Hey all! I can't believe I've never seen this module before! I was hoping a seasoned pro might be able to help me decide if it's right for me (if that's not too much trouble :)

I'm looking for a module that might help offer a helpdesk functionality.

Feel free to skip this prelude, but here's the context: I'm involved in running a competition that we're hoping to move online in the future. It's a multiple choice test taken by perhaps 6000 students, and while we currently mail copies to each school, we'd like to have students write online. Given the way the quiz module is shaping up, this might happen soon, which is pretty exciting!

Anyhow, not only will students have student accounts to write the test, but they will also be linked to separate school accounts (used to registering and distributing info to coordinators).

Here's the important part: I was thinking that it might be hugely beneficial to have a chat option available to teacher coordinators with school accounts, which they'll be logged into during the designated testing time. They'd be able to ask questions on the fly, and I'd be there dealing with them from home-base.

The catch is that it could be chaos if everyone could see one anothers' discussions. For instance, a teacher might air concern that one question is incorrect, and that could cause a big unnecessary disruption among all the teacher coordinators.

So my killer need is for some sort of chat option that allows many users from one role (school), start separate "chats" with one user.

If this app isn't what I'm looking for, any suggestions where someone like myself could look?

I debated posting this somewhere beside the issue queue, but it seems this sort of question might prove useful to others...? :)

Thanks all! I heart the drupal community

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

subscribe.

as chats are nodes, you could probably make this work with Organic Groups.

solipsist’s picture

solipsist commented

Any progress on this?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

@solipsist: no. care to elaborate on what you need, and how organic groups won't work for this? i'm totally open to rolling some patches for chatroom to make it possible for this sort of functionality to work via organic groups or some other module.

solipsist’s picture

solipsist commented

The case is exactly the same as patcon describes, i.e. the kind of functionality many hosting companies have, "click here to talk to customer support" which opens a popup window with a one-on-one chatroom. The "support rep" should be able to have several windows open simultaneously. Conversations always include only two parties: the inquiring party and the responding party.

We're prepared to contribute patches to achieve this if you're interested. Building on existing modules is always better than reinventing the wheel.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

ok, that sounds good. i think a bunch of the functionality is there, and i'd be totally willing to work with you to add what you need.

i have some better caching code and some bug fixes to push out soon, then we can look at building this stuff in. could you open some specific issues for things that need to be added?

patcon’s picture

patcon commented

It's a little busy now, as I'm in the thick of this year's competition, but I'll have some creative time over the summer that I'll use to dig into the module. Unfortunately I'm not much use until then!

The one drawback I see is that Organic Groups might be overkill. For instance, a similar "help desk" feature might be of use for an ecommerce site, but you wouldn't want to force a developer to make every customer into an organic group maintainer... Wouldn't some sort of AJAX notification system for the admin work in conjuntion with regular old role permissions (school role can create chat nodes). I'm sort of working in the dark until I have time to look into the module more, so just ignore me if I'm misunderstanding how it works!

Offlein’s picture

Offlein commented

I haven't used it, but perhaps LiveZilla would be what you're looking for? It seems very promising.

Their site is here, which should give you an idea of what they offer: http://www.livezilla.net/features/en/
And there's what looks to be a pretty simple Drupal module here: http://drupal.org/project/livezilla