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Re: MOOs @ work

On Mon, 14 Oct 1996, Stephen Hueners wrote:

> I'm looking for examples of how M**s are (or are not) being accepted 
> as business or productivity tools. Anyone using them in front line 
> tech support? 

  I seem to be getting in the habbit of setting up MOOs for internal WWW
servers. One I got going just a few months ago was for programmers to manage
task assignments. Programmers (this is, people employed as programmers at the
company, not $programmers in MOO) create tasks, give them descriptions,
assign who is to review the code/etc. The task shows up on the user's "to do"
page, and they advance it through start,completion,review,sign-off phases.
It's all done through WWW get/post requests in full compliance with HTTP. 

  Unfortuanately I left the company before completely polishing off that
system. It now looks as though I'll be creating a similar system for where I
work now -- except it'll do task management, bug tracking, and tech support
contact managemnt (all across multiple software products our company sells).
I intend for this one to be *fully* managable via the WWW, no telnetting into
the server should be necessary. This particular system is still in the design
phase. 

  The user's perspective should just be a great WWW interface -- they don't
even have to know there's a "MUD game" underneath (often it's better they
don't know I've found). User interface is very easy to overlook when
designing WWW systems; there is often little understanding of the limitations
(and possibilities) of HTTP/HTML forms by people who've written windows code
for 5 years. 

  I've been evolving my WWW core for about a year and a half now. I 
started long ago with LambdaCore in '94 sometime and have removed some 
large chunks of it that are unneeded in a WWW server MOO. (in-MOO email 
for example). I still have a lot of core changes in mind -- I can 
envision a core modified to the point that it no longer represents a 
traditional MOO. The MOO environment I want to develop would be for 
hard&fast WWW coding, not for socializing among users or other more 
"traditional" MUD roles.

  These projects have gotten enormous support from the management at the
companies I've worked for (small companies of 20-30 employees). For the price
of my labor (cheap!) they get something better than could be done with
thousands of dollars of Microsoft software and probably even more dollars in
programming time. As a bonus these MOOs run great on bare-bones Linux
machines (although they're even better on PPro-200s).

  Feel free to contact me for more details... I love this stuff.

-Will Orton  <will@tyranny.punk.net>
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