[NBLUG/talk] [SoCoSA/discuss] Help with locating good software

Eric Eisenhart eric at nblug.org
Tue Oct 14 12:54:39 PDT 2008


Somebody else already suggested it, but I feel the need to repeat the
suggestion: RT: http://bestpractical.com/rt

It's free, and it rocks.  Can be a bit intimidating, though.

With the RT FAQ Manager addon: http://bestpractical.com/rtfm/

And possibly also the Asset Tracker addon:
http://code.google.com/p/asset-tracker-4rt/

Basics:

With RT, you can have customers email in their requests, or they can log in
and submit requests through the "public" interface.  It's also fairly easy
to create a custom submission form for your users to use.

You can have arbitrary fields on tickets; with quite a bit of flexibility on
those fields (either straight fill-ins, or pull-downs, some other choices,
too).  Usually you have contact info for each person, but there's no reason
you can't add global fields for location and contact info and have those set
on each ticket.  Heck, somebody even made an addon to let you put locations
on a map: http://wiki.bestpractical.com/view/SpatialRT

Knowledge Base:

With the RTFM addon you can easily extract information from a ticket into
the knowledgebase, and can easily find info in the knowledgebase and put it
into a ticket.

Projects:

The normal setup in RT is to have multiple "queues".  Each queue can have
its own custom fields, its own email address, and can have its own set of
"admins" responsible for handling the tickets in the queue.  You could have
the "general" or "misc" or "help" queue be the main one for normal requests,
and have a second queue for projects.  Or maybe a queue for projects and a
second queue for tasks.  All the basic fields you need exist, including the
ability to do all sorts of linking of tickets (projects, tasks, problem
reports) together (depends on/depended on by, parent/child, and refers
to/referred to by) across queues.  I know there's been projects
(RTx::Timeline?) to provide Gantt charts and other visualizations of project
data, but I'm not familiar with them.

Inventory Software:

There's asset tracker, an addon to RT.  I don't know much about it.


The big downside of RT: if you want to do anything really interesting, you
have to learn Perl.  There are plenty of existing addons available
(http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/contrib and
http://wiki.bestpractical.com/view/HomePage) and there's a book
(http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006686/), though.

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 03:53:42PM -0700, Eric Landerville wrote:
> Web based
> Trouble ticket tracking system.
> Either a front page with the ticket submission or the ability for the 
> customer to enter in name/location/contact info on each ticket (they 
> move about quite often).  What I'm trying to say is that I don't want a 
> single set of contact info and that is all we have to go on to get a 
> hold of whom ever entered the ticket.

> A searchable knowledge base of ticket problems/solutions (it would be 
> nice if the program asked if you want to submit the solution into the 
> database, we really don't need "trained customer" 100 times).
> A project management portion.  Nothing so grand as something like M$ 
> Project, just a different ticket type that can be open ended and allow 
> for constant updates.

> A real bonus would be something that can integrate with (or has 
> embedded) a inventory software that can work with existing bar code 
> labels.  But this isn't really necessary.


-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit
Jabber/XMPP/GTalk: freiheit at gmail.com



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