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,…