RT 5.0.0 Alpha 1 Now Available

As we announced near the end of December, RT 5.0 is coming and today we're happy to make available an alpha release for you to start to test with. Alpha means not yet ready for production, so at this phase we're asking for testing only.

Why Test Early?

We know testing takes time, so you might ask how it might help you in addition to helping us. One of the main advantages for you is you’ll get to see how the new RT will run with your configurations, customizations, and database. The earlier you report bugs and issues that surface in your environment, the better the chance that we'll be able to address them before the official 5.0 release.

This release brings a ton of new features and a great new look that we think people will want to upgrade to. Testing early allows you to be ready for when the official release comes out.

More New Features

We highlighted a few new features previously so check those out if you missed them. Today we'll mention a couple more, including one that’s had a big impact on us as we have been using it (yes, we have been running the new code for a while now). That new feature is inline edit and it provides a couple of new ways to update ticket data.

Edit Values in Ticket Listings

Right on your homepage, you'll see inline edit now available for fields in ticket listings. These include saved searches on your homepage, in dashboards, or searches you build in the Query Builder.

When you first load the page, you won't see it right away. But as you mouse over fields, you'll see a pencil icon appear which means you can edit that field right on the page.

When you click, you can edit the value right there.

Now you can easily go down a list of tickets and update subjects, reset priority, change status, and even update custom fields. For users who often need to check on and update many tickets at a time, we think this will be a huge time-saver. We provide a checkmark to confirm the change, but for most fields you just select the new value or type and hit Enter, making updates feel quick and natural.

Ticket Updates

Inline edit is also available on the ticket display page. Each portlet now has a button with the same pencil icon. You can click that button and edit ticket metadata right on the same page.

User Entry Display

We have also updated the look and behavior of users when you add them as Requestors on new tickets or One-time Ccs on updates. Values will still auto-complete as before and suggestions from the ticket are shown, but now as you add users they are displayed in a colored box so it's easier to work with each user as you add and remove them. You can even drag a user from one box to another. This makes RT look more like modern email clients and should be easier and more comfortable for new users.

Send Us Feedback

Ready to get started? You can find all of the details for downloading the alpha release on our forum.

We hope you find some time to test and try out these and many more new features. If you find bugs or have feedback for us, you can open a ticket in our public RT system . You can sign in with a Google account, post as a guest, or just send email to rt-bugs@bestpractical.com which will automatically create a public ticket. Note that we can’t notify you of updates on guest posts, but you can come back and check the ticket later.

Our next milestone will be a beta release that will be much closer to what will be version 5.0.0. We're still adding new features and fixing bugs as we work toward that. In the meantime, you can watch us on GitHub and watch here for information on more new features!

20 Years of Request Tracker and What's Next with RT 5

In October of this year, RT turned 20 years old, at least if you look at the commit for the official 1.0 release and the date of the 1.0 tarball on our download site. If you look all the way back to the beginning, you'll see RT is actually two years older than that, and even older if you look at dates in some of the notes in the initial commit.

Whichever day you want to pick to celebrate RT's birthday, we're proud to still be going strong after 20+ years and 700 releases of RT. And believe it or not, there are people out there still running RT 1!

RT 5 in 2020

As we prepare for another decade of RT, we're very excited to announce that RT 5, the next major version of RT, will be released in 2020. One of the biggest changes to RT is a complete update of the web front-end. We re-wrote the web interface in Bootstrap, one of the most popular and widely used front-end component libraries on the web today.

For many users, this means a modern new theme and a responsive design. For developers familiar with Bootstrap, it means it will now be much easier to customize RT's UI or even create your own new themes using the Bootstrap toolkit as a base.

Bootstrap-based RT 5 home page

We have also integrated Fontawesome and added sharp, clean, SVG icons throughout the user interface.

The front-end rewrite isn't all we have been working on. RT 5 will have a ton of new features to make RT easier and more efficient than ever. As a short preview, here are a few of the features we're working on:

• A new Javascript charting engine using Chart.js

New chart engine

• RT configuration accessible from the web administrative interface

SuperUsers will now be able to take advantage of RT's hundreds of configuration options by making changes right in the browser, no ssh required.

Configuration in RT admin interface

• Transaction Query Builder

You can now search for individual transactions and get transaction information in search results. This allows you to do searches like "show me all the replies I sent this week" or "show me all of the changes to this custom field on this ticket" or even "show me how many replies were sent by everyone on the Support queue last week".

Transaction query builder

Watch Us Work and Work with US

As an open source company, we develop in the open, so if you're interested in experimenting along with us, the future release is on the RT master branch, accessible on GitHub. If you have feedback, feature requests, or bug reports, you’ll see the new RT 5 version as an option in our public RT system. You can sign in with a Google account or post as a guest. Note that we can’t notify you of updates on guest posts. Coming soon, we'll have a demo site with the pre-release code so you can see it without building your own.

We're very excited about this new release and we think you will be too. We'll have more information in the new year and possibly some pre-releases that will allow us to get some testing out in the field. Happy (a bit late) birthday to RT and happy (a bit early) new year!

Sponsoring New Features in RT

We are always thinking about new ways for our customers to be involved with the future of Request Tracker. Since RT is open source, many of the features you see today are because of users just like you.

We get a lot of feedback from our customers about features they'd like to see added to RT, and while we'd love to work on each request, the majority of our time is focused on providing product support to our on-premise and hosting customers, or working on new features that other users have sponsored.

To help share future product ideas we’ve created a Sponsored Features Page. If you’re interested in adding a potential feature to the list, would like to help fund the development of a feature, or are interested in shared sponsorship opportunities please get in touch with us.

We'll be updating this list as we receive feedback, so check back in often to see what great features may be in store for RT!

Save time with Bulk Update

Have you ever needed to update several tickets at the same time? With Request Tracker’s Bulk Update feature, you can perform the same action on several tickets simultaneously.

Starting in the Query Builder, first create a search that finds the tickets you need to update. When you have search results that meet your criteria, select Bulk Update from the RT submenu.

You'll be sent to a Bulk Update page where you can select / deselect tickets from your search, and make changes like resolving multiple tickets, or updating various ticket metadata like priority, custom fields, and ticket starts and due dates.

Give bulk update a try today!

A Personal Approach To RT With Gmail

Request Tracker is open source ticket tracking software typically discussed as enterprise software used by various types of businesses and organizations. There are plenty of diverse examples of how large and small businesses use RT to manage everything from help desk requests to security incident response to software bug tracking. But at Best Practical, we also hear from users who deploy RT on a much smaller scale, sometimes only for an individual user.

Being the type of person who finds it thrilling to spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet and see what open source tool I can use for my own personal needs, I also decided to try running a personal RT for myself. I also happen to work for Best Practical Solutions, so I am always asking myself what the software I make is capable of.

RT And Email

RT is built off of email. Although strictly speaking email isn't necessary for tracking tickets, you could solely use the web UI with no email alerts or ticket creation from email, for my use case I wanted to incorporate my personal email with RT. Luckily I have my own domain name that I use for personal email.

In my experience most companies will provision many email accounts for their RT to use with addresses like “support@example.com” and “sales@example.com” for example. These would be two separate inboxes that when emailed would create a new ticket in RT queues “Support” or “Sales”. Simple!

If you're like me though you're not interested in paying for the Gmail subscription for every single RT queue you want to make (around $6 a month per email).

Email Aliasing To The Rescue

G Suite allows you to set aliases for your inbox, so for my case I only paid for the “craig@example.com” but now I can point many email aliases to my single inbox. For this example I created two aliases “craig-billing@example.com”, “craig-travel@example.com”, and “craigs-rubber-duck-collection@example.com”.

Setting Up Gmail To Work With RT

As part of the set-up described here, you need to enable “less secure apps” with your Gmail account in order to fetch mail from your inbox. Once things are set up, you can keep your Gmail inbox as your personal inbox and use it with RT. Realistically we do not want a ticket for every email that comes into our inbox, we only want a subset of these emails to be preserved on our pristine RT life tracker!

Luckily for us Google makes it simple to automatically separate the junk emails and the worth-saving-in-RT emails through tags and filters. First let's go and create a Gmail tag called “RT”. This is where we will put the emails that we want to have RT open a ticket for. We don't want to do this manually though, so we can create a new Gmail filter.

We want the filter to check for our two email aliases as the “To” parameter and if one of them is indeed the value for the “To” parameter, go ahead and add one of our Gmail tags “RT/Travel” or “RT/Billing”.

Now that Gmail is all set let's hop onto our RT server and set-up our email fetching.

Getmail And rt-mailgate

We will use Getmail to fetch out emails from our RT inbox and pipe them to RT.

Getmail parameters can be stored in a config file and I will put mine at "/opt/rt4/etc/getmailrc-travel" with the following content: (Note you need one file for each email alias)

[retriever]
    type      = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
    server    = imap.gmail.com
    username  = craig@mydomain.com
    password  = supersecret
    mailboxes = ("RT/Travel",)

[destination]
    type      = MDA_external
    path      = /opt/rt4/bin/rt-mailgate
    arguments = ("--url", "http://rt.mydomain.com", "--queue", "
Travel
", "--action", "correspond",)

[options]
    read_all = false
    delete = true
    message_log = /var/log/getmail.log

Now lets break down the important parts here:

mailboxes = ("RT/Travel",)

This line tells Getmail that we only want to check the “RT/Travel” mailbox. In our case since we are using Gmail it is the “RT/Travel” tags mailbox.

[destination]
type      = MDA_external
path      = /opt/rt4/bin/rt-mailgate
arguments = ("--url", "http://rt.mydomain.com", "--queue", "Travel", "--action", "correspond")

We use the MDA_external option and the rt-mailgate utility to send the email over to RT. There it will create a ticket or add to an existing ticket in the “Travel” queue.

Finally we can create a cron job for fetching our email regularly:

*/1 * * * * /usr/bin/getmail --rcfile /opt/rt4/etc/getmailrc-travel --rcfile /opt/rt4/etc/getmailrc-biling

Now we should all be set to track all the important things in our life!

The configuration described here works well for personal use, but there are some limitations that require changes to scale for business use. But if you’re thinking about setting up your own RT for personal use, it’s a simple way to automatically route some email to your RT life tracker.

Automatic Ticket Assignment with Request Tracker

It's important to always set the Owner on a ticket since if no one owns it, it won't get done. Some RT’s users take tickets as they come in or someone might be responsible for assigning tickets. But for a busy RT, wouldn't it be great to assign tickets automatically?

The AutomaticAssignment extension allows you to do exactly that. As you can see in the video below, this RT extension automatically sets the ticket Owner based on rules you configure. You can set a filter to define the list of possible owners and then a chooser which determines the method to use when assigning users from the pool of users. Get the extension today: (https://metacpan.org/pod/RT::Extension::AutomaticAssignment)

One default filter option allows you to set the list of potential owners to an RT group, making it easy to manage membership. The "Work Schedule" filter is a little more interesting. It allows users (or, perhaps, only their manager) to select which business hours they are available. Only users currently working when the ticket comes in are then considered for assignment.

One method for assigning tickets is the "Active Tickets" chooser, which sets the owner of the ticket to the user from the filter who has the least number of currently active tickets. The "Round Robin" chooser cycles through the available users list in sequence, giving each user a ticket as their turn comes up.

Automatic assignment is triggered by RT's scrips system, so you can activate rules per queue and select default conditions like "On Create" or define custom conditions like "On Correspond from Requestor."

As with many things in RT, the filters and choosers are designed to be extended in the future and we look forward to hearing new ideas for both.