[System Admin main menu screenshot] As part of a company Intranet, I designed and built a service administration system which allows services to be administered by non-technical staff with minimal training. Services administered include UK domain registrations, DNS zones, web site hosting, email aliases, POP3 mailboxes, and dialup accounts; system logs can also be viewed and queried using SQL statements.

Access to the system is fine-grained, such that specific operators can be given control over one specific subsystem and no others (for instance first-line technical support staff may be allowed to view dialup passwords and logs, and nothing else).

Monitoring daemons maintain lists of who is using the system, what blocks are currently in place on the firewall, and the current network load, to allow problems to be diagnosed quickly.

[DNS zone listing screenshot]
All of the services maintained within this system can be listed and searched using straightforward keyword matching, and ordered in many different ways. This means that operators find the services they are looking for as quickly as possible.

Defaults for all services are set such that an operator will need to modify at most two or three fields in the course of creating a normal service - but the back-end database has been designed with enough flexibility to cover any special cases that arise.

Record editing is done on clear unambiguous web forms, with on-screen prompts to remind operators of easily forgotten information where applicable.

Finally, this system ties into the semi-automated invoicing system, which generates pro forma invoices, sends them to customers, queues payments and queries for processing by the accounts department, integrates with the Sage accounts package, and provides an account history / call log mechanism. This means that any customer's full service record and call history can be viewed instantly, from any of the service listings.

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