RT's model for privileged users

Originally when pre-populating my user database, I thought it made sense to
make all of my users privileged so I could easily assign them to groups - I
noticed unprivileged users were not displayed in the user-management
interface by default. But what I’m seeing now is that there is a ‘great
divide’ between privileged and unprivileged users in RT. Specifically,
unprivileged users get the SelfService interface automatically, which is the
interface most users would want most of the time. Being “privileged” in RT
seems to inherently imply being “a ticket resolver” due to the dramatically
different interface presented by RT.

I was about to run off and modify RT to present the SelfService interface to
privileged users who can’t own tickets when it occurred to me “What’s the
difference? Why not make the general user unprivileged?”. On the one
hand, in my present use-model I suspect it doesn’t matter. On the other
hand, I perceive there is functionality like dashboards that can’t be
exposed to people if they are unprivileged, though having dashboards publish
themselves via an email address would work around that I suppose (I think
they can do that?).

In any case, is this the right paradigm?

  • privileged = ticket resolvers
  • Unprivileged = ticket submitters?

I sense having all of my users be privileged is going against the design
philosophy of RT, and would appreciate any clarification or insights from
other RT admins.

Thanks much!
-Rob

I sense having all of my users be privileged is going against the design
philosophy of RT, and would appreciate any clarification or insights from
other RT admins.

There are a number of problems just having a large number of legitimately
privileged users; many of the configuration screens don’t scale well with
a large number of users.

We’re looking at pretty much privileging all users here (to a greater or
lesser extent) but it does cause problems, yeah.

jan grant, ISYS, University of Bristol. http://www.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44 (0)117 3317661 jan's very old home page
“Sufficiently large”=“infinite” for sufficiently large values of “sufficiently”