Mole and eMon – the forgotten support software at Boots

Back in the early/mid-1990s I’d been working on the IT (then IS) Help Desk at Boots the Chemist, supporting store’s POS (Point of Sale) systems. After a few years, my existing development chops were recognised and I was moved away to a more technical support team, where I would be helping to create support tools, as well as make fixed and minor enhancements to the POS system.

My manager was very supportive of us all and allowed us to find our own path, in terms of what we’d spend our time doing. In my case, as the only person in the team with direct experience of working on the Help Desk, I wanted to do what I could to assist them.

So I wrote Mole.

The Award Winning Mole

Mole was a knowledge database. It ran on the mainframe but allowed anyone to create and save text based articles that could be shared by everyone on the Help Desk to quickly get to solutions. These days having something like this pretty much a default but, back then, they had nothing. Okay, that’s not true.

Back then, internet search engines were in their infancy, but I learnt how they worked, building the tool to index the results but also adding search features such as boolean logic, etc. Eventually I added a natural language search, the likes of which aren’t even present in current search engines.

That way, the department had their inaugural “Excellent in IS Awards”. Mole was put forward for the software category, and was up against the POS star-of-the-show, wireless RF (handheld terminals and even battery-driven wireless tills¹). Mole won. I got a framed certificate (which I still have), plus was awarded with this plaque, which you keep until the next award…

The fact that picture is a scan from an APS film really does show the age of this. The certificate can just be seen on the right-hand side.

Anyway, Mole actually failed as a product because it was hardly used. Not that it was my fault. All of the online documentation was imported and more added – it was a huge repository of useful information, but the manager of the Help Desk decided that they were going to implement something better, so didn’t recommend its use. Years went by before they did this, and the solution was neither very good nor used. In fact, they asked for my help to import all the documentation to it from Mole.

1. Very advanced at the time, but not without their flaws. The tills only lasted around 20 minutes on battery ↩︎

eMon and More

So, it was time to look for the next thing. The mainframe-based format gave me control over the software, but also anyone within Support access, so I stuck with that. I envisaged a suite of programs, all providing assistance to the Support teams.

As was the trend at that time, I decided to prefix them all with an “e”, so the first product was eMon (short for “electronic Monitoring”). In time, I planned to rename Mole to something else with the same format.

eMon took over producing a number of reports that the Help Desk already manually created each day. Not only did it run them all for them, at the right time of day, but would also check for file existences and fix known issues with the reporting. Previously they printed, but eMon sent them all to a file and then let you view them on screen. Each report may produce a list of issues for different stores, so by combining them you could see all the problems for each store in turn, meaning that the Help Desk could resolve everything in one go – until then, somebody would take each report and fix each problem in turn, often returning to the same store on multiple occasions.

Unlike Mole, eMon was still running and being used daily on the day that I left the company in 2017.

But, as I said, more software was planned although, for the life of me, I can’t remember what they all were. One (name now unknown) was going to integrate with Connect:Direct and allow us to built a library of scripts that could be remotely sent and activated in specific stores. When combined with Mole and eMon, fixing an issue requires a one-touch solution, as a person logging into the store’s server and running something is no longer needed. A workaround in Mole could tell you what to do but then offer up a button to just do it, and eMon would attempt fixes remotely and then only report anything that still didn’t work.

In the end, this didn’t get implemented. My management changed and they no longer had the appetite for us to do work such as this.