[rt-users] "staff" or "non-staff"?

[Pei Ku]

Hi all,

I have been playing with RT for a few days.  I have a 'best practice' kind of question:

After reading the available manuals, my impression is that the global user group "non-staff" (synonymous with 'privileged') is intended for external customers, and "staff" (synonymous with "non-privileged") is for all of the employees in my company.  Any user in a RT system belongs to either one of these groups (but not both).

One restriction is  that a "non-staff" group memeber cannot be assigned to any user-defined groups.  So if I have a RT user, who is really a staff member in the Development group, then I have to make that user a 'staff' group memeber in order to be able to add it to the user-defined group 'Developers'.

The main purpose of my looking at RT is for implementing a ticketing system for tracking internal requests.  That is, all users are company employees and all requests are for managing internal activities -- no plan to keep track of external customer requests using RT at this point (hmm... maybe I should think ahead...).

Anyway, we have a IT group, a Application Support group, a Development group, a QA group, etc, each group handles many requests daily.  We want to implement some sort of ticketing system to keep track of all those internal requests.

I noticed that when a "non-staff" user logs into the RT web interface, the user gets a 'bare-bone' interface which basically allows the user to see the tickets he filed, to file a new ticket, to change his preference.  That's about it.

A "staff" user's web interface has a lot more info.  Even if I configured the global rights and queue rights in a way so that each user can only see the tickets he filed, there are additional info in the web interface that I would like to hide from a staff (ie, a non-manager).  For example, the 'staff' web interface shows 'new' and 'open' counts of the queues that the user have ShowQueue/CreateTicket rights to.

While there is something to be said about having information more disclosed than otherwise within a company, I can see reasons for not making that kind of info available to all RT users in the company ("What's wrong with IT?  it has so many new and open tickets.  Are they being slackers or what?")

Then again there may be a way to control the information displayed in the web interace that i don't know yet.

A broader question: is there any "best practice" type of documentation?  That is, any documentations on 'typical' configurations for various common usage scenarios?

thanks in advance

Pei Ku
ATC