RT Essentials - O'Reilly's Latest Release

For Immediate Release
For more information, a review copy, cover art, or an interview with
the authors, contact:
Kathryn Barrett (707) 827-7094 or kathrynb@oreilly.com

The Ticket to Managing Teams and Projects
O'Reilly Releases "RT Essentials"

Sebastopol, CA--In a typical organization, there's always plenty to be
done: Vendors need to be paid. Customers need to be invoiced.  Sales
inquiries need to be answered.  Bugs in hardware or software need to be
fixed. And when the end of the day rolls around, someone has to keep track
of who wanted what, who did it, when it got done, and most important, what
remains undone.

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 (Request
Tracker) is a high-level, open source ticketing system that allows a group
of people to efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a
community of users.  In "RT Essentials" (O'Reilly, US $34.95), authors
Jesse Vincent--one of RT's core developers, Robert Spier, Dave Rolsky,
Darren Chamberlain, and Richard Foley introduce the system and explain its
uses for end-users, system administrators, and developers who are
interested in using RT to manage tasks.

Jesse Vincent originally developed RT while working as a summer intern at
a web design shop. The company's founders allowed him to take his creation
with him, continue to hack on it, and offer it to others to use. "Over the
next few years, I found more and more organizations picking RT up for
tracking everything from security incidents to sales inquiries to email
counseling sessions for troubled teens," Vincent recalls. "Our current
best guess is that over 10,000 organizations use RT."

RT is especially important in our current business world because, "RT can
help a company to track each step of the inevitably complex flow of
international service and production processes, and this is a good thing,"
notes coauthor Foley.  "RT uses the thin-client (web-based) model, and is
especially suited to today's networked structure."

Coauthor Dave Rolsky agrees, adding, "RT is a tool I use every day, and
it's very powerful, but has needed better documentation for awhile. This
book will help fill the documentation gaps."

The book starts off with a quick background lesson about ticketing
systems, and then explains how to install and configure RT.  Readers will
learn how to perform day-to-day tasks that turn their RT servers into
highly useful tracking tools. Among other topics, the book examines how a
company can use RT to manage its internal processes. Advanced chapters,
aimed at developers, focus on creating add-on tolls and utilities using
Perl and Mason. Other topics include:

-Maintaining an RT installation
-Customizing RT with templates, actions, and scripts
-Using RT from the command-line
-The nuts and bolts of RT's internals
-Tips on contributing code to RT

No matter what kind of data an organization tracks--from sales inquiries
to security incidents or anything in between--"RT Essentials" is the
ticket to instilling order where it's needed most.

Additional Resources:

Chapter 13, "An Architecture for Digital Identity," is available online
at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/digidentity/chapter/index....

For more information about the book, including table of contents, index,
author bios, and samples, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/digidentity/

For a cover graphic in JPEG format, go to:
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/grap hics/book_covers/hi-res/0596006683.jpg

RT Essentials
Jesse Vincent, Robert Spier, Dave Rolsky, Darren Chamberlain, and Richard
Foley
ISBN: 0-596-00668-3, 200 pages, $34.95 US, $48.95 CA
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000
http://www.oreilly.com
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472

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