In a typical organization, there's always plenty that to do such as: pay vendors, invoice customers, answer customer inquiries, and fix bugs in hardware or software. You need to know who wants what and keep track of what is left to do.
This is where a ticketing system comes in. A ticketing system allows you to check the status of various tasks: when they were requested, who requested them and why, when they were completed, and more. RT is a high-level, open source ticketing system efficiently enabling a group of people to manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.
RT Essentials, co-written by one of the RT's original core developers, Jesse Vincent, starts off with a quick background lesson about ticketing systems and then shows you how to install and configure RT. This comprehensive guide explains how to perform day-to-day tasks to turn your RT server into a highly useful tracking tool. One way it does this is by examining how a company could use RT to manage its internal processes. Advanced chapters focus on developing add-on tools and utilities using Perl and Mason. There's also chapter filled with suggested uses for RT inside your organization.
No matter what kind of data your organization tracks--from sales inquiries to security incidents or anything in between--RT Essentials helps you use RT to provide order when you need it most.
Dave Rolsky is a programmer, author, and activist with a background in music composition and an obsession with Hong Kong films and the works of author Gene Wolfe. He has been actively developing Free (Perl) Software for several years and is a member of the Mason core development team. For more information about Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason please visit www.masonbook.com, a web site maintained by the authors where additional information and downloadable source code are available. Darren Chamberlain is an active member of the Template Toolkit development team.Richard Foley is an itinerant Perl programmer (since 1996), born in London, currently living near Munich, Bavaria. He fritters most of his time programming in Perl and Oracle, when he could be spending quality time with his family, reading or playing chess, walking or skiing in the nearby Alps. He has a technical illustration background, and has developed applications using Perl and Oracle on UNIX in the Aerospace, Internet and Banking industries. Responsible for maintaining the perlbug database, from 1997 to 2001, he has submitted patches to the Perl debugger, and written the perl debugger tutorial (perldebtut). He is the author of several modules on the CPAN including Oracle::Debug, an interface to the server-side Oracle PL/SQL engine, which was inspired by the Perl debugger. Co-organiser of YAPC::Europe::2002 in Munich, he is a also a member of the YAPC::Europe committee, the group responsible for organizing Perl conferences in Europe. High point was 24,000 feet on Broad Peak in the Karakorum Himalaya and low point 300 feet under the Yorkshire Dales in the North of England. Oh, and even the grey hairs are receding, when his daughters don't pull them out first! Jesse Vincent is the author of RT and the founder of Best Practical Solutions, LLC, a company dedicated to open source tools to help people and organizations keep track of what needs doing, when it gets done, and who does it. Before founding Best Practical, Jesse worked as the Systems lead for a now-defunct dotcom and a software designer at Microsoft. Robert Spier is a software engineer who has been working with RT for almost 7 years. When not managing other engineers at his day job, he moonlights as Best Practical's lead trainer, and maintains the perl.org infrastructure.
