Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, June 4, 2007:
HelpSpot Version 2 Preview!
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
The future of web based help desk software has finally arrived (too boastful you think? 
).
I’ve actually managed to get the preview page up on time!! Actually it’s very much evolution more than revolution, but there’s a lot of really interesting new features. Just about all of them come directly from customer requests so thank you all!
Check it out and let me know what you think.
http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/version2/
Discussion
Looks great! Congratulations!
I have been following your blog since the beginning and it has been a great learning experience to see your product evolve.
For this particular release, I see that you have gone from 'friendly date time (e.g. 1 day from now, 2 days from now)' to the actual timestamps. I can guess that the reason behind the change is number of customer requests, right? I am surprised that people didn't find 'friendly date time' friendly enough! Could you not have provided a javascript based implementation on client side so that they can toggle the date time display with a click?
You claim that you have improved performance of the workspace page by 10x. That's a great improvement. I am curious to know as to what design decisions used in earlier workspace page was causing it to run so slow? I know it could be hard to explain without knowing how you have laid out your application but if you can discuss the performance fixes at higher level, that would be great.
Thanks and Good Luck!
JD
Created by JD on 06.05.2007 9:52 am
Hey JD, great to hear from you. Glad to know you're still around!
Actually, the friendly time is still there, but it only appears on the latest request next to the timestamp. Older requests just have the timestamp. I actually think it's better since the friendly time sort of only makes sense on the latest note (the last note was 4 hours since creation), not so much on every note.
10x is actually the middle, but I didn't want to go crazy with the numbers. Some folks won't see much if they don't use filters while others will be amazed.
The basic issue was that I wanted to keep the SQL the same across all supported DB's (mysql 3,4,5, PG, MS SQL) and the big issue was that I couldn't use subselects because MySQL 3 doesn't support them (and mysql < 4.1). You can sometimes work around with joins, but I couldn't for the main filter code. So some logic ended up being put into PHP code to work with the recordsets and filters properly, especially with certain types of fields like "time since" fields.
In researching I found that almost no customers were on MySQL < 4.1 so I dropped support for MySQL < 4.1 and was able to push all the logic into the database. This provides massive speed improvements as you would expect.
It's a bit of a risk, but I think the improvements are going to be well worth it.
Created by Ian on 06.05.2007 10:02 am
Looks great! I can see the merge feature saving a lot of time and hassle.
Created by Scott Carpenter on 06.06.2007 8:19 pm