Adding Old Data to a Live System

We’re about to start using an ‘RT’ queue for handling some customer
correspondence, which’ll make life considerably easier for us.

But at the point we do the switch we’ll have a bunch of things we’re
part-way through deal with for which there aren’t tickets. The
blindingly obvious solution is to create a ticket for each of these.
Bouncing old mails to the RT alias achieves this.

(At least, it works for initial requests (handily using the original
obviously incorrectly create new tickets, but we could either merge
those in, or edit the ticket numbers into the Subject: headers in the
mailbox of past mails, or make do without and deal with things on an
ad-hoc basis. We’ll manage somehow, and this isn’t my biggest concern
at the moment.)

Unfortunately it also distributes those mails to the Ccs and AdminCcs,
making them look like new inquiries. That would obviously get very
confusing, if a member of staff is receiving genuine new inquiries mixed
in with old e-mails he’s already seen that are just being sent because
they’re new to the ticket system.

How have other people dealt with this when moving from a manual system
to using ‘RT’?

The best work-around I’ve thought of is to create a fake queue with its
own e-mail alias just for the transition. All scrips could be removed
from that queue, so old mails can be bounced to it without creating new
mails. Then the bulk ticket update could be use to transfer them to the
correct queue (by which time they wouldn’t be new tickets, so no mail
would be generated).

Anybody got a better suggestion?

Smylers
GBdirect

We’re about to start using an ‘RT’ queue for handling some customer
correspondence, which’ll make life considerably easier for us.

How have other people dealt with this when moving from a manual system
to using ‘RT’?

Depending on the previous manual system, there are a few existing programs
to import the previous correspondence into RT, preserving the date/time of
various ‘events’ (correspondence, resolution etc). These can be found at
http://www.fsck.com/pub/rt/contrib/ (or are mentioned in RT/FM).

                         Bruce Campbell                            RIPE
               Systems/Network Engineer                             NCC
             www.ripe.net - PGP562C8B1B                      Operations