Announcing our Q4 Request Tracker Training: Los Angeles, California

Great news! Our Q4 RT training session will be held in Los Angeles, CA on November 4-5, 2014! We do have a limit on how many people we can effectively teach, so please register as soon as you can to make sure you get a seat. If you can't make LA, please feel free to suggest a future location by dropping us a line at training@bestpractical.com! Also, we still have a few spots in our upcoming Boston training! If you haven't registered yet but want to attend, now is the time!

This training will introduce you to the new features in RT 4.2 as part of a comprehensive overview of RT. Whether you're an old hand at RT or a recent convert, you'll have a good understanding of all of RT's features and functionality by the end of the session.

The first day starts off with a tour of RT's web interface and continues with a detailed exploration and explanation of RT's functionality, aimed at non-programmer RT administrators. We'll walk through setting up a common helpdesk configuration, from rights management, constructing workflows and notifications, and the basics of Lifecycles.

The second day of training picks up with server-side RT administration and dives into what you need to safely customize and extend RT. We'll cover upgrading and deploying RT, database tuning, advanced Lifecycle configurations, writing tools with RT's API, building an extension, and demonstrate how to extensibly alter the web UI and internal functions.

It goes without saying that you'll get the most out of training if you attend both days of the course, but we've designed the material so that you can step out after the first day with a dramatically improved understanding of how to use RT.

For both days, the cost is USD $1,495. A single day is USD $995. Each class includes training materials, a continental breakfast, and snacks (lunch is not provided).

If you'd like to pay with Visa, MasterCard or Discover, please visit Best Practical's online store. Unfortunately we are unable to accept American Express or PayPal. If you'd prefer to pay with a purchase order, please email us at training@bestpractical.com. Be sure to include: if you want to attend both days or a single day and the full names and email addresses of attendees.

Finally, please contact us at training@bestpractical.com for discounted pricing if you are from an academic institution or if you'd like to send more than 3 people.

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Join us for our Q2 Request Tracker training in Dallas!

Hello! Best Practical is pleased to announce our second Request Tracker training for 2014! We will be in Dallas, Texas on May 20-21. We do have a limit on how many people we can effectively teach, so please register as soon as you can to make sure you get a seat. If you can't make Dallas, we will have upcoming sessions later this year in Boston, MA and Los Angeles, CA. Please let us know if you have a suggestion for a future location by dropping us a line at training@bestpractical.com!

This training will introduce you to the new features in RT 4.2 as part of a comprehensive overview of RT. Whether you're an old hand at RT or a recent convert, you'll have a good understanding of all of RT's features and functionality by the end of the session.

The first day starts off with a tour of RT's web interface and continues with a detailed exploration and explanation of RT's functionality, aimed at non-programmer RT administrators. We'll walk through setting up a common helpdesk configuration, from rights management, constructing workflows and notifications, and the basics of Lifecycles.

The second day of training picks up with server-side RT administration and dives into what you need to safely customize and extend RT. We'll cover upgrading and deploying RT, database tuning, advanced Lifecycle configurations, writing tools with RT's API, building an extension, and demonstrate how to extensibly alter the web UI and internal functions.

It goes without saying that you'll get the most out of training if you attend both days of the course, but we've designed the material so that you can step out after the first day with a dramatically improved understanding of how to use RT.

For both days, the cost is USD $1,495. A single day is USD $995. Each class includes training materials, a continental breakfast, and snacks (lunch is not provided).

If you'd like to pay with Visa, MasterCard or Discover, please visit Best Practical's online store. Unfortunately we are unable to accept American Express or PayPal. If you'd prefer to pay with a purchase order, please email us at training@bestpractical.com. Be sure to include:

  • If you want to attend both days or a single day
  • Full names and email addresses of attendees

Please contact us at training@bestpractical.com for discounted pricing if you are from an academic institution or if you'd like to send more than 3 people.

Thanks for your support of Request Tracker!

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Don't miss Best Practical's first Request Tracker training of 2014 in London!

Just a reminder that Best Practical's first RT training is taking place on March 19-20 in London, UK. This will likely be our only non-US public session this year. This training will introduce you to the new features in RT 4.2 as part of a comprehensive overview of RT. Whether you've been using Request Tracker for years or are a recent convert, you'll have a good understanding of all of RT's features and functionality by the end of the session.

For both days, it is USD $1,495 for one person. This includes training materials, continental style breakfast, and snacks. You can register by heading over to our shop to pay via credit card (Amex not accepted, unfortunately.) You can also drop us a note at training@bestpractical.com if you'd rather we send an invoice. Finally, if you're from an academic institution, or would like to send more than 3 people, let us know so we can give you a bit of a discount. We're always happy to answer any questions, so please don't be shy.

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What's New in 4.2: Scrips Configuration

In RT 4.2 we've updated the scrips configuration pages and the changes will save RT admins a bunch of time when managing scrips. Specifically, you can now apply scrips globally or to selected queues on one simple configuration page.

Disabling a Scrip on Just One Queue

RT's global scrips work for most notifications, often with just some updates to the global templates. If you want different templates for specific queues, you can create a queue-specific template with the same name as the global template and the global scrip will use that template for notifications on that queue.

But what if you want to disable a notification for just one queue and leave it on for all the others? In previous versions of RT, this meant disabling the global scrip, then creating a new scrip in each queue that still needed it. In RT 4.2, this is now much easier.

For example, let's assume we have an Office queue for internal office requests and everyone agrees we don't need to see the 'On Resolve' notification when the new staples have come in. First we go to Admin > Global > Scrips and click on the "On Resolve Notify Requestors" scrip.

On the Basics page you'll notice a new Applies to label showing "Global" and a check box to enable and disable the scrip. You could previously disable scrips in a dropdown menu in the same location, but the other items in the dropdown were the scrip stages, so users often didn't know the Disabled option was in there.

Scrip Basics

The current options are fine for our case, so we click on the Applies to link in the submenu. The resulting page says "Applies to all objects", meaning the scrip is currently global. Below that is a checkbox you can check to remove the scrip from all objects. We check that and click Submit to see the new Modify page.

The new page displays all of our queues with checkboxes so we can check all queues but the Office queue. You can also change the scrip stage (normal or batch) or change the template at this point.

Apply Scrip

After we submit, we see the scrip has been applied to the selected queues.

Scrip Applied

You can now easily move scrips between queues or make it global again.

Scrip Order

From the scrip listing pages, at both the global and queue level, you can now also manage the order in which scrips run. For default configurations, this isn't an issue for most notifications, but as you add more scrips you sometimes want to guarantee that one scrip will run before another for the same sort of update (comment, correspond, etc.). To change the order, just click the Up and Down links on the right.

Manage Scrip Order

You'll also notice we now separate regular scrips and batch scrips to make the running order more clear. Batch scrips run at the end of a transaction after all other scrips have run.

Scrips that are not applied appear at the bottom of the screen and you can easily select and apply them either globally, if you're on the global modify page, or on the current queue if you're on a queue-specific scrip page.

Summary

These updates should make it much easier to reuse scrips across a portion of the queues in your system and selectively apply them. The new scrip display and ordering features should also make it easier to view and control when they run.

If you'd like to learn about more new features in 4.2, take a look at the new feature overview.

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What's New in 4.2: Grouping Custom Fields

In RT 4.2 we've added some new configuration options that allow you to cleanly organize your custom fields, improving the look of pages and making it easier to view and update custom field data.

Ticket Custom Field Grouping

The new configuration goes in your RT_SiteConfig.pm file, as usual, and can be used for ticket and user custom fields. A simple configuration to group together a few ticket custom fields on a support queue might look like this:

Set(%CustomFieldGroupings, 'RT::Ticket' => [ 'Product Details' => ['Products', 'Current Version', 'Database'], 'Basics' => ['SLA'], ], );

The first entry under RT::Ticket will create a new "Product Details" grouping and include the three custom fields listed. You can add more entries and custom fields to set up as many new groups as you need. If you have additional custom fields not assigned to a group, they will appear in the standard Custom Fields portlet as usual.

The second entry shows another nice feature, which is the ability to include custom fields in existing ticket groups. You can't remove or reorder core RT fields in these groups, but you can add custom fields to them. The standard RT groups are:

For Tickets: Basics, Dates, Links, People For Users: Identity, Access control, Location, Phones

With the configuration above, the ticket display page will now look like this:

Grouped Ticket Custom Fields

The ticket groupings appear on the ticket create, display, and update pages. The ordering of the custom fields in each group is still controlled by the queue configuration. You can find this by going to Admin > Queues, clicking on a queue, then selecting Custom Fields > Tickets in the submenu. Just click Up/Down on the configuration page to change the ordering.

The custom field groupings also apply to RT's self service pages. You might want your customers to set some custom fields to help with support requests, so you can give them permission to see and edit selected custom fields even though they are unprivileged users. They can then fill out some fields as part of their support request.

Self Service Ticket Custom Fields

User Custom Field Grouping

Adding a grouping for some user custom fields might have a configuration like this:

'RT::User' => [ 'Focus Areas' => ['Product Areas', 'Primary Roles'], 'Location' => ['Base Office'], ],

Which adds the following to the user page:

Grouped User Custom Fields

You can find details on the new custom field grouping features in the RT_Config documentation. We think you'll find this a nice way to bring some order to you custom fields.

If you missed some earlier posts, you can find more new RT 4.2 features in the new feature overview.

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What's New in 4.2: User Summary Page

In the user administration section, you'll find a new User Summary page in RT 4.2. This new page pulls together current information related to a given user in one convenient place, making it a natural destination for links from usernames throughout the RT interface.

User Summary Page

To get to the new User Summary page, you'll find links in all of the normal places where a username is display. This includes ticket listings that show requestor or owner, ticket histories, and the People section on tickets. There is also a User Summary link in the "More about the requestors" section on the ticket display page. The ticket listings on the User Summary page itself have links as well, making it easy to jump to another owner or requestor.

As you can see above, the top of the page contains a search for finding other users in the system. Like other user fields, it provides auto-completion to make it easier to track down the right user by name, email address, or real name.

The page then has a short summary identifying the user, followed by a Quick ticket area that allows you to easily create a new ticket on behalf of the user. This is convenient when a request comes in on your cell phone or just a "drive-by" office request, or when a new request or task springs from an existing ticket and the user you're looking at should be the requestor.

The bottom of the screen displays a summary of active and inactive tickets similar to the summary in "More about the requestors," but with more data. This section displays tickets where the user has some sort of watcher relationship. If you're looking at the page for a staff member, you'll see active and inactive tickets where they are the owner. For customers, you'll see tickets where they are the requestor.

Finally, when you need to update some user information, the user Edit and Membership links are available in the submenu at the top.

If you missed some earlier posts, you can find more new RT 4.2 features in the new feature overview.

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What's New in 4.2: New Charting Features

RT 4.2 adds the ability to chart several different aspects of ticket data at the same time with new grouping options. You can also chart various calculated values to get more from your time data.

As with earlier RT charts, the first step is to build a query to search for the tickets you want to chart. Your search might focus on a particular queue and you might only want to see tickets in a selected time period. Once you have your search and click on the Chart link from the submenu on the search results, you'll see new Group by and Calculate options below the initial default chart.

The Group by section allows you to define up to three levels of grouping to chart your ticket data. For example, you might want to see the owners of all of the tickets in your selected queue and how many tickets each owner has. To view that, you just select Owner in the first "Group tickets by" section. Depending on the view you want, you can have the owner label display using name, email address, real name, or some other user field.

As you're looking at that chart, you might wonder how many of those tickets are in each status. Are they mostly resolved, or are people juggling a bunch of open tickets? To see the status information, you can select Status from the next dropdown under "and then." That would give you a chart and table that looks something like this:

Owner and Status Chart

RT tickets have many date and time fields, some automatically set for you by RT like Created and Resolved, and some optionally set by you like Time Estimated and Time Worked. These fields can be helpful in determining where people are spending their time and how well tickets are moving. The new Calculate section on the Charts page makes it very easy to generate charts and tables from this data.

For example, you might want to see how long tickets are in the new status before someone has time to take and open them. You can get this value by looking at the difference between Created (when RT initially created the ticket based on a request) and Started (when the ticket was opened). On the Charts page, you can set the Group by section to only Queue. In the Calculate section you can select Created-Started, leaving the second dropdown set to the Summary option. When you click Update Chart you get a chart and table showing you the Minimum, Average, Maximum, and Total time tickets spent in the new status for the selected queue.

Created-Started Summary Chart

Like the Group by section, you can now also select multiple criteria in the Calculate section to display at once. So after seeing the time spent in new, you might also want to see how long tickets were active before being resolved. In the Calculate section you can use the second section below "and then" and select Started-Resolved and leave the initial Summary option. Clicking Update Chart you now have all the same values for the time the ticket was active.

While all of that information is interesting, you might decide the chart and table are a bit busy with all of those values. If you look in the second dropdown in the Calculate section, you'll see you can select each calculated value individually. You might want just Average for both values to get a general idea how long things are taking.

Pulling it all together, you can select Queue and Owner from the Group by section, and a combination of times and ticket count to generate a graph and table like the one below.

Queue, Owner, and Times Chart

Adding the count mixes the units a bit and you can see that the chart units are set by the first calculate criteria (time in this case). But adding the count is a good way to give perspective to the averages. In this case it shows that while holmes' averages look good, he only worked on 1 ticket.

You'll find there a many new ways to mix and display your data to get more information from your ticket system. As always is the case, the better you follow your processes (taking, opening, resolving tickets) and track data (if you use the other time fields), the more useful the data will be. And once you create the charts you want, you can save them and create a convenient dashboard so you can easily check them.

You can read more about charts in the new charts section in the RT documentation. If you missed some earlier posts on the new features in RT 4.2, you can find more in the new feature overview.

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What's New in 4.2: Ticket Display Improvements

The ticket display page is the main location for viewing and working on tickets, so we've put some work into making it more interactive. Here are some of the things we added.

More about the requestors

The "More about the requestors" portlet provides a convenient summary of activity for the current requestors. It's displayed by default for Unprivileged users and you can activate it for Privileged users with the $ShowMoreAboutPrivilegedUsers option.

More about the requestors

We've updated the ticket list to look more like typical RT ticket lists, making it easier to view. You can still click on the ticket id or subject to go to a ticket, and now the ticket owner's username is also a link which takes you to the new user summary page. We'll cover the user summary page in another post, but it's essentially a summary of information for the selected user.

To access additional requestor information, the upper righthand corner also has a new link to the user summary page for the current requestor. This replaces the "Modify this user" link since all user actions, including editing user details, are available from the user summary page.

Inline Images

Inline images from email previously were displayed at the bottom of the email in the history. At times this could be awkward if the text of the email referred to the inlined image or there were several images, so we now display images inline just as they were in the incoming email.

Inline Images

Default to HTML Email

The $PreferRichText option allows you to tell RT to show HTML or rich text messages in preference to the plain-text versions. In the past this option was defaulted off, but it's now on by default. It made sense to update this option given the number of email clients sending HTML email. In addition to making the history look a little nicer, it will also help resolve issues some users had with not seeing email sent with only an HTML version.

More Linked Items

The ticket history contains a lot of information, some of it referencing other RT tickets, users, or articles. As you can see in the screenshot above (look for the hand hovering over the ticket link), we've made many of these items live links now so you can easily access them right from the ticket history. As you mouse over transactions in the ticket history, you'll see that users, tickets (when referenced in history for adding a link, for example), and articles are all links now.

Floating Menu

As you scroll down through the ticket history, you'll notice the ticket submenu now floats with you so it's always available. This makes it much easier to jump to an update page (e.g., People, Dates) or access a ticket action from the Actions menu. This is especially useful if you have customized your lifecycles to include your most common status changes as actions or quick actions.

Ticket Autocomplete

Finally, we've added autocompletion for ticket ids on the Links page to make it much easier to find and link to the correct ticket. Like other autocomplete fields in RT, just start typing a ticket id or subject and you'll get a list of tickets that match. Select the one you want to link, and the field is populated with the ticket id.

Ticket Autocomplete

You'll also notice that on the Links page we've move Merge into a separate area. Merging is different from the other link relationships and having it in the same section as the others could be confusing for users.

We think these changes add up to some real efficiencies on the ticket display page. We hope you agree.

Read the RT 4.2 new feature overview for information on more new features.

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What's New in 4.2: Menu Changes

We've moved some menus around in RT 4.2 to make things more intuitive and usable. We know many of you have been working with RT for years and willwonder where some things have gone, so we put together this summary of the changes to help you out.

RT 4.2 Menus

Home Menu (Dashboards)

In RT 4.2, users have more control over the dashboards that show up in the Home menu. In the Home menu itself, you'll see a new "Update This Menu" option that allows you to do just that. The option is also available under Logged in as > Settings > "Dashboards in menu." On the new Customize dashboards page, you can add and remove dashboards from the Home menu and set the order just the way you want. Users will need rights for some of these features, like "Create personal dashboards" (CreateOwnDashboard) and "View personal dashboards" (ViewOwnDashboard).

If you're the RT admin, you can set default dashboards as well. Go to Admin > Global > "Dashboards in menu" and configure the dashboards just as with personal dashboards, but since these are global, they will become the default for everyone. If you're setting it up for the first time, remember to grant the appropriate rights, at least "View system dashboards" (SeeDashboard) and possibly "View saved searches" (ShowSavedSearches) if the dashboard uses a saved search.

Search Menu

Searching for information is a very common action in RT and depending on your roles in RT you may want to search for things other than just tickets. To acknowledge this we've replaced the "Tickets" menu with a more general "Search" menu. We think "Search" is more intuitive and better describes where the menu leads. In addition to Tickets, which is the first and primary item, you'll now see entries for easily accessing search for Articles and Users.

Articles

The Articles menu, previously in Tools, has been moved up to the top-level menu. This new menu gives you easy access to the Articles overview page, Topics, the create page, and Search.

Tools

Previously, Tools was something of an overflowing toolbox. It contained items like Articles, tools for RT users, plus tools for administrators. As mentioned in other sections, several items have been moved and promoted to the top-level menu. What remains are user-focused tools like the My Day page and Approvals.

The Offline tool also used to be in the Tools menu. The Offline tools itself has been removed in RT 4.2 due to some long-running deficiencies.

Admin

All of the menu items for administering RT, previously in the Configuration menu under Tools, are now in their own Admin menu.

Conclusion

We hope you like the changes. Please let us know what you think. As with previous versions of RT, many menus are still controlled with rights, allowing you to hide them as needed. For example, users need the "Show Articles menu" right (ShowArticlesMenu) to see Articles. Also remember that, like many parts of RT, the menus can be cleanly modified via Callbacks, so you can make additional changes and customizations to suit your needs.

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What's New in 4.2: Overview

With the upcoming release of RT 4.2, we're excited to have users get their hands on the new features we've been using internally for a few months. To highlight these features and give you some background, we'll be publishing blog posts on key features as we've done in the past.

As always, RT 4.2 will come with a full set of upgrade scripts and additional upgrade information (which you can preview here), so we hope you'll be able to upgrade soon and take advantage of the new features. If you need help upgrading from any version of RT, we also offer a range of upgrade and support services. Just send email to contact@bestpractical.com.

New RT 4.2 Features

The first thing you're likely to notice is our new theme "rudder". It's cleaner and more modern looking, and we think you'll like it. This is a shot of the home page to give you a taste of what it looks like.

RT 4.2 rudder theme

The aileron theme is still available as a personal or site-wide setting.

You'll also notice that we've made some changes to the menus.

RT 4.2 Menus

You can find a description of the changes along with our reasoning in the menus blog post.

In addition to the new theme and menu changes, RT 4.2 brings a host of other new features:

We'll provide details on these and more over the next few weeks. After the release, we'll publish all of the RT 4.2 documentation in the documentation section on the Best Practical site.

End of Life Products

As previously announced, Best Practical maintains and supports two major releases of RT at a time. As such, the release of RT 4.2 will mean RT 3.8 and other related products will be scheduled for end of life. We'll provide details on products, versions, and end of life dates in an upcoming post.

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