Dealing with external parties via email?

Sometimes when resolving an issue for a client it is common to email a
third party (an application vendor, for example) and have a conversation
with them to solve the problem. I’d like to be able to use RT3 to
capture this exchange and keep all the information about that ticket
together.

The problem is of course that the vendor is not the requestor nor admin
of the ticket, nor should they be. Is there any way to allow the owner
of a ticket to have a private email conversation with another person
about a problem but not have them in the position where they need to see
ticket open/close/status messages for a ticket they don’t have access
to?

This has to be fairly common I would think - how do others handle it?

With my current knowledge of how RT works I guess I could create a
’technical’ queue, and remove all the normal scrips on it. Then when
a third party needs to be involved I could create a ticket on that
technical queue and somehow associate it with the original user ticket

… seems a bit of a kludge, but useable … any other ideas?

Malcolm Herbert System Administrator
ph [990] 54881 rm 28-241 School of GeoSciences

I believe just using the “CC” functionality of the ticket should meet
your requirements no?

Malcolm Herbert wrote:

Sometimes when resolving an issue for a client it is common to email a
third party (an application vendor, for example) and have a conversation
with them to solve the problem. I’d like to be able to use RT3 to
capture this exchange and keep all the information about that ticket
together.

The problem is of course that the vendor is not the requestor nor admin
of the ticket, nor should they be. Is there any way to allow the owner
of a ticket to have a private email conversation with another person
about a problem but not have them in the position where they need to see
ticket open/close/status messages for a ticket they don’t have access
to?

This has to be fairly common I would think - how do others handle it?

With my current knowledge of how RT works I guess I could create a
‘technical’ queue, and remove all the normal scrips on it. Then when
a third party needs to be involved I could create a ticket on that
technical queue and somehow associate it with the original user ticket

… seems a bit of a kludge, but useable … any other ideas?

Adrian Carter
Technical Manager
Leading Edge Internet

Web http://www.lei.net.au http://support.lei.net.au
Direct +61 2 6163 6162 Support 1 300 662 415
E-mail cartera@lei.net.au

|I believe just using the “CC” functionality of the ticket should meet
|your requirements no?

I think Cc: is really for people who are interested in seeing the
problem resolved but aren’t the requester - ie, they’re still on the
client side of the equation, not the technical one …

That’s how I have thought of it in the past, but I’ll see if that works
for me … thanks for the suggestion … it’s certainly a lot less
cumbersome than the other method I proposed …

Malcolm Herbert System Administrator
ph [990] 54881 rm 28-241 School of GeoSciences

|I believe just using the “CC” functionality of the ticket should meet
|your requirements no?

I think Cc: is really for people who are interested in seeing the
problem resolved but aren’t the requester - ie, they’re still on the
client side of the equation, not the technical one …

you could open a child ticket, with the vendor as the requestor.

seph