@Dashrender
Because my boss is likely psychotic and nitpicks everything. I've been trained to forget trying to do anything the "right" way, and instead spend much time and resources just trying to get exactly what they ask for instead.

In this case, a "ticketing" system that is apparently JUST for her to JUST assign tickets to me, ignoring everybody else in the company. But apparently just sending me an email with a requests/tasks is not jargon-y enough. It must be "tickets".

@IRJ said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

I don't understand this thread at all..

• Manager wants a "cloud" helpdesk that isn't cloud

• You then install osTicket on Vultr (Cloud)

• Then you complain about clicking through an extra screen for a FREE helpdesk, but previously you were asked to use a spreadsheet

• This extra click becomes the most important thing about your helpdesk system.

• Manager does not understand cloud vs non-cloud. Why is he even logging into the system? I have a feeling that he is the one so concerned about this extra click thing. When in reality he probably only needs access once a week to feel like he knows what he is doing and to somehow grade your work.

P.S. use a password management system and you will save login time on every site you visit, not just the Help Desk.

Don't over complicate it.

They want a "ticket" system which I will have to make accessible from anywhere (hence "on the cloud") but still need to lock it down against public/anonymous use of any kind.
So I can't install something just on our private network and have to screw with teaching them VPNs and stuff. Nor do I want them to memorize an IP address rather than set up a normal domain name.

@wirestyle22 said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

@scottalanmiller said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

@guyinpv said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

Essentially what I want is when either the boss or myself visit the site, it immediate asked for login with no other options. No home screen etc. Just go directly to the agent areas.

Just put Apache level authentication in front of it, easy peasy. Or put it in a VPN, but that's generally silly.

You know I may just do this for the experience. Maybe I'll spin up something on Vultr

This just means htaccess/htpasswd, which is what I did. All this does is make people have to login TWICE. Once to get past Apache, and again for osTicket.

@scottalanmiller said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

@guyinpv said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

There needs to be no "public" interface of any kind, just the login for employees.

If you are having that issue, it means that you have exposed the wrong directory in your web server, I think. Instead of pointing the web browser to the root of the install, point it to the scp directory. I think that is what you want.

This is what I want. I was thinking some kind of DNS-level redirect or htaccess, but changing the public root folder sounds like a simpler method. Will have to try this.

@wirestyle22

I already did that. But it isn't the effect I want. If you visit the URL of the system you will see buttons for creating new tickets, looking up tickets, etc etc.

All I want is that when they visit the URL, it immediately demands a login.

Not this:

Not this either:

But just this:

There needs to be no "public" interface of any kind, just the login for employees.

OK I built up a Ubuntu box on VULTR and got osTicket running.

The first "issue" I have is that, this system is really meant to be "internal" which means I want to lock out any public/ anonymous stuff.

I've already set this up in osTicket but it's not really what I'm looking for. In other words, when you go to the default home page, there are links to submit new tickets, look up KB stuff, find a ticket, etc. I don't want any of that.
Essentially what I want is when either the boss or myself visit the site, it immediate asked for login with no other options. No home screen etc. Just go directly to the agent areas.

At first I made an .htaccess basic auth password wall but this is silly because now we have to log in twice, even though it does block out anonymous access.

I wonder if osTicket has a "mode" with no public interface? Just log in directly to the admin screens. I can do this myself by jacking up the default templates but that is not the best solution.
Maybe I can tweak with some htaccess rewrites so that there is no home page and it just redirects strait to the admin login? I might try that.

The interface is kind of old on this thing, a little cluttered. I wonder, do they have alternate styles/templates/themes that can be installed?

So far so good as far as testing. I need to enable all the email handling next.

Cool, will take a look at osTicket and report my findings.

@scottalanmiller said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

we have a setup guide for it already!

Where is that?

So, I am the only tech support at our company and it's pretty low key. People just call me, walk in the office, send an email when they need help. We don't use tickets, though I typically save/archive emails with work requests from the boss.

In any case, the boss finally asked me for a ticketing system to use with me. She only wants a "basic" system of assigning tickets to me with work requests, with simple sort of "pending", "in progress", "done" statuses, etc. Maybe deadline dates or whatever.

She first asked for this to be in "our cloud", which is manager-speak for "some file kept in our Box folder". I cringed, like, no, I'm not using a spreadsheet as my ticketing system!
So then I got on my Airtable account and created a DB for it there. But that doesn't really work since there is no way to use a "public" link with editing abilities, I'd have to create her an account, so that won't work well based on my toying around.

There are systems like Trello which we could use for free, it has mobile apps and stuff, maybe that would work as a ticket system? But there is some "method" to using kanban and I don't want to have to teach no methodologies.

I already have an account on Freshdesk which is an actual ticketing system, but I have it set up more for public support at our ecommerce, not internal tickets.

So my question is, is there a simple and free ticket system that is super easy for the boss to use and access anywhere which is really just for tickets for me and management only? Or, if not a cloud service, something I can host on our internal server, which is also an option.

One feature that would be good is ability to make notes on the ticket by email, so neither of us have to constantly log in to it for updates and notes.

I really don't need the kitchen sink here, just something management can use to assign larger and longer-term jobs and projects. It could be anything from "replace so-and-so's printer" all the way to "build new website for X project". They just want to organize "things they want me to do in the future".

I just want anything, anything but a freaking spreadsheet in a file sync folder!

I have some historical fears of SFF myself. Cases that come stocked with no upgrade path. Tiny underpowered PSes that overheat at the smallest dust ball or fry after a RAM upgrade. Bad thermal in general. After all, most "office" desks put their computers in little enclosed cabinets.

There is also this bizarre connection in my brain between how small it is, and how under-performing it is. I'm fine with SFF but it better still have good power compared to the specs I mentioned before. SSD will certainly help there.

I definitely still need DVD drives and front USB and SD card readers.

@gjacobse
......and replace with...........

I also tend to like the XPS towers.

I should have mentioned, they are general office.
Web apps
QuickBooks
Handful of background programs (AV, backup, cloud sync tools etc)
Office
watching media
email
printing/scanning

There are no "power apps", games, 3D, CAD, video rendering, etc.

Regardless, the previous towers aren't that old. For example Core-i5 3GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB platters, Win7.
You'd think this could handle things, and it does chug along, but somehow they make the above work even grind these systems down.

I know SSD will be huge. As well I want to get on Win 10 Pro.

I could keep and upgrade those, but the plan is to replace, and trickle those systems down to be reloaded and replace even older systems around here.
It's nice to make the boss feel special, always getting the new computers, and the rest of us get the hand-me-downs.

I'm sure this question comes and goes regularly.

I need to replace some workstations, just wondering if there is anything interesting in the market today. Innovations with form factor, power use, administrative features, etc. Anything cool happening I should be aware of? Features I should be sure to get?

Or do I just go grab some Dell towers off their home page as usual?

I still think something more like an object store makes more sense than relational.

product = {
  pid = 12345,
  description = {
    [20160403, "Some long description"],
    [20160513, "Some long description2"],
    [20160821, "Some long description3"],
  },
  otherfield = {
    [20150414, "field value"],
    [20150414, "field value"],
  }  

...
}

This way, the entire product is still one record, but all those dated changes are just in sub objects and arrays. Seems more logical somehow than relational. I guess I'll have to play around with both ideas.

@scottalanmiller said in Need a DB option for archiving ecommerce data:

What we use in finance is called a "tick" system. A column (this could be its own table in an RDBMS, or it could be stored in something like Redis) that stores changes over time. It would only need to record the product, datetime and price.

So would I store the entire product "row" but with the added time stamp? Or would this just be the product ID with the single field and date stamp? Essentially just 3 or 4 columns for every single historical change?

If I store the entire row with all it's columns, there would be a lot of columns of empty data. If I store just ONE field that has a change, then the table as a whole would increase a lot in row count.

Either way I would have to pull every record matching an ID and parse out the history of each field. Not sure which method would be most performant or efficient.

We are doing a huge migration of two stores on one platform into one store on a different platform.

We're starting relatively "fresh" as far as importing anything old. Only the catalog and customers were copied, no order history and so forth.

However, over the years I've been doing weekly backups downloading the CSV data that the previous stores made available. They had separate files for products, categories, customers, and orders. They also provide XML exports which actually include additional data not found in the CSVs.

I need to take these hundreds of CSV files which are in 4 categories, across two stores, and convert them all into a type of single archive application for holding about 10 years worth of data. Sadly, they never wanted individual sales to be recording in accounting software (Quickbooks) so this is also acting like an accounting archive as well.

My skills are in PHP and MySQL as far as building DB apps, but there are some nuances to this project where I might want to explore alternate databases.

One thing is that as I did weekly backups, various bits of data might change, for example the price going up or down, or text in the description changing, or the URL being changed, etc. These are reflected in the history of my CSV files, but would be lost if I simply recorded the latest version of the product. Even an order may have changed from one week to the next if, for example, they added or removed an item from an order. Or the order was live and good but later cancelled. I don't want to lose the history of the order as recorded through my backups.

As I think about this from the RDBS perspective I don't know that it's the best choice. It would be difficult to have "one row" for a product, but then ALSO record every time-stamped variation of any given field.
I could save every backup as individual rows, but then every query would have to group things properly and filter out by date and so on. I think these queries would get very expensive always having to process dozens of rows of the same product and then parse out sorted alternative fields that might exist.

In my brain this seems better suited to an object datastore where an "array" called "Description" could contain every dated alternate text. Then each product or order could still be a single master record and all the alternate fields would be within it.

Normally storing customers, orders, and products would be pretty "relational" with a table for each one. But since I'd like to store the dated history of various fields within those, according to my backups, it complicates things a bit.

I'm either trying to figure out a good RDBMS strategy for this without creating spaghetti queries, or considering more of an object store or graph-type DB. Maybe Mongo, etc.

I also have to consider a method whereby all my CSVs can be processed and stored automatically since I don't want to enter anything manually, or even one file at a time.

Then I'll have to build a basic GUI for finding and viewing the records.

@coliver said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

Have you looked at something like Odoo?

Haven't come across it yet. Will take a look!

That's why I created thread, see if there are any players I missed.

@JaredBusch said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

Then you need to find a software vendor to customize your solution to finish ticking the rest of the boxes

One called Orderbot does this. With customizing and ramping up the business, it would be $40-$50k first year. Onboarding is typically many thousands. I assume most bigger ERP vendors do this.

I was hoping for more of an off-the-shelf general retailer/ecommerce package that is ready to go at small biz prices.

@Jason

This company is only about $2kk gross/yr. So a solution costing more than what the entire business does in revenue is probably not financially wise no matter how you cut it.

@Dashrender said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

@scottalanmiller said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

@Dashrender said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

But it really sounds like the business needs exactly that. They are doing things hodge podge. Of course this is completely normal, it's organic growth. But once you reach a certain level, you need to scrap all that and move to a method more like how the big boys play. Who knows, you might be able to do a staff reduction (aka cost savings) when you move to a more unified ERP solution.

I think part of the question is "is there a big boy solution" in this space? Maybe, I don't really know. But that's the question.

It sounds like he's found one or more already. They just have 20 things that he doesn't need.

Also when looking at costs, remember, you're ditching QB (more cost savings or rather cost moving) etc. What other processes can be streamlined, what software gotten rid of because the company moves to a more holistic ERP?

Yes, but, cost.

NetSuite is kind of an "industry standard" but base price for us is $5k.
Is it completely worth it? Well when everything is integrated and mixed with their marketing features and all the employees are trained on it and we understand its features and automations, it probably IS worth it. I wouldn't be able to build a strong enough ROI to try to convince them to spend the extra $4k and change all their methods.

I'm not an ERP guy, so really I need a consultant or at least some kind of in-person live demo sales presentation or something. Let them sell the boss on their solution.

From my perspective, I'm looking at people whose mouths drop when I say cloud storage is $5 per user. Or O365 is $10 per user. Or project management is $3 per user. Or antivirus is $2 per user.

Anyway, ERP definitely IS the "type" of solution we need, but so is Big Commerce. ERPs tend to be great in the back office but the front end stuff I've never been impressed with.

In any case, the only "middle" I've found is BrightPearl, which would be around $525 a month. Even that would be a hard sell I'm afraid.

@scottalanmiller said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

Or that they can but what they find is terrible.

Regarding shopping carts, this.

Poor handling of variations/SKUs. Can manage payment options right, do refunds or whatever. Completely lack normal business data like what the store paid for an item. How can they even do a profit statement if they don't allow store cost?
Weird limits, like can't export more than 200 of something. Limited products, limited variations, limited orders per month, limited revenue limits.
Poor API abilities or lack of addons or apps.
Bad uptime. Bad support contracts.
Lack of multi-user security features.
Lack of payment options (the one we need)
Lack of good shipping controls.
Lack of good themes and theme-editing abilities.
Lack of mobile responsiveness.
Bad checkout experience.
Bad profit model (they give cart away cheap, then have to pay for all the basic features as addons)

List goes on.

@scottalanmiller said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

@guyinpv said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

Nonsense. It's entirely possible that NO software exactly meets every requirement. We have to settle on getting as close as possible within budget and time constraints.

Now you just have to get management to understand this and be happy with the solution that you have and the additional add ons or whatever that are required.

Yes that's the ticket right there.

I'm just surprised to not find any solutions that fill this particular market, or niche if you will. Makes me want to start a software company!