[rt-users] Connecting RT to IBM iSeries and/or MSSQL databases?

[Alex Hall]

Hello list,
Another day, another proposed RT modification for me to investigate. Our
company has six remote representatives who each have a few hundred
customers they visit in person. The customer support team works locally,
and is the group who actually enters all the tickets. We want reps to be
able to look at tickets related to their customers, but we want to do that
in a dashboard and not as a CC. Since each rep has hundreds of customers,
and since the customer base for a rep can change a lot, saved searches
aren't an ideal solution. It is also too error-prone and time-consuming to
have staff enter a customer rep ID for every ticket, as they already have
to enter an order number and other custom information. The good news is
that, in databases we already have, the order number can lead from the
order, to the customer, to the representative.

My thought is to have a cron job or a custom script that can take the order
number, look up the rep on our iSeries or MSSQL databases, and fill in a
custom field with the username of the relevant representative. I like the
idea of a script, so that users can see the change immediately, but a cron
job would probably be okay too. This would then let us use a saved search
that just finds tickets where the rep name equals the name of the user
whose dashboard it is, instead of having hundreds of 'or' statements trying
to find all possible customer numbers.

* Can Perl code in scripts talk to an external database as I've described?

* Can the RT cron tool do this job? If so, what might the workflow look
like? I haven't yet looked very deeply into this tool's abilities or syntax.

Thanks for any thoughts. Debian 8.6, RT4.2.8 (hopefully going to be 4.4
sometime soon), MySQL database for RT. No, the server doesn't yet have the
drivers for these databases, but my question is about integrating the
information into RT and not about how Debian talks to DB2 or Server.

-- 
Alex Hall
Automatic Distributors, IT department
ahall at autodist.com
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