NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael B Allen]

On Fri, 18 May 2007 16:39:47 -0400
csnyder <chsnyder at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 18 May 2007 10:18:20 -0400
> > "Nicholas Tang" <ntang at communityconnect.com> wrote:
> >
> > > This is a really interesting concept.  How would you deal with a.)
> > > priorities, b.) due dates, c.) simultaneous multiple users, and finally
> > > d.) performance?
> >
> 
> On 5/18/07, Michael B Allen <mba2000 at ioplex.com> wrote:
> >
> > You could do some of these thing though. You would need an actual database
> > but considering you need to consistently generate new ticket numbers, you
> > probably need one anyway. Then you could hang all sorts of ticket metadata
> > off of that. That information would not be accessible through email
> > however. There would have to be a separate web screen for that.
> 
> Each email message has a unique message id. Most modern mail clients
> will show you threaded conversations by id, so it wouldn't exactly be
> difficult to carry on conversations about tickets using just the IMAP
> database. Priority is obvious as well, but due date not so much.
> 
> Simultaneous users could be an issue if you scale past 3-5. I always
> cringe a bit when I realize I have email clients open to the same
> account at work, home, and in two web browsers at once. But I've never
> seen them do anything unexpected.
> 
> As for performance, how many messages are in your inbox right now?
> Apple's Mail.app can search a mailbox with a few thousand messages in
> real time, something no web frontend can do.

Actually SquirrelMail is pretty good at this. I just searched my
Spam folder with 1600 messages in it for the word 'incredible' in the
Subject+Body and got 17 results in less than 5 seconds. I don't know if
it's issuing a server side search command but SquirrelMail and IMAP are
on the same host.

But if you're just searhing for a ticket number you could also limit the
search to the Subject line. And closed tickets could be moved to a
'Closed' folder so the search might also be limited by folder.

Overall I'm not really clear as to why you think performance would
be a problem. There would be nothing happening that you wouldn't do with
a regular mail client and AFAIK IMAP servers are supposed to be able to
handle a large number of users.

> I'm not saying it's not crazy, but it is fun to think about. Until
> someone selects all the tickets and hits 'delete'... :-(

True but I suspect someone could do the same on any ticket system.

Clearly an "IMAP server as the ticket database" ticket system would not
be ideal for everyone. But I think it would be ideal for me since 90%
of the time I would just want to handle tickets as email.

Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
PHP Active Directory Kerberos SSO
http://www.ioplex.com/