Kayako Help Desk Software

We’re trying to make our development process more transparent at Kayako.  So, one of the things my boss thought would help would be if we started talking about what we were doing at work on the blog.  I’m working on the new v4 teamwork stuff.

Hi.  I’m John Haugeland; I’m one of the PHP dorks at Kayako.  I work on SupportSuite mostly.  I’ve been working on five things lately: the new calendar and teamwork stuff for v4, an iso8601 implementation for JavaScript, and three interrelated libraries that I’m not supposed to start talking about until they’re done.  More on those later (since I kind of struggle with not talking about things.)

The new teamwork module is something I’ve been talking about in the forums, getting opinions on from people, that sort of thing; it’s going nicely, other than that an artist has to have at it after I’m done, since I honestly couldn’t draw a stickman with AutoCAD and a team of twelve (some of the buttons I’m using right now are just cropped screenshots of other apps.)  I’m still farming opinions; if you like, leave a comment here or drop me an email, or hit me on the forums or post in the feature request forums, or even open a support ticket; whatever, I’ll catch it sooner or later.

Teamwork is vastly improved in v4, thanks in part to the help of several specific customers with clear explanations of interesting designs.  Previously, Teamwork was mostly a quick address book and event system; it has been promoted to a much more significant tool, with a lot of interesting new features that I’m still supposed to be keeping under wraps.  Suffice it to say that nearly every suggestion or concern that I’ve seen raised about the old Teamwork implementation is addressed, and I think there are going to be a lot of people who have a very different opinion of the system.  There’s a lot of new automation to reduce repetitive tasks, and a lot of shiney AJAX to reduce waiting on independant loads.  The new calendar is designed to be much more easily placed into other documents, and of course, there are those magical new features I keep half-talking-about.  (It’s hard to shut up about something you’re proud of.)

Maybe the most exciting part to me is that the Javascript 8601 library and the three libraries I’m not talking about yet are being open sourced.  Varun, the company owner, sees the value that comes from the Metcalfe Effect around libraries for interconnection, and he’s letting me provide these libraries.  Also, we’re releasing them MIT license, so that they’re available to commercial and open source (and GPL) projects alike.  Sure, the date library is a little bit yawn, but 8601 is tedious and implementations are error prone.  More important is that we’re starting to release libraries; the ones I can’t talk about yet are much more interesting, but that we’re releasing is a big change for us.  It’s a sign of the new way we’re starting to look at things.

We’re starting to move in a whole new direction.  We think you’ll like it.  Stay tuned.