RT -- IRC integration?

RT Users
1

Dear List,

We’re thinking about proving an IRC service for our customers to
communicate with us, and as part of that we’d like to be able to
integrate it with RT for ticketing and ultimately billing purposes.
RT already does WWW and SMTP – why not IRC too?

Searching with google finds a lot of references to chat rooms about
RT, but not what I’m looking for. Searching the RT Wiki and CPAN has
turned up nothing appropriate, although the RT bot at
http://www.dmo.ca/projects/hacks/RT/RT.bm is more like it. Alas, it
doesn’t have the sort of functionality I’m after.

I guess the sort of thing I’m looking for hasn’t been done yet, but I
thought I’d ask if anyone knew of some all-singing all-dancing RT-capable
chat-bots out there? I’d be interested to hear of anyone’s experiences
in doing something similar.

At the moment I’m only gathering the information we’ll need before we
decide whether to go ahead with this IRC project or not; part of that
will be to evaluate what we can afford to spend on programmer and admin
time in setting it up.

Cheers,

Matthew

Dr Matthew Seaman The Bunker, Ash Radar Station
PGP: 0x60AE908C on servers Marshborough Rd
Tel: +44 1304 814800 Sandwich
Fax: +44 1304 814899 Kent, CT13 0PL, UK

signature.asc (250 Bytes)

2

Dear List,

We’re thinking about proving an IRC service for our customers to
communicate with us, and as part of that we’d like to be able to
integrate it with RT for ticketing and ultimately billing purposes.
RT already does WWW and SMTP – why not IRC too?

Searching with google finds a lot of references to chat rooms about
RT, but not what I’m looking for. Searching the RT Wiki and CPAN has
turned up nothing appropriate, although the RT bot at
http://www.dmo.ca/projects/hacks/RT/RT.bm is more like it. Alas, it
doesn’t have the sort of functionality I’m after.

I guess the sort of thing I’m looking for hasn’t been done yet, but I
thought I’d ask if anyone knew of some all-singing all-dancing RT-capable
chat-bots out there? I’d be interested to hear of anyone’s experiences
in doing something similar.

At the moment I’m only gathering the information we’ll need before we
decide whether to go ahead with this IRC project or not; part of that
will be to evaluate what we can afford to spend on programmer and admin
time in setting it up.

the Bunker eh? Way cool - I would love to work there - but I am on the other side of the pond so to speak… You must feel very safe when you are at work… emf aside.

Anyway, what kind of functionlity are you looking for from an IRC bot? I did one a while back to handle querying servers for information / status / etc… but found some of the limitations on IRC annoying (try passing large amounts of text data over irc… ewwww).

I probably can’t help you, but I was really curious about what you see it doing for you…

3

Bill wrote:

the Bunker eh? Way cool - I would love to work there - but I am on
the other side of the pond so to speak… You must feel very safe
when you are at work… emf aside.

Actually The Bunker is designed to survive a 250 kilotonne airburst
directly over it, including all the EMP effects. The main technical
areas are within a double layer Faraday cage and there are within that
some special areas with even more shielding. As it is, we believe that
our clients will be immune from any plausible EMP weapons powered by
anything less than a nuclear bomb…

Of course, we just keep the computers down there. Most of the time we
work in some fairly ordinary offices above ground.

Anyway, what kind of functionlity are you looking for from an IRC
bot? I did one a while back to handle querying servers for
information / status / etc… but found some of the limitations on
IRC annoying (try passing large amounts of text data over irc…
ewwww).

Yeah – it’s mostly about tracking and logging chat sessions against
tickets, plus we need to keep the different clients separated into
their own channels – it wouldn’t do for them to be able to see each
other’s sessions – so we need a mechanism for alerting the support
techs. to go and join a particular channel when there’s any activity.

I probably can’t help you, but I was really curious about what you
see it doing for you…>

It’s pretty much the same sort of functionality as you’ld get with the
e-mail or web interfaces to RT only slightly modified to cope with the
particular idiosyncrasies of IRC.

Cheers,

Matthew

Dr Matthew Seaman The Bunker, Ash Radar Station
PGP: 0x60AE908C on servers Marshborough Rd
Tel: +44 1304 814800 Sandwich
Fax: +44 1304 814899 Kent, CT13 0PL, UK

signature.asc (250 Bytes)

4

Heya Matthew,

I think that you’ll find that as IRC is a more free-flowing medium than
email, you’ll have a hard time integrating it into RT. It’s not clear
to the system which conversation items are connected to which tickets.
In email, you have subjects that can be connected to a ticket #, but
there’s no equivalent structure in IRC to separate issues.

Also, you may want to look at IM/web-based chat as an alternative to
IRC. When handling support issues, a one on one chat session can be
preferable to a channel-based system. People generally want to talk to
a company representative rather than other customers looking for help.
In addition, if you go with a web-based solution, it can be SSL and you
can integrate it with your authentication system so that the user’s
identity is verified before they’re connected to a tech.

We provide AIM and MSN support to our customers, and the way that we
handle it is that in the event that their request requires either
billing or followup action, we paste the conversation into a ticket and
then let it go through our normal support handling/billing workflow. If
it’s just a simple question that doesn’t require followup, we won’t add
it into the system.

I hope that you find this helpful. Best of luck optimizing your
customer contact.

Cheers,
Erek Dyskant
System Administrator
Blumenthals.comOn Fri, 2006-12-22 at 09:19 +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:

Dear List,

We’re thinking about proving an IRC service for our customers to
communicate with us, and as part of that we’d like to be able to
integrate it with RT for ticketing and ultimately billing purposes.
RT already does WWW and SMTP – why not IRC too?

Searching with google finds a lot of references to chat rooms about
RT, but not what I’m looking for. Searching the RT Wiki and CPAN has
turned up nothing appropriate, although the RT bot at
http://www.dmo.ca/projects/hacks/RT/RT.bm is more like it. Alas, it
doesn’t have the sort of functionality I’m after.

I guess the sort of thing I’m looking for hasn’t been done yet, but I
thought I’d ask if anyone knew of some all-singing all-dancing RT-capable
chat-bots out there? I’d be interested to hear of anyone’s experiences
in doing something similar.

At the moment I’m only gathering the information we’ll need before we
decide whether to go ahead with this IRC project or not; part of that
will be to evaluate what we can afford to spend on programmer and admin
time in setting it up.

Cheers,

Matthew

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5

We’re thinking about proving an IRC service for our customers to
communicate with us, and as part of that we’d like to be able to
integrate it with RT for ticketing and ultimately billing purposes.
RT already does WWW and SMTP – why not IRC too?

When I first read this, I thought IRC would not be right for this
task: it is a shared discussion and tracking who’s talking about what
is troublesome.

It did seem logical though to add an IM interface, probably based on
jabber. You’d “chat” with your ticket. Though this would probably
be more of a cool interface for an admin to manage tickets instead of
using the CLI program.

smime.p7s (2.47 KB)

6

Vivek Khera wrote:

We’re thinking about proving an IRC service for our customers to
communicate with us, and as part of that we’d like to be able to
integrate it with RT for ticketing and ultimately billing purposes.
RT already does WWW and SMTP – why not IRC too?

When I first read this, I thought IRC would not be right for this task:
it is a shared discussion and tracking who’s talking about what is
troublesome.

It did seem logical though to add an IM interface, probably based on
jabber. You’d “chat” with your ticket. Though this would probably be
more of a cool interface for an admin to manage tickets instead of using
the CLI program.

Hmmm… yes. IM(XMPP) certainly does seem like a better choice rather
than IRC. I particularly like the difference in the way authentication is
done – especially if we can get it hooked up using SASL to a common
back-end directory for authentication to various other services as per
RFC 3920. Nice.

Using this interface as an administrative means of managing ticket status
is certainly a cool idea, but not a primary objective. The big win, as I see
it, is that you get all the immediacy of a telephone call with the added
ability of the client to cut’n’paste from the screen.

Cheers,

Matthew

Dr Matthew Seaman The Bunker, Ash Radar Station
PGP: 0x60AE908C on servers Marshborough Rd
Tel: +44 1304 814800 Sandwich
Fax: +44 1304 814899 Kent, CT13 0PL, UK

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