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!

What's New in 4.4: Assets Now Standard in RT

In February of 2014, we released an official Assets extension to make it easy for IT departments everywhere to track and manage all of the equipment they are responsible for in RT. Support groups have more things to track than ever including software licenses, laptops, printers, and servers. And with the Internet of Things just around the corner, they may soon be adding automated sensors and robots to the list.

The initial release was an optional extension, which is often how new features start for RT. To make it easier for more people to work with it, we've pulled it into core RT so it's now standard in every install or upgrade to RT 4.4.

An asset in RT is similar to a ticket in the sense that for each object you want to track, you create an asset record. Assets is built with RT's powerful custom fields, so you can manage all the information you need: model number, type of asset, date purchased, date support expires, contact details for support, etc. And assets are grouped into catalogs, much like tickets are grouped into queues. For example if you want to keep your servers separate from your printers because different departments support them, or if they just have very different sets of custom fields, just create two separate catalogs.

Assets are thoroughly integrated with RT tickets to support some common workflows you'll need as you support your infrastructure. You can easily find assets assigned to a user on their User Summary page. From an asset record, you can select the "Create linked ticket" action to track service like moving a server or ordering more ink for a printer.

Catalogs leverage RT's lifecycles, which means for each catalog, you can define the statuses that each asset can cycle through. A typical cycle might be from "new" to "in repair" and at some point to "recycled". You configure it to follow your process and workflow. You can see a quick demo of Assets in this video.

To learn more you can walk through the asset tutorial or read the assets documentation. Just in time for the next 4.4 release candidate, we have added an RT permission, ShowAssetsMenu, so the menu will be hidden by default when you upgrade. If you don't plan to use assets, you can leave it that way and none of your users will see the Assets features. To enable it, you can grant rights to access the Assets menu and a catalog to a few users or groups and get started. The tutorial explains this in more detail and don't hesitate to send us an email at contact@bestpractical.com if you have more questions.

If you missed some other posts on the new features in RT 4.4, you can find more in the new feature overview.

What's New in 4.4: Improved Attachment Handling

Just as attachments are a vital part of everyday email, they are also fundamental to RT. Whether you are a working with a user sending a screenshot showing an error or exchanging a spreadsheet with accounting to track your new hardware order, we work with them all the time. Recognizing this, we've made several improvements to how RT interacts with attachments. Read on for details or just watch this video.

To start, if you type some variation of the word "attachment" into the comment/reply box, RT will gently remind you to actually attach something, just like your email client does. To add those attachments, you can now drag files from your desktop and drop them in the attachment area below the comment box. If you prefer using the file selection dialog, you can click on the attachment box and then select your files. In either mode, you can now select multiple attachments to quickly add them all at once.

We've updated the attachment handling once you've selected them as well. Once attached, you'll see a small thumbnail preview so you can be sure you have selected the correct attachments. We also start uploading the attachment in the background the moment you pick it. Previously we would wait until the entire page was submitted, which could cause a delay with large attachments. Now we get a head start while you are finishing up your changes, which will make for a quicker submit once you're done.

As you continue to work on a ticket, sometimes you'll want to reuse an attachment already on a ticket. For example, someone replies with an attachment and you want someone not on the ticket to also see it, so you want to send it along. Now you can select from the attachments already on the ticket rather than grabbing a copy from your desktop.

Finally, we've added the ability to store attachments in external file storage solutions. By default, attachments are stored in the database, which for most installations isn't a problem. However, some users work with a large number of very large attachments, which can disproportionately grow the size of the database and its backups. You can move attachment storage to standalone files on your server or to Amazon S3 or Dropbox. You can find more information on this new feature in the configuration documentation and with the feature documentation.

If you missed some other posts on the new features in RT 4.4, you can find more in the new feature overview.