RT Essentials: Managing Your Team and Projects with Request Tracker

by Jesse Vincent, Robert Spier, Dave Rolsky, Darren Chamberlain, Richard Foley

Overview

In a typical organization, there's always plenty that to do such as: pay vendors, invoice customers, answer customer inquiries, and fix bugs in hardware or software. You need to know who wants what and keep track of what is left to do.

This is where a ticketing system comes in. A ticketing system allows you to check the status of various tasks: when they were requested, who requested them and why, when they were completed, and more. RT is a high-level, open source ticketing system efficiently enabling a group of people to manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

RT Essentials, co-written by one of the RT's original core developers, Jesse Vincent, starts off with a quick background lesson about ticketing systems and then shows you how to install and configure RT. This comprehensive guide explains how to perform day-to-day tasks to turn your RT server into a highly useful tracking tool. One way it does this is by examining how a company could use RT to manage its internal processes. Advanced chapters focus on developing add-on tools and utilities using Perl and Mason. There's also chapter filled with suggested uses for RT inside your organization.

No matter what kind of data your organization tracks--from sales inquiries to security incidents or anything in between--RT Essentials helps you use RT to provide order when you need it most.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596550707
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/18/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	218
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jesse Vincent is the author of RT and the founder of Best Practical Solutions, LLC, a company dedicated to open source tools to help people and organizations keep track of what needs doing, when it gets done, and who does it. Before founding Best Practical, Jesse worked as the systems lead for a now-defunct dotcom and a software designer at Microsoft.

Robert Spier is a software engineer who has been working with RT for almost 7 years. When not managing other engineers at his day job, he moonlights as Best Practical's lead trainer, and maintains the perl.org infrastructure.

Dave Rolsky is a programmer, author, and activist with a background in music composition, and an obsession with Hong Kong films and the works of author Gene Wolfe. He has been actively developing Free Software (Perl) for several years and is a member of the Mason core development team.

Darren Chamberlain is system adminisitrator and recovering programmer living and working in the Boston area.

Richard Foley is a Munich based Perl and Oracle developer who spends most of his time programming, when he could be spending quality time with his family, walking or skiing in the nearby Alps. He has a technical illustration background, and has developed applications for the Aerospace, Internet and Banking industries. Responsible for maintaining the perlbug database, from 1997 to 2001, he was co-organiser of
YAPC::Europe::2002 and is a member of the YAPC::Europe committee, the group responsible for organizing Perl conferences in Europe.

Table of Contents

Preface; Audience; Assumptions This Book Makes; What’s Inside; Conventions; Using Code Examples; We’d Like to Hear from You; Safari® Books Online; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: What Is Ticketing?; 1.1 Why “Ticket”?; 1.2 A Dissected Ticketing System; 1.3 Uses for a Ticketing System; 1.4 Features of a Ticketing System; 1.5 Ticketing Helps Everybody; 1.6 Getting Started; 1.7 Why RT?; Chapter 2: Installation; 2.1 Requirements; 2.2 Starting the Installation; 2.3 Site Configuration; 2.4 Configuring Your Web Server; 2.5 Serving RT Behind a Proxy Webserver; 2.6 Configuring Outbound Email; 2.7 Configuring Inbound Email; 2.8 Installation Problems; 2.9 Installation Complete; Chapter 3: Getting Started; 3.1 Logging in to RT; 3.2 Creating a New Ticket; 3.3 Ticket Display Page; 3.4 Replying to (and Commenting on) a Ticket; 3.5 Escalating a Ticket; 3.6 Assigning a Ticket; 3.7 Resolving a Ticket; 3.8 Merging Duplicate Tickets; 3.9 Associating Related Tickets; 3.10 Searching for Tickets; 3.11 Updating Many Tickets at Once; 3.12 Email Interface; Chapter 4: Command-Line Interface; 4.1 Running the CLI; 4.2 Creating a Ticket; 4.3 Finding a Ticket; 4.4 Replying to a Ticket; 4.5 Editing a Ticket; 4.6 Searching for Tickets; 4.7 Command-Line Help; 4.8 The Shell; 4.9 Scripting RT; Chapter 5: Administrative Tasks; 5.1 Creating and Updating Users; 5.2 Groups; 5.3 Queues; 5.4 Custom Fields; 5.5 Day-to-Day Management; 5.6 Backing Up RT; 5.7 Restoring RT; Chapter 6: Scrips; 6.1 How Scrips Work; 6.2 Gritty Details; 6.3 Examples; Chapter 7: Example Configurations; 7.1 Network and Server Operations; 7.2 Helpdesk; 7.3 Software Engineering; 7.4 Customer Service; 7.5 Emergency Support; 7.6 Sales Inquiries; 7.7 Human Resources; 7.8 Finance; 7.9 The Paperless Office; 7.10 Personal To-Do Lists; 7.11 Conclusion; Chapter 8: Architecture; 8.1 Quick Overview; 8.2 Filesystem Layout; 8.3 Unicode; 8.4 Logical and Object Model; Chapter 9: API; 9.1 How It Works; 9.2 RT Codebase; 9.3 Database Considerations; Chapter 10: Development Environments; 10.1 DevelMode; 10.2 Modifying RT’s Codebase; 10.3 Access Control; 10.4 Profiling; 10.5 Debugging; 10.6 RT’s Test Infrastructure; 10.7 Internationalization; 10.8 RT Community; 10.9 Packaging and Releasing an RT Extension; Glossary; Ticket; Subject; Status; Body; Transaction; Attachment; Watchers; History; Priority; Relationships; Dates; Custom Fields; Queue; Scrip; Conditions; Templates; Users; Groups; Principals; ACL; ACE; Command-Line Action Reference; Configuration; Environment Variables; Configuration Files; Required Perl Module Dependencies; Configuration File Reference; Base Configuration; Database Configuration; Incoming Mail Gateway Configuration; Outgoing Mail Configuration; Logging; Web Interface Configuration; RT UTF-8 Settings; RT Date Handling Options (for Time::ParseDate); Miscellaneous RT Settings;