[rt-users] Can RT replace Remedy?

[James Pifer]

On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 14:15 -0600, Kenneth Marshall wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 02:20:16PM -0500, James Pifer wrote:
> > We currently use Remedy and it's in need of an upgrade.If you know
> > anything about Remedy you know that can be extremely costly. I'm trying
> > to look at other Helpdesk products to see if something else could fit
> > instead of staying with Remedy.
> > 
> > Our helpdesk is somewhat customized, but we really don't take advantage
> > of what Remedy has to offer. We use it for tracking tickets/incidents. 
> > 
> > I have RT installed on a test server and configured for LDAP which is a
> > requirement.  
> > 
> > We currently create and route tickets based on a three level category
> > and the user's Location. My initial look at RT shows it as much simpler
> > than that. Basically writing an email and submitting. I assume someone
> > else is then responsible for routing the incoming tickets accordingly?
> > 
> > Other things we do:
> > 
> > 1) Escalations? We have tickets with four different severity levels,
> > like Critical, High, Medium, and Low. Depending on the severity level
> > AND which group the ticket is assigned to, if nothing happens on a
> > ticket within a certain amount of time, an escalation
> > notification(email) is sent. Each group has three levels for during and
> > after business hours, plus three more global higher levels. These levels
> > are set for each group. 
> > 
> Yes, this is configurable. Check the wiki for information.
> 
> > 2) Are there business hours and after hours specifications? Holiday
> > settings?
> 
> Yes, but it is a function of your customizations.
> 
> > 
> > 3) Any type of bulletin board or global notices functionality?
> > 
> Not so much.
> 
> > 4) Any type of Solutions functionality?
> > 
> Yes, RTFM (yes it is a productname). 
> 
> > There's certainly more, but that's a start. Can RT do any of these
> > things? If it was customized to do these things, how hard would future
> > upgrades be?
> > 
> The customizations are very localized and the upgrades are quite
> simple. I recommend some type of regression testing to confirm
> functionality, but I would recommend that for an upgrade to Remedy
> or any other product. We like RT a lot and chose it over Remedy.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ken

Thanks to everyone for their answers so far. Couple more questions.

What about routing the initial request based on criteria? Any way to do
that? We won't have a "dispatcher" that reassigns requests as they come
in, so this is a pretty important piece.

For example, currently in Remedy if a user from New York enters a
request with a category of Desktop/Hardware/Printer Problem it would get
routed to a specific group or queue, like "New York SE". Any way to do
something similar?

I'm would also interested in importing existing Remedy data. I realize
not all the data would be applicable, but I would want to import the old
data. I'm assuming I can do that somehow. Haven't searched for that
specifically yet.

Lastly, how scalable is RT? I guess I could find some blurbs on the site
somewhere about it as well, but just wondering how many requests others
have in their DBs. Can RT handle several hundred thousand requests in
the DB?

Thanks a lot. 

James