[rt-users] RT and project billing / CRM integration.

[Kenneth Crocker]

Daniel,


	The USER Table the is part of the RT DataBase has a lot of info that 
may correlate to your client info needs. Why not just use that? As to 
project billing rate/project info, you're right, a Custom Field would 
work well AND there are some extension available that will highlight 
them with colors, etc. along with the standard RT rights to make them 
read-only, etc. just a thought.


Kenn
LBNL

On 4/23/2008 7:59 PM, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> G'day.
> 
> A client of mine has been using a product to do task, project, client
> and billing management, AllocPSA.  For various reasons they are
> considering moving away from that to something more open and widely used
> and supported.
> 
> My recommendation, for task tracking, is Request Tracker: I have used it
> with success for years, and I am very comfortable that it can work well
> for managing job assignment, completion and history.
> 
> There are a couple of features that AllocPSA, being a "one stop shop"
> provides that don't come out of the box with RT and which I wondered
> about what experience / advice y'all had for integration:
> 
> 
> My client currently has per-project billing rates for their staff, so a
> single engineer might be working on one job at $50 per hour, another at
> $75 and so forth.
> 
> This is, currently, displayed on the tasks; my view is that this can be
> extracted in an overlay to the ticket display and added, as a read-only
> field, to one of the standard display boxes.
> 
> (Alternately, it can be set and maintained as a custom field on the
>  tickets, but I don't want them to be mutable and probably do want them
>  more highlighted than a standard CF would be.)
> 
> 
> They also have some CRM style features: the software maintains a
> hierarchy of [ client 1 -> * project 1 -> * task ] in the system, so
> that a single client can have multiple projects and a project multiple
> tasks.
> 
> It also provides contact management: a client has contact records, and
> so forth, which are then used once you get down to the project or task
> level.  
> 
> It would be good to keep this sort of integration and, from experience,
> the user management part of RT really isn't targeted at this space: it
> doesn't seem to provide a lot of "client" focused searching or display,
> for example.
> 
> The two approaches I can see to this are:
> 
> 1. Deploy some other CRM style application and encourage people to use
>    that, optionally using the command line tools to sync changes from
>    the external product into the RT client/user database.
> 
> 2. Modify RT to use an external data source for client/user information,
>    pulling that from the external tool directly.
> 
> The second is more desirable, to my mind, since it avoids duplicating
> the information -- but I am not sure what sort of workload it would be
> to incorporate that into RT?
> 
> 
> I welcome your advice,
>          Daniel
> 
> _______________________________________________
> http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users
> 
> Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com
> Commercial support: sales at bestpractical.com
> 
> 
> Discover RT's hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O'Reilly Media. 
> Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com
>