[rt-users] New RT user

[Graham Mainwaring]

Hi, I just wanted to introduce myself as a new RT user. I am looking at using RT for tracking support requests within my company's IT department. I got through the install process alive, and it's a great product - there's a lot of functionality here. I have several questions that have come up:

1. I expect users to send messages to several people within their department, and CC: the RT queue's correspondence address. This is fine and I want to use the ParseNewMessageForTicketCCs feature. However, if another user does a 'Reply to All' to the original message (the one that first created the ticket), the RT queue address will be one of the recipients - but the original message does not have a recognizable subject header. So the reply will create a new, unwanted ticket. Any suggestions how to avoid this? I have vague ideas about setting a rule that no message with "Re:" as the start of the subject can create a new ticket, but that doesn't seem like a very good solution.

2. This system is going to be strictly for internal use. Customers will not be sending messages into the system or receiving messages out of the system. Customers will talk to our project management group, who are effectively the 'customers' from RT's point of view. So I never want to receive or generate an e-mail to an outside address. In order to avoid having external CC: recipients added as watchers, I have added the following rule to IsRTAddress:
  return(1) if (!($address =~ /etrials.com$/i));
This ought to prevent anything that isn't an etrials.com address from being added. However, I would be happier if I could find a more global way of enforcing this. I'm using Sendmail so I suppose I could work up a ruleset to deny all outbound mail going outside etrials.com, but I hate messing with Sendmail configuration. Is there a native RT way to do this?

3. On some of our queues we have a one-hour response SLA. All new tickets must be responded to within one hour. In order to make this more likely to happen, I want to send pager messages (e-mails to blahblah at skytel.com) whenever a new item in a queue first becomes 15 minutes old. I expect this will be an external script that gets run from cron, which I'm happy to write, but if there's a better way I'd love to know about it.

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

-Graham

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Graham Mainwaring, Director, Information Technologies
etrials - the e in clinical research - www.etrials.com
(919) 653-2042 voice   -   (919) 653-2180 fax
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