This is the proposal for esup-helpdesk to become a JASIG incubated project (see JASIG Incubation Process). It has been posted as a JIRA issue on March 2nd, 2009.
Formerly known as ifsic-helpdesk (1999-2003, developed and used by IFSIC, the computer science department of the University of Rennes 1), the project is now know as esup-helpdesk (2004-2008, esup stands for ESUP-Portail).
He leads the project since1999:
The project already has three active mailing lists, hosted by the Sympa mailing list manager:
All these lists are French-spoken, helpdesk-users@esup-portail.org has never be used (no community yet).
Even if the incubating portlets normally use the portlet mailing lists, experience shows that the traffic concerning esup-helpdesk grows very fast and pollutes general lists (esup-utilisateurs@esup-portail.org was used at the very beginning but helpdesk-xxx have been requested one month only after the application was distributed to the ESUP-Portail community due to traffic).
helpdesk would be a logical preface.
Most of the v2 commiters have left the project.
The initial goal of the esup-helpdesk project is to provide to the French Universities a single application to deal with the user support at establishment-level.
See: helpdesk-eunis2006-article.pdf (written in 2006, no v3 feature presented).
esup-commons is the development framework adopted by the ESUP-Portail community in 2007.
Since esup-helpdesk is based on esup-commons, it uses:
It is distributed as:
Thanks to esup-commons, the same code is used by the three deployment modes.
Note: Pascal Aubry is also the maintainer of the esup-commons project.
See also: esup-commons - Framework de développement (in French, sorry)
esup-helpdesk is approx. used in production by 25 institutions (mostly universities, but also high schools and research labs).
6 universities have already migrated to version 3 (available since 2008 Aug.).
The map below shows the deployers on 2006 Aug.:
esup-helpdesk does not conflict with any other part of the JASIG sponsored softwares.
Even if sometimes deployed as a servlet, it is motly deployed as a portlet into uPortal (the ESUP-Portail community is uPortal-based).
esup-helpdesk relies on CAS for the authentication and can use the uPortal groups and user attributes to define user profiles (thanks to esup-portal-ws).
Main benefits are:
Alain Mayeur (Board Member)
The main page of the esup-helpdesk project: esup-helpdesk - user support at establishment-level