Request Tracker: Quick Ticket Create

RT provides a variety of standard fields for tracking information about requests and has a powerful Custom Field system to allow you to track specific metadata as it relates to your organization. When creating a new ticket in RT, these custom fields are displayed to let you capture as much information as possible about your request from the get go.

However, there are times you want to create a ticket but don’t have the time to enter in all the desired metadata. Out of the box, RT includes Quick Ticket Create, which is a handy portlet that enables you to enter bare minimum information about a new ticket so that you can quickly create a new ticket.

The default RT at a Glance home page puts Quick Ticket Create at the bottom of the main body, which is handy. But several of us at Best Practical don't even want to have to scroll down, so we edit the page and put it at the top of the sidebar so it's easy to use right when the page loads.

RT also has a preference that will redirect you to the main display page of the newly created ticket after you create it. This is turned off by default, but you can enable it for all users in the RT configuration file with the $TicketAfterQuickCreate option, or select it as a personal preference in the Ticket display section of the personal settings.

Give Quick Ticket Create a try and never forget to make tickets for all of the important things that need to get done!

Learn about RT 4.4 and RTIR in our first public training of 2016, coming to you from Hamburg!

We're thrilled to be in Hamburg, Germany on March 14-15! This training will introduce you to the new features in RT 4.4 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.

Also, this session will include our very first RTIR training! We will walk through the incident response workflow, how to integrate RTIR with other systems, and how to best leverage RT's features for security teams (especially the new ones in RT 4.4!). We're also happy to show you the new flexible workflows that the next version, RTIR 3.4, offers you.

We can’t wait to tell you about what we’ve added for you in RT 4.4, including Assets, for tracking physical and digital resources. We’ll show you how to set up service level agreements (SLA) which take your business hours and holidays into account. There’s a new built-in timer for tracking time worked on tickets. You can now upload multiple files at once with a quick drag-and-drop, as well as reuse existing attachments on replies.

We’ll show how RT 4.4 improves things behind the scenes for you. You can have your users authenticate against external services (LDAP). RT can now seamlessly store attachments outside of its database, putting them on the filesystem, uploading to Amazon S3, or in Dropbox. You can even serve them directly out of S3. You can create custom role groups then assign them to queues and tickets. These custom roles can have their own permissions and notifications. We think you’ll find these are foundational for improving automation. There are also some major performance enhancements like gradual ticket history loading that will improve your team’s day to day experience.

Agenda

The first day of training 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 and users. 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. RTIR will be the focus in the afternoon of the second day.

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.

Attending

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 Hamburg, please feel free to suggest a future location by dropping us a line at training@bestpractical.com! Our spring training will be in Washington, DC.

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.

Thanks for supporting RT!