Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Maintenance databases RFC

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Posted by Dominic Espinosa (Member # 2122) on 02-12-2010, 08:53 PM:

A little background:
At my current employer, maintenance (facilities, projection, etc.) has been accomplished for the last few years by means of a manager filling out a form (excel spreadsheet -- no formulas, just a questionnaire) and faxing it to the head maintenance guy.
After I came on board I build a simple database in mysql with a cgi frontend which enabled us to file requests via e-mail, provide transparency between maintenance and administrative personnel and, most importantly, keep track of things.

The initial incarnation has been a good tool but I feel like it's time to expand it.

I had the pleasure of picking the brain of a couple Regal techs a while back who mentioned Christie's service devision is doing something similar.

I'm in the design phase of something new though, which I'll likely make open source or at least freely distributable.

So, I'd like to ask: what do you all think of these types of systems and what suggestions would you have?

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-12-2010, 09:13 PM:

If you are operating on a company wide server system with MYSQL thats probably the best way to handle it but in my case I don't have any small chains that begin to have that luxury so I've also always used Excel.

Mark

Posted by Jim Ziegler (Member # 86) on 02-12-2010, 09:41 PM:

Most webhosting services offer one or more MySQL databases as part of the webhosting packages. I would guess that smaller chains are probably hosting their sites using a service rather than maintaing their own server, so they should have the capability to use something like this. The question is if they have people with the ability to implement it.

Sounds like a great idea Dominic.

Posted by Scott D. Neff (Member # 185) on 02-14-2010, 11:15 AM:

We had something similar for work orders at Century. We used Lotus Notes though to do a lot of that stuff... don't know the specifics.

Posted by Dominic Espinosa (Member # 2122) on 02-16-2010, 05:40 PM:

Jim Z. in Hollywood now? You get around a lot!

The system was originally designed to run on MySQL but I'm setting it up to run on SQLite and MySQL for compatibility purposes.
Though I think most places will do precisely what we're doing, run it on their web hosting service.

So, what features would you as operators and technicians want to see in something like this?