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

Tue Oct 14 11:30:26 PDT 2008

Yeah, if you have any perl experience, of have someone on staff who 
does, RT might be what you want.

It's dependency chain can be cumbersome to deal with when installing, 
but it's not too bad if you install guides at their wiki.

There's a few different versions, RT (Request Tracker), RTFM (that's 
Request Tracker for FAQ Management, not what you thought. ;), and RTIR 
(RT for incident Response), RTFM and RTIR being variants on RT.  See 
http://bestpractical.com/products.html for more info.

Time tracking, due dates, tickets dependencies and relationships and 
much more are supported "out of the box".

RT is extremely customizable in that all actions performed by the system 
are handled by "scrips", a type of pseudo perl that operates on RT 
objects (in the sense of a programming object).  Thus, extremely 
advanced modifications can be made without changing the source code 
(which is also very easy).  for example, the auto response on ticket 
creation isn't part of the system, but handled through a scrip that 
comes already configured.  Want to turn it off, change the text, or make 
it give a different text based on the submitter, queue, or ticket 
content?  Easy.  Want to check every transaction (comment, reply, etc.) 
on a ticket for certain content or a certain user and mail watchers of 
the ticket?  Also easy.  Throw in the ability to define custom fields to 
hold specific information about tickets, users, transactions, etc. and 
it can do just about whatever you want.  I haven't put much thought into 
inventory management through it, but it would have to be integrated 
through custom fields, as it's not in the base system.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm sure RT could fit your needs fairly 
well, but getting it to that point will take a fair bit of sweat equity. 
  The cost is good through (free!).

P.S. It occurs to be this would make a good SoCoSA talk.  If there's 
still a location to do it and a willing audience, I'd be willing to give it.

Trevor Benson wrote:
> RT by Best Practical is what we use.  Very customizable, we even integrated
> it directly to our billing systems so we can track employee time and build
> invoices.
> 
> Trevor Benson
> A1 Networks
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: discuss-bounces at socosa.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at socosa.org] On
>> Behalf Of Tim Preston
>> Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 8:08 PM
>> To: General NBLUG chatter about anything Linux, answers to questions,
>> etc.
>> Cc: SoCoSA general discussion list
>> Subject: Re: [SoCoSA/discuss] [NBLUG/talk] Help with locating good
>> software
>>
>> Might I suggest the product Web+center
>> http://www.inet-sciences.com/downloads.html ?
>>
>> It's a good basic platform and can be customized. That may preclude
>> further updates as it will corrupt the database. However, it covers all
>> the basics and is a good base.
>>
>> Try the demo. It may grow on you.
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> Eric Landerville wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> I'm trying to find some good help desk / trouble ticket software.  My
>>> team has increased from 2 people to 8 and it's no longer feasible to
>>> just shout "hey I'm going to take care of ..."  We need something
>>> centralized and web based.  What I am looking for is something that
>> does
>>> at least the following:
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> As I took all of Mark Street's Linux classes I have no fear of the
>>> command line to configure.  It would also be great if the software
>> was
>>> free, but we do have a small budget for this.
>>>
>>> Any help someone can give would be greatly appreciated,
>>>
>>> Eric
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> talk mailing list
>>> talk at nblug.org
>>> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>>
>>>
>>>
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-- 

-Kevan Benson
-A-1 Networks