We’ve recently made a few improvements to our TRAC trouble ticketing/project management system. On an aesthetic level, we’ve now skinned the system in Loopo’s smart green livery, but more importantly we’ve vastly improved the automatic emailing and user assignment areas of the system. Overall, this will provide our clients with an easier to use and more intuitive system.

Also, everything is now hosted on our superfast shiny new servers.

I’ll blog seperately with a more technical piece on the TRAC system, but briefly: It’s an excellent open source trouble ticketing and project management system which we’ve grown to love. It does everything one would expect with minimal fuss and bother, and does not suffer from any application bloating.

We’re used to recruitment agencies being on the persistent side when it comes to cold calling, but a recent caller really took the biscuit.

The agent (we’ll call him “Dave”) first tried fairly straightforward tactics (owning up that he was a recruitment consultant) to get us to transfer the call to our senior developer (who he was presumably trying to poach). Needless to say, he got a fairly perfunctory response.

Read more »

Most software written for companies contains rules relating to the problem domain the application is trying to solve. These rules are things like “All customers that spend more than £100 at one time will receive a 10% discount”, “Automatically delete any support requests written in capitals”, “Delivery Dates cannot be set in the past” or “Members who joined after such and such a date are not eligible for the pink elephant special offer”. These rules are called Business Rules.

Lately here at Loopo we have discovered the need for a more flexible and standardised way of handling our business rules in some of our applications.
Read more »