Is anyone using Trac as a helpdesk tool?

[Dan North]

Hi folks.

As the subject says, I'm looking at using Trac as a helpdesk tool and I wondered if anyone else was using it in this way? Have you tried it and abandoned it, or better yet tried it and found it does everything you need?

I searched the list archives for "helpdesk" and "help desk" and only found only a handful of threads, from 2009 and earlier. Google doesn't turn up much either.

Does this seem like a sensible use of Trac or should I be considering something else entirely to manage helpdesk ticket lifecycle?

Thanks,

Dan

[Eirik Schwenke]

Dan North skrev 04/01/11 11:45:

We are using trac as a help desk tool of sorts -- and it fits our (very
limited) needs well. We are still mostly using trac internally to share
and document information among administrators, not so much as a user
facing (visible) tool.

We are planning to move our support-(email)-list over to defaulting to
creating trac-tickets, but are still doing this on a case by case basis,
triaging out trivial issues that we don't need to document for posterity.

Depending on your needs, and idea of what a "help desk system" is --
trac can work well -- it's very customizable, and has reasonable email
integration via email2trac[1].

To the best of my knowledge the main missing feature is an easy,
automated way of escalating tickets based on age. But various
workarounds should be possible, perhaps using the xmlrpc-plugin[2] in
combination with a few scripts run by cron.

[1] https://subtrac.sara.nl/oss/email2trac
[2] http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/XmlRpcPlugin

Best regards,

--
.---. Eirik Schwenke <eirik.s...@nsd.uib.no>
( NSD ) Harald Hårfagresgate 29 Rom 150
'---' N-5007 Bergen tlf: (555) 889 13

GPG-key at pgp.mit.edu Id 0x8AA3392C

[W. Martin Borgert]

Quoting "Dan North" <d...@dannorth.net>:
> Does this seem like a sensible use of Trac or should I be considering
> something else entirely to manage helpdesk ticket lifecycle?

In my company we have one instance of Trac as the help desk system.

Pros:
- we use other Trac instances for development, no need for yet
another system for help desk
- integration of tickets and wiki is very useful, e.g. typical
customer
problems and solutions can be described in wiki pages
- email2trac creates tickets automatically and appends to tickets
- Trac has with its many plugins many features you might need,
while most other systems cannot be enhanced easily

Cons:
- reply to customers not integrated in Trac, you still have to
use MUA (notification is not an option, as internal changes
should not be sent to the customer)
- if customers reply doesn't contain existing ticket number, a
new ticket is erronously created, but there is no easy way to
merge tickets (see #3006)
- spam protection does not always work perfectly
- no integration into customer data base, e.g. contact data like
telephone, nor integration with any CTI or VoIP tool

HTH

[Flatfender]

I used it at a past company and liked it. The inability to merge
tickets is a problem, but not insurmountable. I'm getting ready to
hopefully replace RT at my current company with Trac. Here is a list
of plugins I used at my last company, this was some time ago, so not
all these may be needed or useful given the latest version of trac.
We used private wiki portion to have public and private parts of the
wiki which was really useful. So we could use the wiki to document to
user so sometimes they didn't need to put a ticket in, b/c the wiki
could answer their question. If you needs are simple it should work
quite well. Adding and tweaking fields will be of value to you.

AutocompleteUsers-0.4.1-py2.5.egg
BatchModify-0.2.0-py2.4.egg
BatchModify-0.2.0-py2.5.egg
BlackMagicTicketTweaks-0.1-py2.5.egg
BreadCrumbsNavPlugin-0.1-py2.4.egg
NavAdd-0.1-py2.5.egg
NoteBox-0.1.dev-py2.5.egg
PrivateWikis-1.0.0-py2.5.egg
TicketBox.py
TicketCharts.py
TicketValidator-0.1-py2.5.egg
TracAccountManager-0.2.1dev-py2.5.egg
TracAddHeadersPlugin-0.1-py2.5.egg
TracAdvParseArgsPlugin-0.1.-py2.5.egg
TracAuthRequired-0.3.1-py2.5.egg
TracDateField-1.0.1-py2.5.egg
TracHTTPAuth-1.1-py2.5.egg
TracNav-3.92-py2.5.egg
TracNewsFlash-1.0.1-py2.5.egg
TracNoAnonymous-2.0-py2.4.egg
TracPrivateTickets-2.0.2-py2.5.egg
TracUserManagerPlugin-0.3-py2.5.egg
TracWysiwyg-0.2-py2.5.egg
Tracticketstats-1.0-py2.4.egg
openFlashChart.py
openFlashChart_elements.py
openFlashChart_varieties.py
ticket_clone.py.bak

Sorry for not having a better list, I only got a plugins directory
listing after I left. You should be able to find them on on track
hacks though.

Matt P.

[Rainer Sokoll]

On 1/4/11 11:45 AM, Dan North wrote:

> Does this seem like a sensible use of Trac or should I be considering
> something else entirely to manage helpdesk ticket lifecycle?

We use trac for our internal helpdesk for about 5 years now.
All modules but the wiki module and the ticket module are disabled.
Pros:
Once it is installed and configured, it is a fire-and-forget solution.
Ability to open tickets via email (email2trac). Fine grained ticket
permissions via plugin.
Cons:
No escalation. No remainders when a tickets gets overdue. No way (at
least I found none) to force users to set their email address at first
login - no emails are sent out to the reporter then. Most users don't
care about the wiki syntax, so often the formatting is messed up. No way
to merge tickets.
In summary: To me, trac is a really good helpdesk tool. I can live with
its limitations. It is worth a try.

Rainer

[Flatfender]

Yeah we hacked trac and the email2trac to do AD lookups and fill in
the user records automagically so that we always had consistent info.

Yeah we hacked trac and the email2trac to do AD lookups and fill in
the user records automagically so that we always had consistent info.
And I'll second that the limitations for our purposes we're livable.

Matt P.

[Dan North]

Yeah, I was expecting to have to hack up some XML-RPC cron scripts or get into some Python, so that's not a big deal.

Thanks,

Dan

[Bas van der Vlies]

On 5 jan 2011, at 15:16, Flatfender wrote:

> Yeah we hacked trac and the email2trac to do AD lookups and fill in
> the user records automagically so that we always had consistent info.
>

Maybe this hack for email2trac is also useful for others. Cn you post this diff?

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Bas van der Vlies
ba...@sara.nl

[Rainer Sokoll]

On 1/5/11 3:16 PM, Flatfender wrote:

> Yeah we hacked trac and the email2trac to do AD lookups and fill in
> the user records automagically so that we always had consistent info.
> And I'll second that the limitations for our purposes we're livable.

We do this via a cron job:

#!/bin/sh
#

for user in `sqlite3 $1 'select distinct sid from session_attribute;'`; do
#
EMAIL=`sqlite3 $1 "select sid,value from session_attribute \
where name='email' and sid='$user';"`
if [ x${EMAIL} == x ] ; then
LCUSER=`echo $user | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`
EMAIL=`/root/bin/GetLDAPEMailForUser.pl $LCUSER`
if [ x${EMAIL} != x ] ; then
sqlite3 $1 "insert into session_attribute \
values('$user',1,'email','${EMAIL}');"
echo "Added ${EMAIL} for user $user in trac.db"
fi
fi
done

To write GetLDAPEMailForUser.pl is up to the reader ;-)))

Rainer

[Dan North]

Thanks - that's a really useful list of plugins. If I can get autocomplete-users working with ldap integration I'll be a happy man!

[Bas van der Vlies]

On 5 jan 2011, at 16:22, Dan North wrote:

Thanks - that's a really useful list of plugins. If I can get autocomplete-users working with ldap integration I'll be a happy man!

We have patched autocomplete-users to support ldap and set the session attriibutes for the users. So email is also working ;-)

[Dan North]

Hi Rainer.

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 6:50 AM, Rainer Sokoll <rai...@sokoll.com> wrote:

On 1/4/11 11:45 AM, Dan North wrote:

> Does this seem like a sensible use of Trac or should I be considering
> something else entirely to manage helpdesk ticket lifecycle?

We use trac for our internal helpdesk for about 5 years now.
All modules but the wiki module and the ticket module are disabled.
Pros:
Once it is installed and configured, it is a fire-and-forget solution.

That sounds fantastic. Do you mind if I ask what size of company you're using it in and what they do? The reason I'm asking is to understand  if you're working for a mostly technical organisation, or if lots of your helpdesk users are non-technical.

Thanks,

Dan

Ability to open tickets via email (email2trac). Fine grained ticket
permissions via plugin.
Cons:
No escalation. No remainders when a tickets gets overdue. No way (at
least I found none) to force users to set their email address at first
login - no emails are sent out to the reporter then. Most users don't
care about the wiki syntax, so often the formatting is messed up. No way
to merge tickets.
In summary: To me, trac is a really good helpdesk tool. I can live with
its limitations. It is worth a try.

Rainer

[Flatfender]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Bas van der Vlies <ba...@sara.nl> wrote:
>
> On 5 jan 2011, at 15:16, Flatfender wrote:
>
>> Yeah we hacked trac and the email2trac to do AD lookups and fill in
>> the user records automagically so that we always had consistent info.
>>
> Maybe this hack for email2trac is also useful for others.  Cn you post this diff?
>
>

I don't work there anymore, it's been 18 months since I touched it.
I'll have to dig at home to find the code, I'm pretty sure I have it.
I'm not sure what version of email2trac it's against either. It will
take me a few days before I can post it back.

[Rainer Sokoll]

On 1/6/11 3:40 PM, Flatfender wrote:

> I don't work there anymore, it's been 18 months since I touched it.
> I'll have to dig at home to find the code, I'm pretty sure I have it.
> I'm not sure what version of email2trac it's against either. It will
> take me a few days before I can post it back.

Go for that. If your patch is good, Bas will implement it, maybe with
his own modifications.
I know that ;-)

Rainer

[mark ardiente]

Usually you send a reply to a trac ticket notification email but sometimes you just have to
put that on a CC field.

 Can tickets be appended if the email2trac email is in the CC field?

Regards,
Mark