I work for a small department in a large university, in a technical support capacity. One of my major responsibilities is managing several hundred computers, and all the related equipment, phones, rooms, and tools. I also manage the department web sites, which I'm migrating to Drupal 6. While designing a support sub-site, I realized that most of my site structure and function was quite common, and thus should have some good modules developed for it.
I searched all over Drupal.org and quickly found a fractured landscape of mods and hacks, few of which were helpful. There are also a lot of parallel developments that undermine each other, just because they used different terminology and don't realize their common needs. I created this group to try and unify these efforts.
There is a need for solid, abstracted layers including:
- scheduling
- resource balancing
- conflict avoidance
- reservations
- reminder triggers
- rental/checkout
- contract details
- billing
- owner/borrower relationships
- inventory
- node type libraries with common views and functions
- quantity monitors
- quality monitors
- relationship mapping (dependencies)
- project management
- support ticketing system
- many more...
(I'm just brainstorming here, please suggest more, or re-arrange relationships). Specific mods could then use these base mods, via APIs, to meet specific use cases.
May I suggest that we contribute use cases which could be dissected for their base components and requirements. That will help define these base modules clearly for development.