[rt-users] Initiating tickets and entering tickets via forward

[Jonathan Manton]

There are two things my users would like to do with RT.  I have  
figured *a* way to make these things happen (with a lot of custom  
code), but am hoping there is something easier.

We use RT to manage distance education.  The people asking for support  
are students, the people monitoring the queues and resolving tickets  
are instructors.  The students never use RT directly - all of their  
interaction is via email.  Instructors use a mix of email and the RT  
web interface to interact with tickets.

1)  Sometimes the students send an email directly to their instructor,  
rather than sending the email to RT first.  We want those emails going  
through RT.  Right now, the instructors have to go and create a  
ticket, copy/paste the email, then change the requester in the RT  
interface.  THEN, they have to reply to the ticket, to let the student  
know that it is now in RT, and get a "proper" ticket that the student  
can then reply to (with ticket number in subject, RT as the reply- 
to).  They would like to be able to forward the email to RT, and have  
the ticket be created with the original sender as the requester, them  
as the owner, and have a notification email sent to the student.  I  
know I *can* write custom code for this - the question is, is there an  
easier way (or has someone already done it)?

2)  Instructors sometimes need to initiate a ticket with a student, as  
if the student was the requester (so that replies will go into RT,  
rather than to the instructor's private email address).  Again, right  
now they have to do this more-or-less manually by creating the ticket,  
changing requester, then reply to the ticket with their original  
information they wanted to convey.  Is there a straightforward way to  
change the create function to do these steps automatically?  One way I  
*could* do this is pre-populate a custom value, and then handle all  
this in a scrip during create ticket.  But it seems messy to create a  
custom value that is only used once, essentially as an indicator.