Feature wishlist, was: Re: [freeside] 1.2.3 released

[ivan]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2000 at 11:55:43AM -0600, Tim Jung wrote:
> I would also love to see Freeside support bandwidth billing by reading the
> Cisco NetFlow Accounting data so we and other ISP's could automatically bill
> co-located servers and even potentially other virtually hosted sites like
> MUD, Palace Chat, IRC Chat, etc based on the bandwidth they use or average
> sustained rates or whatever. I'm not much of a programmer so I don't know
> what all this entails but I did download a NetFlow client agent/whatever for
> Linux though.

I would also like to see Freeside support this.

> It would also be nice to see Freeside be able to read Apache log files and
> bill customers for web traffic that way as an option also. Plus an option to
> bill for excessive disk usage without having to use quotas if you didn't
> want to, would be a nice feature as well. So you could monitor with a script
> or something to see how much disk space a user was using then get some
> average and charge a certain amount for anything above some preset limit for
> that account type.

More good suggestions.

> I might be able to hack something like this up, but I'm
> not 100% sure where to start or if there is something out there that could
> be modified or not.

I'm not aware of anything like what you describe, personally.

With regard to the usage-based billing, all prices in Freeside are Perl
expressions.  I'd like to see usage-based billing implemented by having
the usage logs written to SQL and then queried by the billing process.
See <http://www.sisd.com/freeside/list-archive/msg00423.html>.

> Do you think that you will ever support the HKS CCVS (Hell's Kitchen
> Software Credit Card Verification Software) since Red Hat bought them out
> and is going to be including that for credit card processing when you buy
> the professional version?

I'll probably support it when:

  - A CyberCash-type CCLib-type interface comes out for it (this is where
the Authorize.Net and Signio support comes from)

  - Someone pays me to add it.

  - Someone sends me patches.

> What about possibly supporting the OpenCCVS which
> is a GNU/GPL version of a credit card program?

Last time I checked OpenCCVS wasn't even close to a usable state.  If this
has changed recently I'd like to hear about it.

> I haven't had time to comb
> through the Freeside code to see how hard it would be to add support for
> these as externally called programs.

I don't think it would be very difficult.  I could probably even be
motivated to help rework the credit card processing to make it modular
enough that adding this sort of think is fairly straightforward.

> Also any thoughts on help desk, and knowledge base stuff? Any thoughts on
> this stuff, and how possible and what kinds of work or time frame would be
> involved?

"help desk" type functionality seems like a natural extension of
billing and customer tracking software.  Doing it well would certainly not
be a trivial undertaking.

-- 
meow
_ivan