Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
Jesse; Why do you need RT to own the customer database , I think its not such a good idea .. your support/ticketing system should be different from your provisioning system which is different from your billing etc , the ticketing system is not the place to hold your customer contacts particularly as you mentioned some of those contacts will have nothing to do with tickets .. As long as the systems talk/query each other that is all that count. All you need in your RT is your unique customer id, this is what I have in here and it works (sort of) : - customer contacts in Customer db , those that need ticket access are tagged and auto created in RT (also auto updated) - contacts of customers are grouped, if each of them created a ticket a cf customer reference is populated with the customer id - currently customer details (products or services etc are populated into a ticket wiki cf by grabbing the customer reference cf value and soap call to provisioning db (this have the problem of not being updated on old tickets and when I have time I want to look into using the (Link values to ) so it talks real time to a provisioning web service. Hope the above was of any use. Regards; Roy Jesse Vincent wrote: Thank you, Kelly. Everyone else's reactions to customer file were beginning to make me think *I* was nutsabago. Nope. It's a perfectly reasonable feature request. We've specced it out for customers several times. To do it reasonably as part of RT requires that RT own your customer database, which it generally sounds like the folks who've been looking for this on the list aren't willing to have happen. We'd probably model it as RT groups, so that you could usefully model who's part of which customer. The big hard bits are probably setting RT up to not mail everyone from a customer on every issue ;) ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
RE: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
Thank you, Kelly. Everyone else's reactions to customer file were beginning to make me think *I* was nutsabago. Nope. It's a perfectly reasonable feature request. We've specced it out for customers several times. To do it reasonably as part of RT requires that RT own your customer database, which it generally sounds like the folks who've been looking for this on the list aren't willing to have happen. We'd be happy enough to have RT own the customer database (or at least build scripts to morph the data over from the real customer database regularly). That would be fine, although I'd think people in other circumstances might prefer a well defined interface so that they could adapt it to their existing customer db. We'd probably model it as RT groups, so that you could usefully model who's part of which customer. The big hard bits are probably setting RT up to not mail everyone from a customer on every issue ;) Personally I'd probably want a single user still to own the bug, but have that user somehow belong to the customer entity. -Kely ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 01:04:13PM -0600, Kelly F. Hickel wrote: Thank you, Kelly. Everyone else's reactions to customer file were beginning to make me think *I* was nutsabago. Nope. It's a perfectly reasonable feature request. We've specced it for customers several times. To do it reasonably as part of RT requires that RT own your customer database, which it generally sounds like the folks who've been looking for this on the list aren't willing to have happen. We'd be happy enough to have RT own the customer database (or at least build scripts to morph the data over from the real customer database regularly). That would be fine, although I'd think people in other circumstances might prefer a well defined interface so that they could adapt it to their existing customer db. Probably. We'd probably model it as RT groups, so that you could usefully model who's part of which customer. The big hard bits are probably setting RT up to not mail everyone from a customer on every issue ;) Personally I'd probably want a single user still to own the bug, but have that user somehow belong to the customer entity. Perhaps you and I ought to go off and kibitz on how, exactly, this ought to work, semantically, and then see if we can find someone to make it do that. :-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth[EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth AssociatesThe Things I Think'87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
[rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
It's been a while since I've looked at RT. The last time I tried to get it some traction in the organization I work for, it foundered on 3 points: * It didn't understand customers. The company I work for is in the computer service and support business. I need a ticketing system to have an integrated 'customer file' that keeps track of all the information about a client, specifically including mapping incoming email addresses to clients and auto-carboning the appropriate client supervisory email. RT didn't do that when I looked at it last, and AT could be made to do it -- I thought -- but I was already selling 'up-hill' and the loose integration was something I couldn't overcome. * I needed a what happened today view for the boss -- showing all of today's ticket activity and status changes and total time billable -- and there wasn't one, quite, and I wan't smart enough to write it myself. * To work helpdesk with it efficiently, I sort of needed a way to start keying in the notes on an empty screen, and then figure out which ticket it applied to, and attach it, or create a new one. It's been over a year since I played with it; 3.2 timeframe, I think, and I was wondering if anyone, BP or otherwise, has extended RT in any of those direction. I took a look at the website and the wiki... but I didn't find release notes, or a feature list in sufficient detail to make me not have to ask... and the screenshots are from 3.0. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth[EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth AssociatesThe Things I Think'87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
I am not quite sure what you mean by the first one. The what happened today is quite nice in the newer releases - you can take any search and save it on your home page - so as long as you can write a search (and pick which columns you want to display) you can get exactly what you want. The last one, sounds like you need notepad/emacs... On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: It's been a while since I've looked at RT. The last time I tried to get it some traction in the organization I work for, it foundered on 3 points: * It didn't understand customers. The company I work for is in the computer service and support business. I need a ticketing system to have an integrated 'customer file' that keeps track of all the information about a client, specifically including mapping incoming email addresses to clients and auto-carboning the appropriate client supervisory email. RT didn't do that when I looked at it last, and AT could be made to do it -- I thought -- but I was already selling 'up-hill' and the loose integration was something I couldn't overcome. * I needed a what happened today view for the boss -- showing all of today's ticket activity and status changes and total time billable -- and there wasn't one, quite, and I wan't smart enough to write it myself. * To work helpdesk with it efficiently, I sort of needed a way to start keying in the notes on an empty screen, and then figure out which ticket it applied to, and attach it, or create a new one. ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
RE: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
The first one is a common requirement. We have a database with all of our customer details in it (ok, well, we have a db that nearly has all the stuff in it and some of it is even correct). We need to link a ticket to a customer record, not to a person who happens to have been employed by that customer at the time the defect was opened. Ideally Customers (which really means Companies that Have our products) would have persons as sub records. The idea is that a customer may have opened 10 tickets, but their contact information and details about what database they're running, what product(s) they are licensed for, what servers are located where, what hardware they're running on, are all things that a person reviewing a ticket needs access to, but you don't want to have to enter it for each ticket. With RT you can whip up some kind of url link or something, but there really needs to be a nice clean interface to some place where the above data is kept. -- Kelly F. Hickel Senior Software Architect MQSoftware, Inc 952.345.8677 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:rt-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jon Daley Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 12:26 PM To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com Subject: Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion? I am not quite sure what you mean by the first one. The what happened today is quite nice in the newer releases - you can take any search and save it on your home page - so as long as you can write a search (and pick which columns you want to display) you can get exactly what you want. The last one, sounds like you need notepad/emacs... On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: It's been a while since I've looked at RT. The last time I tried to get it some traction in the organization I work for, it foundered on 3 points: * It didn't understand customers. The company I work for is in the computer service and support business. I need a ticketing system to have an integrated 'customer file' that keeps track of all the information about a client, specifically including mapping incoming email addresses to clients and auto-carboning the appropriate client supervisory email. RT didn't do that when I looked at it last, and AT could be made to do it -- I thought -- but I was already selling 'up-hill' and the loose integration was something I couldn't overcome. * I needed a what happened today view for the boss -- showing all of today's ticket activity and status changes and total time billable -- and there wasn't one, quite, and I wan't smart enough to write it myself. * To work helpdesk with it efficiently, I sort of needed a way to start keying in the notes on an empty screen, and then figure out which ticket it applied to, and attach it, or create a new one. ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 12:56:03PM -0500, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: It's been a while since I've looked at RT. The last time I tried to get it some traction in the organization I work for, it foundered on 3 points: * It didn't understand customers. The company I work for is in the computer service and support business. I need a ticketing system to have an integrated 'customer file' that keeps track of all the information about a client, specifically including mapping incoming email addresses to clients and auto-carboning the appropriate client supervisory email. RT didn't do that when I looked at it last, and AT could be made to do it -- I thought -- but I was already selling 'up-hill' and the loose integration was something I couldn't overcome. * I needed a what happened today view for the boss -- showing all of today's ticket activity and status changes and total time billable -- and there wasn't one, quite, and I wan't smart enough to write it myself. * To work helpdesk with it efficiently, I sort of needed a way to start keying in the notes on an empty screen, and then figure out which ticket it applied to, and attach it, or create a new one. Pay someone to do what you want. RT is fully customizable and though most people don't realize it, it's real power is in it's API. I'm sure BP/Jesse don't see the value in features that will be used by a tiny percentage of RT users, so they made RT a great base upon which your dream ticket system can be built. -Todd ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 01:18:06PM -0600, Kelly F. Hickel wrote: The first one is a common requirement. We have a database with all of our customer details in it (ok, well, we have a db that nearly has all the stuff in it and some of it is even correct). We need to link a ticket to a customer record, not to a person who happens to have been employed by that customer at the time the defect was opened. Ideally Customers (which really means Companies that Have our products) would have persons as sub records. The idea is that a customer may have opened 10 tickets, but their contact information and details about what database they're running, what product(s) they are licensed for, what servers are located where, what hardware they're running on, are all things that a person reviewing a ticket needs access to, but you don't want to have to enter it for each ticket. And, just as much, that you should be able to see all tickets open for this customer so that you can tell whether an incoming call applies to one of them, or is something new -- which speaks to my third point. Thank you, Kelly. Everyone else's reactions to customer file were beginning to make me think *I* was nutsabago. With RT you can whip up some kind of url link or something, but there really needs to be a nice clean interface to some place where the above data is kept. And, as noted, *some* of that can be done with, say, AT... but I don't think you can do all of it. I don't know, because I don't seem to be able to get a good look at 3.6 without installing the damned thing. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth[EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth AssociatesThe Things I Think'87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
Thank you, Kelly. Everyone else's reactions to customer file were beginning to make me think *I* was nutsabago. Nope. It's a perfectly reasonable feature request. We've specced it out for customers several times. To do it reasonably as part of RT requires that RT own your customer database, which it generally sounds like the folks who've been looking for this on the list aren't willing to have happen. We'd probably model it as RT groups, so that you could usefully model who's part of which customer. The big hard bits are probably setting RT up to not mail everyone from a customer on every issue ;) ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 03:46:15PM -0500, Jesse Vincent wrote: Thank you, Kelly. Everyone else's reactions to customer file were beginning to make me think *I* was nutsabago. Nope. It's a perfectly reasonable feature request. We've specced it out for customers several times. To do it reasonably as part of RT requires that RT own your customer database, which it generally sounds like the folks who've been looking for this on the list aren't willing to have happen. For my own part, I'd be perfectly willing to deal with that. I can't speak to *everyone* that's wanted it, but I don't know that that was ever stated that explicitly before -- though I sort of inferred it. We'd probably model it as RT groups, so that you could usefully model who's part of which customer. The big hard bits are probably setting RT up to not mail everyone from a customer on every issue ;) Yeah. I should assume that either none of the people for whom you've specced it took it, or that they all took it on a commercial-only license? On an only vaguely related topic: are there any current screenshots anywhere? Did that MIT manual I remember, perhaps, get updated to 3.6? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth[EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth AssociatesThe Things I Think'87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
I can't speak to *everyone* that's wanted it, but I don't know that that was ever stated that explicitly before -- though I sort of inferred it. We'd probably model it as RT groups, so that you could usefully model who's part of which customer. The big hard bits are probably setting RT up to not mail everyone from a customer on every issue ;) Yeah. I should assume that either none of the people for whom you've specced it took it, or that they all took it on a commercial-only license? We go to lengths to make sure everything we build is freely releasable. (Sometimes it doesn't happen, but we try hard.) This isn't soemthing we've built yet. ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
Re: [rt-users] RT State of the Onion?
On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 04:13:10PM -0500, Jesse Vincent wrote: I can't speak to *everyone* that's wanted it, but I don't know that that was ever stated that explicitly before -- though I sort of inferred it. We'd probably model it as RT groups, so that you could usefully model who's part of which customer. The big hard bits are probably setting RT up to not mail everyone from a customer on every issue ;) Yeah. I should assume that either none of the people for whom you've specced it took it, or that they all took it on a commercial-only license? We go to lengths to make sure everything we build is freely releasable. (Sometimes it doesn't happen, but we try hard.) This isn't something we've built yet. Got it. I so assumed, since we don't see it (:-), but the clarification is noce. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth[EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth AssociatesThe Things I Think'87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 ___ http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com Commercial support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
