What is it?

AXIS is a complete management system that brings together Support Desk, Project Management, Maintenance Control, Hardware Management, and Network Management - all under one roof. Currently, the Support Desk Module for AXIS is almost complete, and this post will focus around the many parts that make up this product.

Right out of the box, AXIS supports both local and Active Directory authentication.

Once logged in, you'll be presented with summary page that provides details as to the exact status of all tickets under your control

The "Unassigned" queue contains those tickets that have recently been created, but not yet assigned to anyone, or accepted by any operators

Your login ID ties in with the queue you are using, and it's easy and simple to see how much work you have, and what priorities they are set at. Marie has 4 tickets, although the default view shows 3 as it natively looks for OPEN when you first login (this is going to change)

Opening a ticket provides you with a list of all the available options for that particular ticket you are working on. Let's have a look at some of these functions

AXIS is able to automatically "walk" the contents of any email (either in plain text or HTML format), and deduce which parts of the message contains attachments. These are added on the fly by the system poller, and are tagged to the ticket when it is created. The attachments can either be viewed inline, or via this screen

Editing a ticket is a simple operation - AXIS allows for multiple field edits, and logs all transactions and changes

The logs for any ticket can be reviewed in an instant from any of the ticket views. Double-clicking the log view window will make it full screen - tickets that have several logs can be difficult to read, and this makes the process much easier

Tickets can be created manually from the console - you can also email these into your predefined email address for ingestion by the AXIS poller

Once a ticket has been created, it's status can be changed to suit requirements. For example, if there is going to be a long delay in a ticket being closed (for whatever reason), it can be placed on hold

The above is an example of the ability to change status

AXIS has powerful searching facilities out of the box

Here, "Marie" has been searched. Clicking on any of these individual logs will take you to the corresponding ticket

The reporting module can be seen above - here, we include status, hours spent, and the top ten ticket creators.

AXIS also has full audit capabilities

As well as history and recent ticket/logs tracking facilities

Creating and editing users is made simple by either importing and synchronising your users in bulk via Active Directory, or creation manually

Administration is made much easier via a centralised console

Other features

AXIS will be able to interact and obtain data from mature Open Source projects such asCacti,Open-AudIT, andObservium.