[rt-users] RT to go? Dependency graphs?

[Johan Ihren]

Hi,

I'm a long time Req user from a previous life (including implementing
my own multi-queue extensions and whatnots) but I have not used RT2
before. RT looks very nice (especially to someone with too much
exposure to Req internals, shudder).

However, I do have two questions for non-standard use that would be
extremely useful to me/us.

1. We are not a typical helpdesk. Instead we have a mix of internal
   issues, tech development, planning *and* customer promblems. And I
   want to funnel it all into RT.

   To make things worse, we are not always in one place. We travel, we
   lose Internet connectivity (typically in hotel rooms, airports,
   etc). At the same time such (disconnected) occasions are often the
   best to get things off your personal list of things to do.

   So what I would like to do is run RT on top of a replicated MySQL
   db with slave replicas in our laptops. I fully realize that I
   should restrict myself to read-only access to the replica, and any
   writes while disconnected had better be done via an email-updater
   (possibly enhanced-mailgate that I found in the contrib area).

   Is this idea a strong indication of someone either finally going
   bonkers or at least trying to fit a square nail into a triangular
   hole? Or would it be possible to make this work in a reasonable
   fashion? Anyone tried anything like that?

2. Many tickets in my environment have a tendency of forking new
   "sub-tickets". I.e. the original issue stalls on identified
   subproblems and the dependency fields seem great to express this.

   However, I have not found any functionality to get an overview of
   the resulting dependency graph. This is the type of functionality
   that is traditionally found in project management systems, and I
   agree that it is possibly a little bit out of the main stream
   trouble ticket business.

   But it would be incredibly useful for people like me that have very
   convoluted dependencies and a need both to keep track of this for
   oneself and to communicate the dependencies to others, preferably
   visually.

   It would be possible to implement this outside of RT, just working
   from the raw MySQL data, but I think it would be much nicer to have
   it within the RT framework. Has anyone seen any tools doing
   anything like this anywhere close to RT?

Regards,

Johan Ihrén
Autonomica