Rt Essentials: Managing Your Team and Projects with Request Tracker

by Dave Rolsky, Jesse Vincent, Robert Spier, et al.

Book Overview

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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596006683
• ISBN13: 9780596006686
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.1" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Worked for me

I needed to assess whether this application would work for me, and this book did great with getting me this information.

Helpful, but already dated

Request Tracker (RT) is a great product. I am the only sysadmin at a small company, and having an automated tracking system is going to be an immense benefit for me. I bought "RT Essentials" to help me get up to speed on RT3 really quickly. And, since it was written by the programmer who's responsible for RT, the book had lots of detail and tips. However, when it came down to implementing some of the code in the book, I found that it was already outdated. For example, I tried to set up the Autoreply template with Password by copying the code straight out of the book. It didn't work because the program codebase has changed too much since the book was released. I was able to fix my template problem by hooking into the great RT user community, where the author contributes frequently. All in all, I thought the book was really helpful for getting RT installed and getting me up to speed. For the nitty-gritty, I'd rely on the online wiki and great user community.

Excellent Software, but Average Book

We've been using RT for several years. As one happy customer mentions at Best Practical's site, managing a project or service driven organization without RT is like watching TV without a TiVo. The software is powerful, flexible, and above all, adaptable to many styles of management for more than just technology projects. No question, the software gets 5 stars. This book, however, is largely a reorganization of the information provided with the software. If you prefer to read printed materials instead of PDFs or HTML, this book will save you money on printer paper. But if you're looking for best practices, recipies, or enhancements such as those you'll find in the RT Wiki, you may be disappointed. In fact, for most of the advanced capabilities, you are referred by the book to other resources. The book does contain the occasional nugget, such as a half dozen lines of code to truly delete a ticket and related data. With some searching, you'd be able to find those, and better, at the RT Wiki, such as the particuarly valuable contributions from the University of Oslo (do an A9 search for "RT prosjektgruppen"). Compared to most O'Reilly books which set the bar for excellence, this one is merely average. However, I do recommend this book as an introduction for those considering whether it's worthwhile to move to RT from some other enterprise ticketing system, and for techs to give to managers who are more comfortable with hard copies than electronic documents. For any RT admin, it's certainly worthwhile to have documentation printed and organized in an easy reference, considering how much you've saved on the excellent software itself.

QUITE THE TRACKER!!

Are you an end-user, system administrator or developer who interacts with RT on an occasional or regular basis? Authors Jesse Vincent, Robert Spier, Dave Rolsky, Darren Chamberlain and Richard Foley, have written an outstanding book that is for everybody who has to use RT to manage tasks. Vincent, Spier, Rolsky, Chamberlain and Foley, begin by providing some background about what ticketing systems are and how they can help save your job and your sanity. Then, they walk you through the process of setting up an RT server and configuring sane system defaults. The authors continue by showing you how to get up and running with RT's web interface. In addition, they explain how to interact with RT from your shell or console window. The authors also step you through the basics of turning a virgin RT server into a useful tool for tracking what you need to do inside your organization. Then, the authors show you how to extend RT's standard behavior with custom business logic. Next, they provide a look inside the RT configuration at Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, a nonexistent company that makes heavy use of RT to manage their internal processes. Next, the authors walk you through RT's files on disk; as well as, the details of its database tables. Then, they describe how DBIx::SearchBuilder works. Finally, they show you how to set up a local sandbox for modifying and extending RT without putting your production server in harm's way. This excellent book will be considerably more useful to you if you have at least a basic understanding of the Unix command line. Above all, this book will be very useful to you if you also have a basic understanding of Unix systems administration skills, and at least a little bit of experience programming in Perl.

Short walkthrough of the basics

This is a short (~200 pages) walkthrough of the basics of Request Tracker. It starts with the fundamentals, sells the approach, then covers installation, the web interface, the command line interface and then into hacking and administration. The illustrations are good, and the text is well written, if a little terse.