At work we have moved to a new “Engagement Platform” called iModules. Some of you already know something about this as I’ve shared stories about it with some of you before.

The system is up and running. I have to admit that I’m quite glad that the implementation phase of the project has reached a conclusion, as it took six months to get this wobbly-legged foal up on it’s feet and bouncing around.

This entire project still has some pieces to mop up, most notably the mopjob that I have to do surrounding our old platform, WordPress. Honestly I’m sad to see our use of WordPress in this regard come to a close as WordPress has been a wonderful platform and still is for my personal blog here as well as my “Captains Log” blog. I still maintain the “Captains Log” blog, but there have been lessons in using that as well. That particular one uses WordPress’s own P2 theme and for a time I opened it up and made it publicly available. This turned out to be a great mistake. I got heat from nearly every corner, mostly to do with keeping technical details private to non-maliciously violating an email clickwrap nonverbal unsigned unread agreement. I admit that the draw that the WordPress platform provides, free clouded hosting can’t be beat as far as I’m concerned. So for the “Captains Log” P2 blog, it’s gone private which makes all the previous gripers go silent as they can’t get past the “Please Login” barricade. So, once again thanks to WordPress I’ve found yet another way to “Have my cake and eat it too”.

We have moved the work stuff off to iModules and you all can see the efforts at our new site, MyWMU.com and thanks to our students and our staff who moved the contents off of our WordPress site and onto the new site, the speed of which was honestly shocking to me. Now the mopping up is all that remains. There were three blogs, Old WMYou, WMYou, and Western Express. The first and third have been backed up and purged from the system, but the middle one is stuck and I have a support ticket opened up with WordPress to help address it. We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to update my personal blog, of course, and I will continue to enrich the P2 “Captains Log” and I really think other organizations should make use of WordPress for this great feature. It’s a great way to keep information handy, and takes the onus off the staff to remember the past as the system does it for you, time and date stamps, tags, categories, and the commenting system – not that the last part is really used for our P2 blog, but still. Not having to worry about hosting, cost, security, not to mention the ubiquity of ways to access the WordPress system make it the most compelling way to manage the working log of any business or help desk.

The only thing that I would like from WordPress, but would likely start running into real money (which I would pay, mind you) would be a Help Desk CRM overlaid on top of their P2 theme system. Some way for people to email problems or browse to the site and enter issues and the system gives them a trouble ticket number for tracking and we can lurk in the dark, hovering over this blog. That would leverage the logging goodness of P2 and it’s great usability and I don’t think it would be all that hard to code. I know there are Help Desk solutions for WordPress.org, but I really REALLY prefer to use WordPress.com. Perhaps someday in the future WordPress.com will get around to something like this. Time will tell.