RT Essentials

2017-07-07 02:10:07

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Yoyodyne's corporate internal helpdesk fields a couple hundred inquiries a day by phone and by email. No matter how simple the problem report or question is, a ticket is always opened. Eighty percent of the time, the tickets are closed out immediately with a simple note like "Told the user to reboot." Having a record of every call that comes into the helpdesk has made new staffing requests much easier and has helped to identify what software and hardware are the best candidates for upgrade or replacement during the next budget year.

7.2.1. Custom Fields

The Helpdesk queue has several custom fields.

Hardware device affected: Yoyodyne staff fill this FreeformMultiple field with the hostname of any piece of network hardware to which this ticket refers.
Severity: Yoyodyne categorizes its helpdesk issues with the same SelectSingle custom field they use for systems and network administration.
Location: This FreeformSingle field lets Yoyodyne staff quickly record a physical location for a given ticket. It's usually an office number.
Operating System: This SelectSingle field keeps track of which operating system a given problem report is about. Generally staff only fill it out when the first technician to deal with an issue can't resolve it quickly. This makes it easy for more specialized staff to find open issues they can help resolve. When Steve, one of the Macintosh specialists, comes in in the morning, he does a quick search for all of the new or open Macintosh issues that are currently unowned and takes responsibility for them.

7.2.2. Scrips

RT originally was designed for use by a helpdesk, so just about all the scrips that Yoyodyne uses for the helpdesk shown in Table 7-2 are included the RT distribution.

Table 7-2. Helpdesk scrips
Condition	Action	Template
On Create	Autoreply to Requestors	Autoreply
On Create	Notify AdminCcs	Admin Correspondence
On Correspond	Notify Requestors and Ccs	Correspondence
On Correspond	Notify AdminCcs	Admin Correspondence
On Comment	Notify AdminCcs	Admin Comment
On Create	Autoreply to Requestors	Password

Using a specialized template named Password, the Helpdesk queue has RT send a password for the SelfService web interface to each user the first time they submit a helpdesk ticket. If a user already has an RT account with a password, nothing will happen.

7.2.3. Templates

The helpdesk uses a single custom email template named Password. It's the autoreply with Password template defined in Chapter 6.

7.2.4. Groups

To make it easier to manage access control, all helpdesk staff is added to a Helpdesk group.

7.2.5. ACLs

To allow all staff at Yoyodyne to submit tickets to RT, the Privileged group has the following ACL rights:

SeeQueue CreateTicket ReplyToTicket

To let end users use the SelfService interface to log in, view, and update their own tickets, the Requestor role group has the following rights:

ShowTicket ShowTicketHistory

Yoyodyne's helpdesk staff is able to do just about everything to tickets in the Helpdesk queue, so the RT administrators granted the Helpdesk group the following ACL rights:

ShowTicket ShowTicketComments ShowOutgoingEmail Watch WatchAsAdminCc CreateTicket CommentOnTicket OwnTicket ModifyTicket DeleteTicket TakeTicket StealTicket