[rt-users] some basic "getting started" questions

[Kelly F. Hickel]

Hi,
	I was going to send each of these as a separate email so people
could ignore the ones they didn't have input on, but I decided that it
would be better to have people be able to ignore the whole thread,
rather than annoying everyone with a bunch of posts.

OK, I have RT 3.0.6 up and running with RTFM, and I've been pushing our
support folks to look at it, and we're getting close to having a plan to
put it in place.  We've run into some things that have been requested
that I think are outside the scope of RT, and some that aren't.  I
wanted to get some feedback on how other people are accomplishing some
of these things:

1) "integration with Bugzilla".  I've seen on the list where people seem
to think that RT and Bugzilla work well together, I'd like to get some
more details on exactly how people are using these products with each
other. Is it all manual (put a link in an RT ticket to a BZ), or is
there something deeper?


2) I'd like to have a web form set up for customers to open tickets,
that would require certain information be entered up front, and have
that information be pulled out by the incoming mail gateway (or the
command line tool) and used to populate some Custom Fields.  Any tips on
this? I'm not much of an HTML form person....


3) Some of our customer's want to be able to see their own tickets.  The
obvious way to do this seems to be to run RT in the DMZ and give
customers access to their own (and only their own) tickets.  To start,
I'm a bit leery of running out support ticket setup in the DMZ, but
let's say that's OK.  I don't see an obvious way to limit access of a
user to only tickets for which they are the requestor (maybe I'm missing
it), and to make sure they can't see comments, only replies.

4) Same sort of question as #3, but for RTFM articles.  I think it's a
little simpler here, I could just have a public (https) RTFM server, and
presumably I can push the RTFM database every week or so from the
internal RTFM out to the "public" one.  Any obvious problems with this?

5) This one is more about customer contact information.  It breaks down
into a few related questions:
   A)  When I'm viewing a ticket, if I want to see information about the
requestor (company name etc), it seems I have to go search for the user.
Shouldn't there be a link that I can click on to see their info?  Better
yet, shouldn't I be able to pick what I want to see right on the basic
view (I dimly remember that I may be able to change what shows up by
editing the presentation template, but I'm not sure).

   B) Our support folks want a way to store various information about a
customer's organization (how many copies of the product are deployed,
what versions etc), and be able to review that with a customer when
they're on the phone, and not have to type it in for each ticket.  This
seems to be outside the realm of RT, but it would be great if I'm wrong.

6) Support wants different status values than what are in the product,
is the functioning of the product tied to any of those values?  Should I
change the current value set, or create a custom field for our values?

Well, I think that's it for now, but I'm sure I'll have more
questions......
 

Kelly F. Hickel
Senior Software Architect
MQSoftware, Inc
952.345.8677
kfh at mqsoftware.com