2010 RT Training Sessions

Best Practical Solutions provides unparalleled instruction in how to get the most out of RT. We've been teaching users and administrators how to get the most out of RT since 2001. Since 2003, we've offered intensive one-day RT administrator training sessions to the general public.

2010 will bring three different training sessions for RT, with training split across two days. 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, workflows and configurability. We'll touch on basic administration, but concentrate largely on helping you and your team get the most out of your RT instance.

The second day of training picks up with basic RT administration and covers everything from point-and-click configuration to installation of RT, development best practices and database tuning.

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 or show up on the second day and get quickly up to speed on how to make RT do your bidding.

A spot at either day costs $995 USD for US Training / 695 EUR for European Training. You can save 25% if you attend both days of training. That's just $1495 USD / 1042.50 EUR!

If you reserve before January 20th for the San Francisco session, February 15th for the Dublin session, or September 20th for the Washington DC session, you can save an additional 20% by mentioning the discount code BLOG10. If you buy online, we'll automatically apply the discount.

Each class includes a morning snack, coffee/tea, and an afternoon snack, as well as all training materials.

Day 1 - RT User Training

This intensive day-long tutorial about RT starts with basic day-to-day use and continues with detailed training about advanced RT features including saved searches, dashboards, data analysis and options for automating your workflow.

This session will cover:

* The purpose and general use of RT
* New features in RT 3.8
* Saved Searches and customizing searches
* RT's Dashboards feature
* Customizing RT's workflow to match your own
* Automating common procedures
* How to make simple custom reports based on RT's data
* A short intro to RTFM, the RT FAQ Manager
* General Q&A Session

Day 2 - RT Administration and Development

This intensive day-long session aimed at RT administrators and developers covers everything from installation to backups, interface and backend customizations. You'll learn how to customize RT to meet your organization's unique needs and how to make sure that RT stays fast, reliable and flexible.

This session will cover:

* New features in RT 3.8 RT's system architecture
* A guided tour of the RT source code
* Extension mechanisms you can use to customize RT
* RT Installation, including the basics of Configuration
* Examples of how to optimize RT for your organization
* How to tie RT into your existing authentication infrastructure
* Building your own tools that talk to the RT backend
* Customizing RT's workflow to match your own
* Automating common procedures
* How to write custom reports based on RT's data
* Custom coding, modifications, and callback creation
* A brief preview of RT4
* General Q&A Session

These sessions will be offered in:

San Francisco, CA, USA - February 22 & 23 2010
Dublin, Ireland - March 15 & 16 2010
Washington DC, USA - Oct 25 & 26 2010

If you can't make it to these cities, please drop us a line to request a public training in your area. We haven't yet scheduled training for 2011; your feedback will help us decide where to offer additional sessions.

Private Training
We also offer private training sessions tailored to your organization's needs. For more information about on-site training for your organization, please drop us a line at training@bestpractical.com.

Reservations
We like to keep class sizes relatively intimate. Please register soon or we may not be able to guarantee you a seat.

When you register, please tell us which date(s) you are registering for, and whether you'd like to register for the whole training session or for only a single day.

If you'd like to pay via credit card, please visit Best Practical's online store at https://shop.bestpractical.com/

If you'd prefer to reserve a seat and have us bill you, please write to us at training@bestpractical.com. Be sure to include the full names and email addresses of all attendees you'd like to register for training.

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RT 3.8.6 is now available

Best Practical Solutions is happy to announce the release of RT 3.8.6.

For complete instructions on how to install and download this RT release, please read this rt-users mailing list post.

This release contains numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements, as well as a few new features.

Please read UPGRADING for notes on some database updates and how to upgrade your old Custom Field Categories to the new Hierarchical Custom Field system.

Significant changes include:

  • A new Hierarchical Custom Field system.
  • Performance improvements in the spreadsheet export.
  • With the optional Parse::BooleanLogic, we've added better support for Custom Fields in the export.
  • Forward all responses to a ticket, rather than just a single transaction.
  • Bugfixes for comboboxes and hierarchical custom fields in IE.
  • Better error messages when unprivileged users attempt to access administrative areas.
  • Complete refactor of autohandler (code that handles Login) (Compatible with RT::Authen::ExternalAuth 0.08).
  • Performance improvements when displaying pages with many different users (ticket history, search results).
  • Two small memory leak fixes in the Query Builder and html parsing.
  • Shredder bugfixes and the ability to limit shredding to users in a particular group using the member_of option.
  • New PlainTextMono config option (display wrapped and formatted plain text attachments) that uses css to show history in a monospaced font but still force wrapping (unlike PlainTextPre).
  • Display fix for tickets with non-ascii characters in the Subject.

A more complete changelog is available at the above link. Thanks to everyone who helped out by voting and helping to automate the changelog creation for this release!

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RT 3.8.5 Now Available!

RT 3.8.5 is now available. This is a bugfix and security release of RT.

For a description of the bugfix for as well as instructions on how to download and install the patch for 3.8.5, please read this rt-announce mailing list post.

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RT 3.6.9 Now Available!

RT 3.6.9 is now available. This is a bugfix and security release of RT.

For a description of the bugfix for as well as instructions on how to download and install the patch for 3.6.9, please read this rt-announce mailing list post.

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RTFM 2.4.2 Now Available!

We are happy to announce that RTFM 2.4.2 is now ready for download!

It includes a number of bugfixes and an important compatibility fix
which you need to use RTFM with RT 3.8.3 or greater.

You can download it from:

http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/RTFM-2.4.2.tar.gz
http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/RTFM-2.4.2.tar.gz.sig

SHA1 sums

d96b0cd58d983098e4543143aef06b351fdd4a84  RTFM-2.4.2.tar.gz
bbdf23e5da00e6b464f15d72adfe16f43e70837b  RTFM-2.4.2.tar.gz.sig

A changelog can be found after the cut:

RTFM 2.4.2 Changelog

BUG
===

  • Load TransactionCollection before calling new() on it in the upgrade scripts
  • 3.8.3 starts looking for rights granted via objects other than tickets
  • Float article searching to the right so it doesn't stack under GotoTicket
  • Move search headers back over to the left (ticket 13134)
  • Fix acl creation on more recent Pg versions
  • Fix SQL to not find topics from Class 1 when looking for global topics
  • Wording cleanups on reply pages (Shawn)
  • Rename schema.mysql-4.0-4.1.pl to upgrade-mysql-schema.pl and port improvements from RT (accessing remote hosts and more efficient SQL)
  • Don't look at non-RTFM Custom Fields during a search even if they happen to be named Class
  • Refactor plugin overriding in tests to play well with RTIR's tests
  • Fix an issue with 'use 5.8.3' and perl 5.10 (Thanks to Ian Norton)

DOC
===

  • Better upgrade instructions for 2.0 on a new machine
  • Updated it.po (Thanks to Nicola Murino)
  • Fix fr.po file to be all utf8 (Thanks to Emmanuel Lacour)

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RT 3.8.4 Now Available!

We are happy to announce that RT 3.8.4 is now available. You can
download it from:

http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt-3.8.4.tar.gz
http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt-3.8.4.tar.gz.sig

SHA1 sums
c786eb78dd6c8374da3bc0dd10414e040d69864f  rt-3.8.4.tar.gz
7af1be26513b2b26390a456a3360e5cda7d63008  rt-3.8.4.tar.gz.sig

This is primarily a bugfix and security release of RT.

The most important fix is that RT now requires the SuperUser right to edit global RT at a Glance.  In all previous 3.8 releases, the "ShowConfigTab" right unintentionally enabled this. If you have not granted this right to any non-administrative user, then this issue should not affect you.

Alternatively, you can download and install the patch that resolves this issue without requiring an upgrade to 3.8.4.

A more complete list of bugs and features can be found after the cut.
Please note that there is a change to database content in this release; see UPGRADING for more.

Features

  • Clean up NotifyGroup action
  • Obsolete old storable format in NotifyGroup action
  • Add support for group name, user name, user's email address and just an email address in NotifyGroup action. This will make easier to use it in crontool.
  • Add upgrade script for RT 3.8.4
  • Use new format and obsolete old format, we have upgrade script for conversion
  • Add support to rt-crontool for --template argument that allows you to specify the name of a template. Template overridings will work for names. Hide --template-id from help, but don't disable it.
  • Use RT::Plugin in RT->PluginDirs, so we can override only one place in our tests

Fixes & Cleanups

  • Force some widgets to fit at max parent box.
  • Use true arrow (html entities) in button for SelectionBox Widget (closes: #13481).
  • Add ability to change graph groupby and type once the graph is displayed. (closes: #13479).
  • Add a link in search tickets tab to jump easily to Chart when a query exist.
  • Be more consistent in Create/Save Changes buttons across objects.
  • Be more consistent in Select/New links (most don't list the object name, so do this everywhere).
  • Fix overlapping of password file by login button on login page (closes: #13496).
  • Show difference in Dashboard queries between saved searches and graphs (like in RT at a glance pref) (closes: #13497).
  • Don't show empty value in ticket edit basics queue dropdown, as a ticket must be in a queue.
  • In RT::Plugin->Path don't add trailing slash when requested subdir is not defined or empty.
  • Typo in IsCc|IsAdminCc documentations.
  • Don't show "deleted" status in create ticket page as it doesn't make sense to create deleted tickets (closes: #13500).
  • Use GET for firefox2 in ahah (fixes Bookmarks on FF2).
  • Allow the creation of tickets in disabled Queues; this is how Approvals work.
  • Factor out the quickbar-personal div into its own template.
  • Fix failing tests caused by wording changes.
  • Avoid undef warning if this is the first time a dashboard has been sent.
  • Pull out the value of Counter only once.
  • perl.org is a better canonical URL for Perl than .com (in README).
  • Pass more context into callbacks when editing custom fields.
  • Localize custom field name on edit.
  • Don't update watcher in queue watcher edit page when we search for people and one or more current watchers are selected (closes: #13425).
  • Require SuperUser for editing global RT at a Glance.
  • Add a ReadOnly mode for SelectionBox widgets.
  • Show the RT at a Glance selection boxes as ReadOnly if there's no permission to edit them.

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RT 3.6.8 Now Available!

We are happy to announce that RT 3.6.8 is now available. You can
download it from:

http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt-3.6.8.tar.gz
http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt-3.6.8.tar.gz.sig

SHA1 sums
c7b4fac30b5b91a1c7f64bc05ecf63f40aaec50d  rt-3.6.8.tar.gz
cb80cca50254127362a8ff8d9af71ff66881f300  rt-3.6.8.tar.gz.sig

This is a bugfix and security release of RT.

The most important fix is that RT now requires the SuperUser right to edit global RT at a Glance.  In all versions since 3.6.2, the "ShowConfigTab" right unintentionally enabled this. If you have not granted this right to any non-administrative user, then this issue should not affect you.

Please download and install the patch that resolves this issue without requiring an upgrade to 3.6.8.

A more complete list of fixes can be found below.

Fixes & Cleanups

  • Updated italian translation (Thanks to Nicola Murino)
  • validate CFs in SelfService
  • Fix: On comment/correspond, attached files are not recorded if comment/response content is empty.
  • Add HasAttribute and HasNoAttribute to the tisql
  • Allow only SuperUser to edit RT at a Glance
  • Copyright updates

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Use Hiveminder on your iPhone with iMinder!

A while back, we released a web services API for Hiveminder.  The Hiveminder API powers todo.pl as well as a host of other small tools.

Kris Arnold, a Hiveminder user and  software developer has created iMinder, a nifty (and free) Hiveminder client for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you're an iPhone or iPod Touch user, you can download iMinder 1.0.1 the App Store. Built on the Hiveminder API, iMinder lets you access your tasks using an intuitive iPhone interface and transparently keeps your iPhone in sync with Hiveminder. (It does a bunch of other cool stuff too.) 

When you start up iMinder, you'll see something like this:

Main screen

iMinder lets you make changes to a task via your phone:

Quick changes

Read more at iMinder's website, or follow iMinder development on Twitter.

Thanks, Kris!

(More screenshots after the cut)

 Edit due dates for your tasks:

Edit due date

Change task details:

Task details

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RT Training Announcement - April 27 & 28, 2009

Best Practical Solutions provides unparalleled instruction in how to get the most out of RT. We've been teaching users and administrators how to get the most out of RT since 2001. Since 2003, we've offered intensive one-day RT administrator training sessions to the general public.

In response to your requests, we've extended our RT training program to cover additional material targeted at beginning to advanced RT users.  We've split training across two days.  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, workflows and configurability. We'll touch on basic administration, but concentrate largely on helping you and your team get the most out of your RT instance.

The second day of training picks up with basic RT administration and covers everything from point-and-click configuration to installation of RT, development best practices and database tuning.

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 or show up on the second day and get quickly up to speed on how to make RT do your bidding.

A spot at either day costs $995 USD. You can save 25% if you attend both days of training. That's just $1495.

If you reserve your seat before March 15th, you can save an additional 20% by mentioning the discount code BLOG09.

Each class includes breakfast, coffee/tea, and an afternoon snack, as well as all training materials.

Day 1 - RT User Training - April 27th 2009
This intensive day-long tutorial about RT starts with basic day-to-day use and continues with detailed training about advanced RT features including saved searches, dashboards, data analysis and options for automating your workflow.

This session will cover:

  • The purpose and general use of RT
  • New features in RT 3.8
  • Saved Searches and customizing searches
  • RT's Dashboards feature
  • Customizing RT's workflow to match your own, with examples of workflow optimization
  • Automating common procedures
  • How to make simple custom reports based on RT's data
  • A short intro to RTFM, the RT FAQ Manager
  • General Q&A Session


Day 2 - RT Administration and Development – April 28th 2009

 This intensive day-long session aimed at RT administrators and developers covers everything from installation to backups, interface and backend customizations. You'll learn how to customize RT to meet your organization's unique needs and how to make sure that RT stays fast, reliable and flexible.

This session will cover:

  • New features in RT 3.8 RT's system architecture
  • A guided tour of the RT source code
  • Extension mechanisms you can use to customize RT
  • RT Installation, including the basics of Tarballs, and Configuration
  • Examples of how to optimize RT for your organization
  • How to tie RT into your existing authentication infrastructure
  • Building your own tools that talk to the RT backend
  • Customizing RT's workflow to match your own
  • Automating common procedures
  • How to write custom reports based on RT's data
  • Custom coding, modifications, and callback creation
  • A brief preview of RT4
  • General Q&A Session

This spring, these sessions will be only be offered in Boston, MA. If you can't make it to Boston this April, please drop us a line to request a public training in your area. We haven't yet scheduled training for Summer/Fall 2009 yet – your feedback will help us decide where to offer additional sessions.

RT User Training – Monday April 27th 2009
RT Administrator/Developer Training – Tuesday April 28th 2009

When you register, please tell us whether you'd like to register for the whole training session or only for a single day.

To reserve your seat, please email training@bestpractical.com.  We like to keep class sizes relatively intimate. Please register soon or we may not be able to guarantee you a seat.

Private Training
Additionally, we offer private training sessions for organizations. If you would like to schedule a private training session, please drop us a line at training@bestpractical.com.

Reservations
To reserve your seat, please send mail to training@bestpractical.com with the names and email addresses of all attendees.

In the case of credit card payments, a receipt from the credit card payment constitutes your reservation.

A copy of our payment and cancellation policies will be emailed to you upon receipt of a reservation. 

Payment Policy
The cost of training includes all necessary materials. We accept payments by check or wire transfer. Discounts may be available for organizations sending more than one participant and for academic institutions.

If you wish to pay via check or wire transfer, we will email you an invoice upon receipt of your reservation. If your company requires a printed invoice, please provide us with your accounts-payable contact and address.

If payment is not received two weeks prior to the class date, we may be forced to release your reserved seat. Unless you notify us that you will not be attending the session at least two weeks in advance,  you will still be responsible for some or all of the cost of the session. For more information, please see the cancellation policy below.

Cancellation Policy
To cancel your reservation, please send mail to training@bestpractical.com with the names and email addresses of those who wish to cancel.

If you notify us that you will not be attending training at least two weeks prior to the class date, the entire class fee will be refunded.

If you notify us that you will not be attending training less than two weeks before the class date, Best Practical will charge a $250 USD cancellation fee.

If you notify us that you will not be attending training less than 72 hours prior to the start time of the class, the entire fee is non-refundable.

Hotel Information
There will be a limited number of discounted hotel rooms available at the training venue for attendees. More information regarding transportation options and parking will be provided when you register for a class.

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RT 3.8.2 Now Available

We're pleased to announce the release of RT 3.8.2. You can download it from:

http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt-3.8.2.tar.gz
http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt-3.8.2.tar.gz.sig

SHA1 sums

e5e17464849ec040b7b1d6d14f456a2e64871848  rt-3.8.2.tar.gz
b6c1d165af056d21b2ddfb7ac018a1812f928e87  rt-3.8.2.tar.gz.sig

A changelog follows after the jump.

Highlights

  • Approvals System Overhaul
  • Dashboards Overhaul, including the ability to include more types of portlets and a new subscription type
  • Upgrades to the mysql schema upgrade script, now named upgrade-mysql-schema.pl  If you're planning an upgrade from a version of RT prior to 3.8, please read UPGRADING.mysql
  • Many localization cleanups
  • Fixes to HTML mail generation and the handling of mixed/alternative messages.  The WYSIWYG editor was also upgraded.  See docs/templates.pod for more about generating HTML mail.
  • Complete reimplementation of sbin/rt-validator for checking integrity of the DB

If you are using RT::Authen::ExternalAuth with RT 3.8.1, please be sure to upgrade to RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.07_02 (available on CPAN) with 3.8.2.

Changelog

New features:

  • Complete reimplementation of sbin/rt-validator for checking integrity
    of the DB
  • Add UseSQLForACLChecks option - no more wrong numbers in search results,
    no more missing entries on pages, no more empty pages, but only if your
    DB can handle such queries
  • Add sbin/rt-attributes-viewer that helps sometimes investigate problems
  • Break out the Logout link into an Element so you can override it
  • Allow %ARGS to set custom field values in SelfService
  • A new callback for successful login via WebExternalAuth
  • A new callback in Ticket/Create.html
  • Show how often user recieves messages on a ticket
  • REST improvements - Queue ticket CFs, Queue CFs, Group management,
    Attachments
  • Allow optional # before ticket ID in simple search
  • Add callbacks for the themes' main stylesheets
  • Allow group charts by users' Organization and other fields
  • Allow change of Requestor in QuickCreate
  • Revert cleanup from require/our @ISA to use base because it breaks RT running under fastcgi/mod_perl
  • Cleanup Dashboard internals and unify with Saved Searches
  • Allow homepage components to be used on Dashboards
  • Add support for "every X weeks" Dashboard subscriptions
  • Cleanup and refactor the localization infrastructure
  • Add new global Config option MessageBoxIncludeSignature to control whether signatures are included in Replies and Comments
  • Handle dates and Custom Fields when redirecting to Ticket/Display.html
  • Name the Submit button on Ticket modification pages and clean up
  • Support for parallel testing (make test-parallel) and fixes for Pg when running
    in parallel
  • Support for running automated tests on Oracle
  • Add an Initial callback to the homepage
  • New callback on search results to add new tools
  • Instructions for starting to port to windows
  • Add custom Transaction display for Told
  • Add ShowApprovalsTab right to control who sees the Approvals links
  • Approvals System Overhaul
  • Allow setting colspan in formats
  • Documentation of Template variables
  • New Callback in ParseFormat
  • For rt-mailgate, if --action correspond --extension action
    is specific, fall back to correspond for emails without an
    extension
  • Command line enhancements
  • Support HTML for MakeClicky
  • Clean up handling of static files in NoAuth/images and NoAuth/css
  • Let more HTML tags created by the RichText editor show in the Ticket Display

Fixes & Cleanups

  • Fix searching by CFs on Oracle
  • Numerous documentation fixes and improvements
  • Set default LogToSysLog to 'info' instead of 'debug'
  • Fix file names corruption when attaching files with international character
    via UI
  • Fix attaching attachments to outgoing mails in RT on Oracle DB
  • Various improvements in web installer
  • CSS fixes
  • Pg has support for USAGE privilege on sequences only starting from Pg 8.2.0, improve etc/acl.Pg*
  • Don't do the safe ipc hack for SpeedyCGI
  • Rewrite displaying message stanza without recursion to avoid problems with deep recursion errors and improve performance
  • Fix double BRs in ticket history
  • Fix minor tags dis-balance
  • Partially make Shredder's pages translatable
  • Fix issue when schema upgrade script could generate ALTER TABLE...BLOB CHARACTER SET...
  • Don't attach html parts of mixed/alternative messages
  • Fix printing by updating print.css
  • Updated sbin/factory
  • Fixes for localization of RT
  • Fix missed "/" that makes header links on RT at a glance unclickable when WebPath is non-empty
  • Fix for CustomField's LoadByName to be backward compatible
  • Fix a copy & paste typo that's been there for a while forcing admins to grant CreateTicket right to everyone even if they want to do that for unprivileged users only
  • Don't bother checking for data/gpg if the user explicitly turned gpg off
  • Handle the case where you enable GPG but haven't created the data directory.  We should probably just
    create the directory for you.
  • Fix AJAX bookmarking in IE
  • Fix REST/CLI when there is a type field
  • Return error earlier if parsing of a template failed
  • Fix for CF matching in the REST interface
  • Allow tags used by the WYSIWYG editor to pass through so that when you use bold font in a message, you see it in the RT view.
  • Fix problems with loading of FCKeditor in IE
  • Plugin loading fixes for modules such as User
  • Pass more information to Ticket/Update.html's Initial callback
  • Better signal handling for gpg
  • Fix test's database username to avoid going over length limits on mysql
  • Fix search results RSS feed to show correct Time and Creator
  • Refactor maildigest tests
  • Use information_schema in upgrade-mysql-schema.pl on newer mysqls
  • Sort right names using localized values
  • Trim leading or trailing whitespace in for simple search
  • Add documentation of rt-setup-database --action upgrade
  • Clean up display of Custom Field Values during editing
  • Update documentation about upgrade-mysql-schema.pl and give it a better name
  • Updated German (de) translation from Torsten Brumm
  • Don't create empty Deferred Attributes
  • Fix grouping by watchers on graphs
  • Show EmailAddress not id of requestor when using Quick Create
  • Validate mandatory custom fields on SelfService
  • Upgrade FCKeditor to version 2.6.3
  • Add configuration variables for size of FCKeditor
  • MessageBoxRightTextHeight MessageBoxRightTextWidth
  • Reorder and document adding a new config option to META in Config.pm
  • Make config options explicitly sorted
  • Switch to using WebPath from WebURL for portlet links
  • Cleanup GPG tempfiles
  • Use StashWarnings in tests to clean up lots of warnings
  • Remove unused gradient-glossy.png
  • Use ActiveStatus rather than hardcoded values in more of the homepage portlets
  • Make the default RT font Arial
  • Fix gpg passphrase handling to support gpg 1.2
  • Properly downgrade HTML templates to multipart alternative text/plain and text/html
  • Warn when a callback exists in two extensions and only one of them will be run
  • Avoid "Not LIKE ''" on Oracle BLOBs
  • Prefer the SERVER_HOST environment variable for generating uris over HTTP_HOST
  • quiet test output

Dependencies

  • Newer Text::Template which claims to have fixed the T:: cleanup, otherwise scrips in batch stage may be delayed
  • Add dependency on Test::HTTP::Server::Simple::StashWarnings

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