Asset tracking, multiple Contacts in same company, Custom fields, RTFM and more

RT Users
1

After dealing a bit with RT and checking out quite a lot of posts in this
list, i come up with my scenario which would suit me best, perhaps someone
out there has done something similar:

We need to do support for clients, which have usually more than one contact
to communicate with us and more than one system. The systems use to be
listed by name and a system id.

I’d like to be able to enter assets for each company, showing on the
contacts details and also in Ticket, i.e. contact “mt” sends a request, we’d
like to add the information, that this was about System Asystem1, Type MC,
Version 3.1, SysID 4567890

Not talking about the parts (and their serials), the system consists of. :frowning:

Found this:
http://www.nabble.com/RT-State-of-the-Onion--td8753466.html#a8754502, so we
might not be the only one’s. In our point of view, it would be enough, if i
could enter a company and add the users to the company, which are working
for them. If the user is switching company, i can add him to the new
company. In this company data set i can create whatever custom field i need.

There were also this post: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-RT-4-p10795726.html
for putting something like this in RT4.

Some ppl here on this list seem to fear, that RT would change into an CRM
system, but i think, that it would good for the help desk monkey to be able
to check, who called on behalf of a given system id before.

This information should be identical for all contacts of the clients,
because there tend to be more than one guy taking care of the same systems
in one site.

Would also be great, if we could attach files to the “company”.

So if contact “az” sends a request for same system, but updated in the
meanwhile to software release 3.5, i would like to update the info as well,
but only once, of course.

By surfing around, i found the RTx Assettracker, but the webpage seems to be
down.

Anybody out there, who is able to tell:

  • Is this project still alive?
  • Will this Rtx run under 3.8.2(found a v1.2.3 tarball)?
  • Will Assettracker help in accomplishing what i put together before? Or do
    i need something else?
  • Is assettracking on the to-do-list for 4.0, i saw in the RT4 thread
    several people mentioning it, but couldn’t find out, whether someone
    @bestpractical did accept it as a feature for RT4.

I understand, that multiple contacts in same company is a real problem
currently, but i think, that there must be more companies out there, having
the same problem. So anybody got a workflow for this?

This is also a problem with custom fields, i can create custom fields for
users etc., but would need to enter the same information twice or five times
or even more, depending on how many ppl. the client wants to be created in
RT. I am also currently looking in this Scrip Ruslan provided to group
unpriv users, some time ago, this could help on the tickettracking issue.

I also thought about creating a group for each company having more than one
contact, but this seems to be no solution, which could be upgrade safe,
because i would also clutter the database.

And to come down to RTFM:

  1. Any documentation about RTFM, which contains more information as the
    draft .pdf being available from wiki?
  2. Am looking for a language file for RTFM/RT, if i search for .po files, i
    won’t find anything, so someone there, who has a pointer for me?
  3. When replying to tickets, there will be shown a popupmenu which contains
    the complete subject of the article. Unfortunately they are quite long , so
    you won’t see the “Go” button anymore. So, would it be possible to limit the
    length of the subject line in this popup?

Finally:

If i create a new ticket, the client field has to be filled in with the
emailadress of the client. As far as i know, this is a textentry box at
creation time. I’d like to have a searchfield for the users and a “go”
button, so the help desk monkey can enter it right away, not having to save
it first and then edit it one more time to add the user.

Thanks for your time, reading this quite long one.

w_e

PS: RT 3.8.2 (and RTFM 2.4.2 is running on Apache/2.2.3 (Debian)
PHP/5.2.0-8+etch13 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8

View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Asset-tracking%2C-multiple-Contacts-in-same-company%2C-Custom-fields%2C-RTFM-and-more-tp22273450p22273450.html

2

Hi,

You could just create a Queue “Customers” and create a ticket for every
customer there and than attach all the info you have to custom fields and
attachments. The Companies people could be CCs on this tickets.

All you need to do then is create a script that links this ticket to any new
ticket that comes into your Queue “Support” based on the email adress.

Could that be an easy solution to your problem?

Regards,
JulianAm 01.03.09 15:21 schrieb “who else” unter bogey_63@yahoo.com:

After dealing a bit with RT and checking out quite a lot of posts in this
list, i come up with my scenario which would suit me best, perhaps someone
out there has done something similar:

We need to do support for clients, which have usually more than one contact
to communicate with us and more than one system. The systems use to be
listed by name and a system id.

I’d like to be able to enter assets for each company, showing on the
contacts details and also in Ticket, i.e. contact “mt” sends a request, we’d
like to add the information, that this was about System Asystem1, Type MC,
Version 3.1, SysID 4567890

Not talking about the parts (and their serials), the system consists of. :frowning:

Found this:
http://www.nabble.com/RT-State-of-the-Onion--td8753466.html#a8754502, so we
might not be the only one’s. In our point of view, it would be enough, if i
could enter a company and add the users to the company, which are working
for them. If the user is switching company, i can add him to the new
company. In this company data set i can create whatever custom field i need.

There were also this post: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-RT-4-p10795726.html
for putting something like this in RT4.

Some ppl here on this list seem to fear, that RT would change into an CRM
system, but i think, that it would good for the help desk monkey to be able
to check, who called on behalf of a given system id before.

This information should be identical for all contacts of the clients,
because there tend to be more than one guy taking care of the same systems
in one site.

Would also be great, if we could attach files to the “company”.

So if contact “az” sends a request for same system, but updated in the
meanwhile to software release 3.5, i would like to update the info as well,
but only once, of course.

By surfing around, i found the RTx Assettracker, but the webpage seems to be
down.

Anybody out there, who is able to tell:

  • Is this project still alive?
  • Will this Rtx run under 3.8.2(found a v1.2.3 tarball)?
  • Will Assettracker help in accomplishing what i put together before? Or do
    i need something else?
  • Is assettracking on the to-do-list for 4.0, i saw in the RT4 thread
    several people mentioning it, but couldn’t find out, whether someone
    @bestpractical did accept it as a feature for RT4.

I understand, that multiple contacts in same company is a real problem
currently, but i think, that there must be more companies out there, having
the same problem. So anybody got a workflow for this?

This is also a problem with custom fields, i can create custom fields for
users etc., but would need to enter the same information twice or five times
or even more, depending on how many ppl. the client wants to be created in
RT. I am also currently looking in this Scrip Ruslan provided to group
unpriv users, some time ago, this could help on the tickettracking issue.

I also thought about creating a group for each company having more than one
contact, but this seems to be no solution, which could be upgrade safe,
because i would also clutter the database.

And to come down to RTFM:

  1. Any documentation about RTFM, which contains more information as the
    draft .pdf being available from wiki?
  2. Am looking for a language file for RTFM/RT, if i search for .po files, i
    won’t find anything, so someone there, who has a pointer for me?
  3. When replying to tickets, there will be shown a popupmenu which contains
    the complete subject of the article. Unfortunately they are quite long , so
    you won’t see the “Go” button anymore. So, would it be possible to limit the
    length of the subject line in this popup?

Finally:

If i create a new ticket, the client field has to be filled in with the
emailadress of the client. As far as i know, this is a textentry box at
creation time. I’d like to have a searchfield for the users and a “go”
button, so the help desk monkey can enter it right away, not having to save
it first and then edit it one more time to add the user.

Thanks for your time, reading this quite long one.

w_e

PS: RT 3.8.2 (and RTFM 2.4.2 is running on Apache/2.2.3 (Debian)
PHP/5.2.0-8+etch13 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8

3

Quoting Julian Hein jhein@netways.de:

Hi,

You could just create a Queue “Customers” and create a ticket for every
customer there and than attach all the info you have to custom fields and
attachments. The Companies people could be CCs on this tickets.

All you need to do then is create a script that links this ticket to any new
ticket that comes into your Queue “Support” based on the email adress.

Could that be an easy solution to your problem?

Regards,
Julian

In the same vein, you can use the RTx-AssetTracker to group the same
information
using Asset custom fields and attach the asset to the ticket(s) in
question. We
are working on doing this with users machines, sofware and other types
of assets. You can create different asset type to group similar
informations.

Cheers,
Ken

4

who else wrote:

After dealing a bit with RT and checking out quite a lot of posts in this
list, i come up with my scenario which would suit me best, perhaps
someone
out there has done something similar:

We need to do support for clients, which have usually more than one
contact
to communicate with us and more than one system. The systems use to be
listed by name and a system id.
I’d like to be able to enter assets for each company, showing on the
contacts details and also in Ticket, i.e. contact “mt” sends a
request, we’d
like to add the information, that this was about System Asystem1,
Type MC,
Version 3.1, SysID 4567890

For the above idea, you can try this:
http://code.google.com/p/asset-tracker-4rt/wiki/HowToLinkTicketToAssetScrip

In theory, you add a ticket custom field, and the user can then just
stick in the name of an asset and the ticket will be linked to that
asset. So far it isn’t actually working for me, but I haven’t played
with it yet to see why not.

Asset Tracker does appear to be alive, you can take a look around
Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.. It does appear to work
under the latest release of RT. You may want to grab the 1.2.4b1
version for the bug fixes it has.

Would also be great, if we could attach files to the “company”.

I’ve been hoping to use RTFM for this, but haven’t actually tested out
my plan. For now, the plan is to create a ‘class’ in RTFM for each
company, and then upload files into one or more articles.

I understand, that multiple contacts in same company is a real problem
currently, but i think, that there must be more companies out there,
having
the same problem. So anybody got a workflow for this?

Is there any reason that ‘groups’ will not work for this? I’m looking
into replacing our in-house ticket-system/client database/kitchen-sink
system with an RT-based setup. My preliminary plan is to dump all
clients and their related users and use the rt tool to create
corresponding groups with their users, after creating the custom fields
necessary to match to the current set of data we have for each user. Is
there a reason that this will not work well in RT?

5

Hi,

Kenneth Marshall-3 wrote:

In the same vein, you can use the RTx-AssetTracker to group the same
information
using Asset custom fields and attach the asset to the ticket(s) in
question. We
are working on doing this with users machines, sofware and other types
of assets. You can create different asset type to group similar
informations.

Cheers,
Ken

Sounds like a plan :slight_smile: Which version of RTx-AssetTracker are you using? I
can only find 1.2.3, not 1.2.4b1; anybody got a download link?

If you got a workflow for this, i’d be interested to learn more, since i am
a newbie with RT; and try to get too much in too short time into my head :slight_smile:

Thanks for help!
w_e
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Asset-tracking%2C-multiple-Contacts-in-same-company%2C-Custom-fields%2C-RTFM-and-more-tp22273450p22275144.html

6

who else wrote:

Sounds like a plan :slight_smile: Which version of RTx-AssetTracker are you using? I
can only find 1.2.3, not 1.2.4b1; anybody got a download link?

You can grab it out of their subversion repo, something like:

svn checkout http://asset-tracker-4rt.googlecode.com/svn/at/tags/1.2.4b1
at-1.2.4b1

7

Hi Ken,
thank you for your answer

Kevin Phair wrote:

For the above idea, you can try this:
http://code.google.com/p/asset-tracker-4rt/wiki/HowToLinkTicketToAssetScrip

In theory, you add a ticket custom field, and the user can then just
stick in the name of an asset and the ticket will be linked to that
asset. So far it isn’t actually working for me, but I haven’t played
with it yet to see why not.

Asset Tracker does appear to be alive, you can take a look around
Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.. It does appear to work
under the latest release of RT. You may want to grab the 1.2.4b1
version for the bug fixes it has.

Would also be great, if we could attach files to the “company”.

I’ve been hoping to use RTFM for this, but haven’t actually tested out
my plan. For now, the plan is to create a ‘class’ in RTFM for each
company, and then upload files into one or more articles.

I understand, that multiple contacts in same company is a real problem
currently, but i think, that there must be more companies out there,
having
the same problem. So anybody got a workflow for this?

Is there any reason that ‘groups’ will not work for this? I’m looking
into replacing our in-house ticket-system/client database/kitchen-sink
system with an RT-based setup. My preliminary plan is to dump all
clients and their related users and use the rt tool to create
corresponding groups with their users, after creating the custom fields
necessary to match to the current set of data we have for each user. Is
there a reason that this will not work well in RT?

We intend to use RTFM as Knowledgebase; and concerning groups, i will have
to dig deeper into it; i am glad, that RT is up and running, clients are
able to enter/send tickets, we are able to work on them, that’s cool enough,
although RTFM needs a bit more tweaking, but it is less documented than RT
itself. We also have several different databases and information systems and
we want to have everything concerning tech support, assets like systems,
machines etc. in one system, instead of having them to lookup emails in CRM
or ERP or whatsoever. We will have somewhen an integration with our ERP, so
we can check several tickets in ERP and get the according invoice out of the
door :slight_smile: But we need to move forward with RT first, because clients keep
calling all day …

Will talk to our techies tomorrow but first of all, get RTx::AT installed to
check out.

Best

w_e

PS: btw, any other extensions i should be aware of, which might help to
accomplish the task?
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Asset-tracking%2C-multiple-Contacts-in-same-company%2C-Custom-fields%2C-RTFM-and-more-tp22273450p22276103.html

8

Have a look at RTx-EmailCompletion. If you start typing a user’s name or
email address it will bring up a list of emails, much like any other
mail client. It gets the info from the RT database or from LDAP.-----Original Message-----
From: rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com
[mailto:rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf Of who else
Sent: 01 March 2009 14:22
To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: [rt-users] Asset tracking, multiple Contacts in same company,
Custom fields, RTFM and more

Finally:

If i create a new ticket, the client field has to be filled in with the
emailadress of the client. As far as i know, this is a textentry box at
creation time. I’d like to have a searchfield for the users and a “go”
button, so the help desk monkey can enter it right away, not having to
save
it first and then edit it one more time to add the user.

9

Hi Kevin,

got the following error with 1.2.4b1 (RT 3.8.2, RTFM 2.4.2):

Can’t locate object method “new” via package “RTx::AssetTracker::Types”
(perhaps you forgot to load “RTx::AssetTracker::Types”?) at
/opt/rt3/share/html/AssetTracker/Admin/Types/index.html line 70.

Haven’t found anything with google, on the googlecode site or in this
list…

Can you point me in the right direction, please?

Best

w_e

Kevin Phair wrote:

who else wrote:

Sounds like a plan :slight_smile: Which version of RTx-AssetTracker are you using? I
can only find 1.2.3, not 1.2.4b1; anybody got a download link?

You can grab it out of their subversion repo, something like:

svn checkout http://asset-tracker-4rt.googlecode.com/svn/at/tags/1.2.4b1
at-1.2.4b1

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10

Update:

Strange things happen: By reloading the browser the “Assets”-Option in the
Menu might be there or dissappear. AT also creates new error messages like
this:

Creation of new Asset Type (i was able to create 5 or 6 of them before being
presented with this)

Can’t locate object method “new” via package “RTx::AssetTracker::Type”
(perhaps you forgot to load “RTx::AssetTracker::Type”?) at
/opt/rt3/share/html/AssetTracker/Admin/Types/Modify.html line 87.

Just entered a custom field for Asset Tracker, which has been saved, while i
wanted to create another one, the “Asset” Entry vanished. RT then looks like
AT wouldnt be there at all, no config options whatsoever.

Am wondering, whether it will find the entries i made before again, if it
will reappear.

Ok, came back, entered another custom field, this worked out, after creating
another one, “Assets” vanished again.

Someone experiencing this behaviour as well?

Thanks for help

w_e

View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Asset-tracking%2C-multiple-Contacts-in-same-company%2C-Custom-fields%2C-RTFM-and-more-tp22273450p22286923.html