Job tracking and publishing question.

[Thomas Whitney <tr...@centervision.com>]

Hi,

I want to implement a job tracking and database publishing system and hoping
for some assistance.

My company does short run 4 color digital printing.  Because it is short urn
we handle multiple jobs every day.  I developed an online bidding system; it
use Apache, mod_perl, and  mysql.  Now I would like to move to tracking jobs
online; first, for internal purposes -- it would make the workflow much
easier to follow -- and later for customers to view the status of their jobs
on the web.  Each bid has about 38 data fields associated with it and each
job will have a few more fields along with an image file in the form of a
pdf.

Each job needs to be tracked through production with operators at each stage
having being able to update its status or add notes.  After the job is
finished an invoice would be printed to go out with the job.  Web based
applications are good for this because we use Mac's and PC's, and both must
be able to have access to that job.

I was looking at Bricolage, however it appears to be more suited to text
content publishing.  I currently use Template::Toolkit to print out the bids
and I imagine I could do all the programming myself--naturally, it would be
helpful to find some package that suited at least some of my requirements..

I would really appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.

Thanks,
Thomas Whitney

Re: Job tracking and publishing question.

[Perrin Harkins <pe...@elem.com>]

Thomas Whitney wrote:
> I was looking at Bricolage, however it appears to be more suited to text
> content publishing.  I currently use Template::Toolkit to print out the bids
> and I imagine I could do all the programming myself--naturally, it would be
> helpful to find some package that suited at least some of my requirements..

If you want to keep using Template Toolkit with some extra support for 
common things like sessions, users, etc., take a look at OpenInteract.

- Perrin

Re: Job tracking and publishing question.

[Les Mikesell <le...@attbi.com>]

From: "Thomas Whitney" <tr...@centervision.com>

> I want to implement a job tracking and database publishing system and hoping
> for some assistance.
> 
> My company does short run 4 color digital printing.  Because it is short urn
> we handle multiple jobs every day.  I developed an online bidding system; it
> use Apache, mod_perl, and  mysql.  Now I would like to move to tracking jobs
> online; first, for internal purposes -- it would make the workflow much
> easier to follow -- and later for customers to view the status of their jobs
> on the web.  Each bid has about 38 data fields associated with it and each
> job will have a few more fields along with an image file in the form of a
> pdf.

You would have to customize it quite a bit but you might look at
'Request Tracker' as a starting point:  http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/
It uses mason with sql or postgresql as the framework.   A new version
is on the way so if you would probably want to get the latest beta from
http://www.fsck.com/pub/rt/devel/  (2.1.86 now) to start.

---
  Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell@attbi.com