Starent Networks

Starent Networks creates networking technology for providers of mobile data, voice, and multimedia services. Their customers include the major wireless operators, including Verizon Wireless, KDDI, and China Unicom.

Project

Starent Networks had a need for a complete technical support website for their wireless operator customers. The requirements for this support site are continually evolving and include separate, secure sites for authorized customers, support engineers and administrators. As the contractor selected to create this technical support solution for Starent Networks, I developed the sites from the ground up to fulfill the following requirements:

• Allow authorized customer-users to access a personalized support site where they can submit, track and modify support requests as well as download files specific to their company's products and configurations.
• Allow administrators to manage customer support requests, customer and user accounts, and technical data specific to Starent Networks' products.
• Allow administrators to create customized customer surveys, send them to users, send reminders as necessary, and view customized graphs that show the results of the surveys. Administrators can also generate custom reports on support requests and view statistics in various output formats.

Technologies

PHP 4, MySQL 4, Debian linux, Apache 2, Mysql-auth Apache module
JpGraph PHP API, PHP Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer package

Fig 1. Support request statistics graphed using JpGraph PHP API

Fig 2. Excel workbook containing executive reports, dynamically created using PHP