Thread: I had an idea last Friday...

**Tom** · 12 Jul 2010 @ 14.59

Someone asked the questions what makes a great customer support tool.

I had a think about this and when I went off to the pub after work I took some paper and a pen and did some sketching, today I was bored so I did a better mock up:

As you can see it is a server management and customer support tool, the idea is that it is run from the system tray and when something goes offline the customer gets a little bubble advising them, then they can restart any service listed.

Or if a status update is issued by the hosting company or they have sent a support ticket.

This would give a more direct form of communication between the customer and the client and allow them to stay upto date with any outages.

Being in the industry I have had many emails and calls when a server has been taken offline for maintenance and when you say "we put it on our status page" they usually reply with "I didnt know that, where is it".

I haven't worked out how it would actually work and this is more a concept, it is something that may work well if sold by a single company with an API to allow hosting companies to plug into/sell their own version.

**ian** · 12 Jul 2010 @ 15.20

Nice idea. I'd find that useful at home for switching IIS off and Apache on.

**stu2000** · 12 Jul 2010 @ 16.01

That's an absolutely excellent idea! I know I could really do with something like that for the servers that I rent, but I doubt they'd keep it up to date with the comments lol. However something to just alert real time of any problems with certain servers would be really useful.

**Tom** · 13 Jul 2010 @ 16.04

A quick and dirty way to do it would be to create it as a webpage and then app simply shows that page, once logged in of course). Would then be very easy to run scripts to restart services.

**stu2000** · 13 Jul 2010 @ 16.27

Yeah, I was thinking a while back of creating a 'server reset' and other commands through SMS for me to access when I'm out of the office (I don't have one of these posh t'internet phones lol)

However, even using passwords in the SMS to verify my identity I think it would be way to insecure. Something like you suggest through the taskbar however would be perfect!