RT Request Tracker

RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

The RT platform has been under development since 1996, and is used by systems administrators, customer support staffs, IT managers, developers and marketing departments at thousands of sites around the world.

Written in object-oriented Perl, RT is a high-level, portable, platform independent system that eases collaboration within organizations and makes it easy for them to take care of their customers.

RT manages key tasks such as the identification, prioritization, assignment, resolution and notification required by enterprise-critical applications including project management, help desk, NOC ticketing, CRM and software development.

RT is used by Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and development organizations worldwide.

Features:

Track critical data
- RT is your organization's focal point for tracking tasks, issues, knowledge, and collaboration.
- It's easy to submit, assign, prioritize, search, escalate, and report on issues.
- RT keeps track of each ticket's full history and metadata to help your organization better retain knowledge and analyze trends.
- RT can track multiple projects for multiple teams within a single installation.
- RT tracks critical system metadata, including time spent per action, due dates, and estimated time to completion.
- It's easy to record private comments that are not available to end-users.
- RT's web interface comes complete with an intuitive "iterative" search interface that allows end users to construct complex queries by pointing and clicking within their web browsers.
- Users can save and edit queries later, using their browser's "bookmarks" feature.
Convenient for end users
- Users don't need to do anything special -- they can just send email to RT. RT will take care of thanking them for their message, automatically routing it to the appropriate staff, and making sure all future correspondence gets to the right place.
- RT provides a simple, self-service interface that allows end users to view their own active and resolved tickets online.
- RT's web interface is designed to be easy to use from any browser. Just working in Internet Explorer and Netscape isn't enough. Your staff need to be able to get work done anytime, anywhere.
- Whether you use Windows, MacOS or Unix, your staff already have everything they need to access RT.
- RT works great from a handheld or screen-reader (for the blind.) Best Practical is working with users to ensure that a future release is fully compliant with Section 508 accessibility requirements.
- A powerful new command-line interface that allows power users to quickly and easily work with RT, even if they're out of the office is currently available for testing by the public.
- You've got customers around the world. RT lets you interact with them in their own language. Internally, RT converts all data to Unicode, so you can respond to users in their native tongue, but work in yours.
- You've got staff around the globe. RT's web interface has been fully internationalized. Right now, RT speaks English, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. Adding new languages is a breeze, if you need something RT doesn't support yet. On login, RT automatically detects which language each user prefers, so staff members can collaborate even if they speak different languages.
Easy to customize
- RT is written in object-oriented perl. Not only do you get the complete source code to the product with every download, but your staff can begin customizing RT to meet your needs within hours.
- RT's web interface and mail gateway are built on top of the same API we publish for you to write your own tools on top of. The interface is documented and there are numerous third party tools to use as examples and templates.
- Every organization needs to track specialized data. RT lets you define list-based and freeform custom fields to help track your tickets. Once you create custom fields, it's easy to search on them, just like RT's predefined fields.
- All of RT's mailing rules are based around a powerful custom business logic system called "Scrips." Scrips make it easy for a local administrator to make RT do ANYTHING whenever a ticket is created or updated, without making it hard to upgrade.
- RT's entire web interface is built on a flexible templating system that lets you build your own web-based tools or alter RT's look and feel to better fit your organization.
- If you don't want to radically change RT's interface, you can add your own components to RT's pages. A web callback system lets you drop miniature templates into RT's web pages.
- If you need even more power, "Code overlays" let you customize RT's internal behaviour without touching RT's core libraries.
Security
- RT has a built-in access control system that lets administrators grant user, group, and role-based rights to users.
- Users can be made members of groups for the purpose of access control. These groups are hierarchical, making it easy for administrators to manage access to the system.
- Rights can be granted globally or only to specific parts of your RT system.
- Users can be allowed the right to delegate rights that they have been granted.
- RT can use your web server's existing authentication system or its own internal password database to grant or deny users' access to RT.
Easy to install
- Unlike costly proprietary issue tracking systems, an administrator can have a basic RT system up and running in an afternoon.
- RT is built to be useful right out of the box. You don't need expensive consultants.
- There's no client software to manage or keep up to date. Your existing web browser and email clients are all you need.
Platform Independent
- RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. ( Hosting is also available.)
- RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports™and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
- RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.