Best Practical at Educause Security 2019
Automatic Ticket Assignment with Request Tracker
It's important to always set the Owner on a ticket since if no one owns it, it won't get done. Some RT’s users take tickets as they come in or someone might be responsible for assigning tickets. But for a busy RT, wouldn't it be great to assign tickets automatically?
The AutomaticAssignment extension allows you to do exactly that. As you can see in the video below, this RT extension automatically sets the ticket Owner based on rules you configure. You can set a filter to define the list of possible owners and then a chooser which determines the method to use when assigning users from the pool of users. Get the extension today: (https://metacpan.org/pod/RT::Extension::AutomaticAssignment)
One default filter option allows you to set the list of potential owners to an RT group, making it easy to manage membership. The "Work Schedule" filter is a little more interesting. It allows users (or, perhaps, only their manager) to select which business hours they are available. Only users currently working when the ticket comes in are then considered for assignment.
One method for assigning tickets is the "Active Tickets" chooser, which sets the owner of the ticket to the user from the filter who has the least number of currently active tickets. The "Round Robin" chooser cycles through the available users list in sequence, giving each user a ticket as their turn comes up.
Automatic assignment is triggered by RT's scrips system, so you can activate rules per queue and select default conditions like "On Create" or define custom conditions like "On Correspond from Requestor."
As with many things in RT, the filters and choosers are designed to be extended in the future and we look forward to hearing new ideas for both.
RT 4.4.4 and RT 4.2.16 Released
Bookmarking Tickets: How and Why
Querying Active and Inactive Tickets Made Easy
RT's Lifecycle feature gives you complete flexibility to define your own statuses and workflow. However, if your Lifecycle has a large number of statuses, performing a simple search to see how many tickets are currently being worked on can involve building a large query to include each one. With ‘Active’ and ‘Inactive’ values for the Query Builder, it’s much simpler.
RT 4.4.3 and RTIR 4.0.1 Released
Best Practical is happy to announce a new set of releases for RT and RTIR for both the 4.4 series and also the 4.2 series. Here is a full list of new versions now available:
- RT 4.2.15
- RTIR 3.2.1 (works with RT 4.2.15)
- RT 4.4.3
- RTIR 4.0.1 (works with RT 4.4.3)
These releases include a number of updates and fixes. Here are just a few of the more notable changes:
- In the Query Builder, you can now select Active and Inactive for status and it will include all statuses that match the one you select. This can save adding a list of different statuses to see "what tickets are being worked on?"
- In RT, the Owner dropdown menu automatically converts to an autocomplete text box when it reaches 50 users. This number can now be set via the configuration option DropdownMenuLimit so you can easily update it to continue to show the dropdown with larger numbers.
- For accessibility, we added a user preference to use the previous attachment upload interface on the update page rather than the new dropzone file uploader.
- On the update page, recipient checkbox issues are fixed. Previously users would observe checkboxes for recipients below the message box getting checked or unchecked unexpectedly. This happened because the page calls back to the RT server to process any changes you make on the page and sometimes the response could conflict with boxes you may have checked. We've tried several different fixes and included the one that worked best. You'll now see the page is grayed out until the response from the server is processed so you know not to try modifying things while it's still running.
As always, you can view the full set of changes in our release notes. You can also view them on github using the details noted at the bottom of the release notes.
Instructions for updating RT and RTIR are provided in the README files for each release. Always make sure you have good database and file backups before upgrading. Contact Best Practical at sales@bestpractical.com if you need professional assistance with upgrading from any previous versions of RT or RTIR.
BPS at Educause Security 2018
Best Practical attended the Educause Security conference in Baltimore. One of our favorite sessions was a presentation by the University of Pennsylvania about how they use RTIR and automation to manage their high volume of incidents.
Creating Custom Themes in Request Tracker
What's New in RT 4.4.2
RT 4.4.2 Released
We're pleased to announce the general availability of RT 4.4.2. This release introduces several important security fixes, a handful of new features, and many bugfixes.
We have redesigned how time worked is calculated per user and for children tickets. As always please be sure to review the UPGRADING-4.4 document.
Please see our official release announcement for more information, including the complete set of changes and bugfixes.
- Custom fields now have a "New values must be unique" option.
- Custom fields now support value canonicalization (for example, automatically changing input values to be all uppercase). See the @CustomFieldValuesCanonicalizers config option.
- Ticket timers provide a comment box for quickly adding ticket comments to describe your time worked.
- You can now set up default values for assets on a catalog level.
- You can choose to display result counts on ticket search portlets using the new $ShowSearchResultCount config setting.
- There is now a "Load all history" link for the "as you scroll" history loading mode, to allow you to use browser-based text search.
- We now display a list of recently-viewed tickets in the Search -> Tickets -> Recently Viewed menu.
- We have made RT::Extension::AdminConditionsAndActions part of core RT, so you can now easily configure the conditions and actions of your scrips right within the admin UI.