The dawn has always been something of historical interest and reference. There’s just something about the parting of darkness with light to provide paths and opportunities not seen before. In the first article, we made reference to the Virtual Help Center being a lighthouse guiding ships from disaster (somewhere along those lines). Another way to look at it is simply a source of light, you see; the Virtual Help center alongside the Knowledge Base show paths to take to accomplish different tasks and also combined provide an array of opportunities through information provided and updated in perpetuity (like really continuous lah). Back to the dawn reference; it is at this point we draw closer to how the Virtual Help Centre became what it is today, the dawning.
In the previous article; we observed the conception of APIX, the first platform to obtain information on academic activities, form submissions and such. It held itself well as far as the distribution of information went. On the other side of this feat was Awesome Support, the first platform used by the CTI in hopes of achieving the goal of efficient email piping, instead of direct emailing to team members, these requests would go through a central “assist@apu.edu…” email and then be delegated by the departmental leader based on the request. This practice was conceived at a historical DevSecOps meeting held roughly 3 years ago where all the team members associated with anything that had an on button used by staff regularly met and discussed matters of the heart(sounds more poetic than “discussed tech issues and miscellaneous”). It was at this meeting where the Tech Support team which initially handled all these requests agreed to share the burden(I mean opportunity to help) with the CTI and thus the CTI team made the move to a centralised email through the use of a platform known as Awesome Support.
Awesome Support is a third-party online platform that was the first safe haven for the handling and delegation of emails, here is where all emails received by various teams such as webspace, system, and others more were funnelled down to simply “assist@apu.edu…”. The use of Microsoft’s Outlook client was also incorporated in order to allow all employees to create a ticket from incoming mail. It was used solely for this purpose at first and so long this was the goal, it was here to stay.
AWESOME SUPPORT
Students were beginning to familiarise themselves with the concept of going through the knowledge base for information and then creating a “ticket” if they could not find the help they were looking for.
However, with the exponential growth that occurred to the organisation as a whole, the traffic of requests and performance level expected of the platform grew in complexity. It was like shifting from cooking with the help of an expert to cooking alone, in the dark, on a boat, with a blunt knife and charcoal for fire(too far ?,too far). The platform was unable to meet the growing needs and their varying complexities, the team therefor found themselves experiencing support difficulties, customisation restrictions and even lack of plugins(it was like a restaurant running out of chicken, huh ?). The CTI needed an enterprise level platform to meet their current and future needs and begun the search for a suitable platform that would cater for this, this was the start of the Virtual Help Centre as we know it.