is what I'm most interested in) would be -awesome-.

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

MattL — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 04:00:00 GMT

Reiterating what many have said, I agree that it's a great idea if, for not other reason, it's an excellent starting point for small- to medium-sized companies that have an IT staff, in-house developers, but not the expertise to home-grow the whole system from scratch.

In terms of features:
I think (A & B) would be the least valuable, based on my experience with a number of different-sized organizations. Large companies (> 1000 desktops) generally have some asset or inventory package already (if not department), whom I'm certain wouldn't appreciate the overlap -- it would probably even create resistance. Very small companies (< 50 desktops) generally have a good handle on their available equipment (through Excel spreadsheets or Access databases) and this would probably be overkill considering the development time.

An extensible (C) is definitely the sweet spot. Most low-end Helpdesk packages are terrible, and the high-end ones are too costly for many companies. I have personally been involved in writing a number of these in-house systems, and have been an architect on the Liberum (open source, ASP-based Helpdesk) Project for years. It would be great to get a flexible model with a Microsoft-christened pattern. (D) should be directly tied to (C), so that backtracking can be done in reporting.

(E) and (F) may, again, stray into other departments' responsibilities.

(K) would be great, having also written one of these with my team. The headaches with the ADS Query Provider will haunt me for years to come. :) This should also incorporate Identity Integration Server, or at least be pluggable such that things like password changes can be propagated to systems with proprietary user tables.

And, yes, please deliver by next Friday.

Pri1: c, d, f, j, k
Pri2: e, h, i
Pri3: a, b, g

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

David — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 15:26:00 GMT

I would be interesed to see the final results very much,
SQL Im assuming would be the data storage methodology with this, which would be nice from a migration standpoint (getting existing data out of current HD tracking)

PRi 1 c, j, b
PRI 2 D
Pri 3, H

k - Would be nice for Password resets
G - would just be a very interesting feature to see but might be unweildy to use in larger orginizations (over 5000 employees)

Looking forward to seeing this if ya'all go ahead with it.

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Garret Besser — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 07:09:00 GMT

Funny that we are finding ourselves in this exact position with absolutely no time to dedicate to this much needed starter kit.
there are quite a few already up there - but will take at least a month to build on top of it to customize and add the fxns it doesn't have.

i deffinitely think it is a good idea.
with whidbey you could use the interanet site as a good jumpstart

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Phil — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 17:07:00 GMT

Starter Kits are great! Most of the times, the starter kits are so generic (which is good) that you end up reimplementing them. Try and make the source code the best that you can (use coding standards, design patterns, best practices), becuase junior developers will cut their teeth on the kits. Some of the starter kits, and some of the open source projects have so many developers with varying styles, which makes the code hard to follow in the absence of a unified coding/design standard. In addition, don't try to throw in integration or dependencies on frameworks/products that people have to pay for: Keep data in XML files (or at least say that the kit requires SQL Server), don't reference libraries outside of the .NET framework, don't reference libraries that don't provide source code, provide full source code for use by the developers...

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Mark Levison — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 16:38:00 GMT

Starter kits in general - a great idea. But please make sure this polished work, Unit testing, argument checking and all the other best practices that you expect people to pickup on. Consider having public reviews of the code before actually baking into the Whidbey.

As for priorities - I can't say. I'm a Smart Client Developer, so I've no opinion about ASP .NET. I would love to see a real No Touch Deployment app as starter kit. In fact that's just what asked for (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mlevison/archive/2004/03/04/8417.aspx) in my followup to Jon Udell's interview with David Treadwell.

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Marcus Rogers — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 19:22:00 GMT

great idea - can you have it done by end of next week :)?

PRI1: a, c, e, f, h, i, j
PRI2: b, d, g, k

re: Dumb Idea or Good Idea?

Greg Hughes — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 15:57:00 GMT

Good idea. A very good idea. Here's why.

1. You've giving an IT department a real-world reason to care about Whidbey and using it when it is available (and depending on your schedule and the company's licensing agreement, maybe even before it's available). For an IT department, change that's difficult yet has no other real tangible benefit is change that is not likely to happen. Conversely, any real, tangible benefit resulting from something new often trumps any change-related pain, and so adoption in that case is more likely. Not to mention that IT departments in a significant percentage of companies need to sign off on software before it's broadly-used. Call it evangelism, since that's what it is. Show it's value early and in real-world terms, your more than half the way there.

2. You can easily fit this into Microsoft's other big-push initiatives that touch IT. Specifically, I think you should definitely leverage Sharepoint Portal Server (which has to be purchased separately) and/or Windows Sharepoint Services (which is a free add-on to Windows 2003 Server, so I can't think of many reasons not to leverage it given the platform requirements). I think this part is critical, and it would be a deciding factor in whether I would seriously consider your starter kit (an in turn replace my existing proprietary help-desk application), simply because Sharepoint represents an investment in both time and money we have already made. One of the beauties of the Sharepoint model is the ability to create a one-stop-shop for employees to locate and use information. Your starter kit, if exposed via Sharepoint web parts, would feed right into that model, with highly-relevant information for both IT and end-users.

3. It saves time and money. For an IT department, this means efficiency. Any time you can create cost and time savings for a department that fits into the unfortunate class we call "cost centers," you've done something truly valuable. Focusing starter kits and quick, low-cost solutions on areas that are non-revenue-generating for their parent companies is quite important when looking at how much value you can add. If you save me time, you save me money. If it works with other apps (read: Sharepoint, web-services exposure, etc), you're talking my language. Your idea fits right-smack-dab in the sweet spot here.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment on the idea. I'd say go for it, and I'll look forward to what you come up with. Glad to help where I can, too. :)