Several new versions of RT are now available, so no matter what version you are on, there is likely something for you to read about as you plan upgrades. All of these releases contain a security update, so whatever version you are on, you should plan to update or patch. Information on the security fix is in the release notes. Our forum has download details for the following:
RT 4.2.17 is the last release for the 4.2 series, so RT 4.2 is now end of life. Installing this upgrade provides the security update, but there will be no more for the 4.2 series. As always, RT comes with upgrade scripts so you can plan to upgrade to the 4.4 series or 5.0.
RT 4.4.5 is the next maintenance release in the 4.4 series, although this one also has quite a few additional updates. You can review the release notes to see details on all of the updates, fixes, and new features.
RT 5.0.2 is also available and also has a huge list of updates. We'll note a few of the new features here.
RT at a Glance is Now a Dashboard
Long time RT users know you can customize your default RT home page, RT at a glance, by clicking the gear in the upper righthand corner. If you also use dashboards, you'll notice that the page to configure dashboard content looks a lot like the page to edit RT at a glance. But previously RT at a glance wasn't an actual dashboard, so you needed to modify it separately.
Starting in RT 5.0.2, the home page is now a dashboard. When you click on the gear to modify RT at a glance, you'll see a listing of all dashboards you have access to. By just clicking a button, you can set any dashboard to be your home page. And you can still have a custom home page just by creating a personal dashboard, and now you can create multiple and switch between them easily whenever you like.
Select a dashboard for your RT at a glance page
As part of the upgrade process, your existing RT at a glance pages will be converted to dashboards, so your users shouldn't notice any differences until you click the gearbox to modify your homepage.
User Searches in Dashboard Subscriptions
Dashboard subscriptions are a convenient way to automatically send a report to a set of recipients via email. These work great to provide updates on a set of tickets based on general criteria like Status or Created, but they didn't work well for searches like "My Tickets" because each person would get tickets based on the owner of the subscription. Now you can set a context for running the search, so these searches can be based on the user receiving the message.
Select the context for searches sent in a dashboard subscription
So now you can create subscriptions for tickets like "My Active Tickets" and it will be run for each recipient and they will see tickets that apply to them.
rt-crontool Improvements
For the users with automated processes, rt-crontool has learned some new tricks. For testing, it now has a dryrun mode that will check your condition, but not run the action. The reload-ticket option will reload the ticket from the database before running actions. If you have long running jobs, this can be helpful since ticket values can change while a job is running and sometimes the process can reference cached values.
If you have really intensive processes, rt-crontool now has a parallel mode to allow you to use more processing power to run your jobs more quickly. Specify max-processes to enable parallel processing and set max-tickets-per-process to define the batch size.
Time to Upgrade
If you are just starting to look into RT 5, you can see additional features in previous blog posts and a video. The full release notes for all of these releases are available with details on what’s changed and some additional information is posted on our forum. If you need a hand, Best Practical offers RT hosting, migration, upgrades, and professional services, just get in touch with us at sales@bestpractical.com.