Our team is the first-line support for the University’s web needs. This means we get a lot of diverse requests landing in our bug tracker, RT, ever day. To help us share the load, we each deal with the support queue on rotating basis, as you can see in our schedule. We use the wiki rather than the University calendaring system just because it’s quicker and easier to set up, enter events and edit them.
However, using the wiki means that there aren’t any alarms or reminders.
So I took a few hours the other day and built a new module for our open-source Hungrybot which does the reminding.
The wiki calendar has an iCalendar export, so every two hours or so Hungrybot looks at that, works out who is on support today, checks the RSS feed of unassigned tickets and then lets the person on support know about them. In practice, it looks something like this (here you see I’ve prompted it to tell me about the new tickets):
kael
Off-topic.
I’ve been thinking that it might possible to replace OAI-PMH with XMPP so that it can be possible to query libraries for searches and notices, but also to be able to receive public domain content with XMPP file transfers.
November 21, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Phil Wilson
Yes, I think that would make a lot of sense for a number of applications.
Even with OAI-PMH: Bath is using EPrints (which supprots OAI-PMH) for its repository which means that it should be trivial to at least write an XMPP search bot (in theory at least). We use xmpp4r on our XMPP tools which I think does have a FileTransfer module so that bit should be possible too. I’ll ask the people who know about EPrints about it on Monday.
November 22, 2008 at 8:51 pm