13 Sep 2003

The Bluetail Ticket Tracker (BTT) is a system for creating, storing and keeping track of tickets. A ticket describes an issue of some sort. It can, for example, be a Trouble Report or a ToDo note. It is available for use (and distribution) under the GNU Public License. It can be downloaded here Short Introduction Different User Categories The users of BTT are divided in four different user categories: Staff, Friend, Customer and Anonymous. The access to the data stored in BTT can be tailored for the Friend, Customer and Anonymous groups, while the Staff group has full access rights. This (hopefully) allows BTT to be used both for Open Source Projects as well as in more commercial settings. In an Open Source Project: one or several people (Staff) hosts a site which runs the Ticket handling for a certain application a number of people (Staff + Friends) collaborates in the development which also include Ticket handling anyone else interested (Customer or Anonymous) may want to check the status of the Tickets (e.g Trouble Reports) In a commercial setting: a company (Staff) runs the Ticket tracker as an aid in their product development. the company may be spread geographically or may have development partners (Friends) the customers can report problems and track the progression (Customer) Ticket Handling A ticket consists of a number of fields, e.g denoting a release name, component name, responsible person, staus, priority, etc. The actual field values is defined by the Staff when the Bluetail Ticket Tracker is setup. The daily operation of BTT includes creation, editing, searching and viewing of tickets. The users can also activate the mail alert function which will send a mail to the user when, for example, a new ticket as been assigned to the user. Customer Information BTT can also store information about customers which can be useful in a support desk scenario. This makes it possible to connect a ticket with a particular customer. It is also helpful in a support desk scenario where the support engineer quickly need to find information about a customer. Knowledge Base BTT can also store more general information. This Knowledge Base consists of a mail store and a information store. The mail store makes it possible to retrieve mails (from a POP3 account) and store it locally in a BTT directory. Stored mails can then be searched, viewed and turned into tickets. The information store is divided in two parts, one external (for users/customers) and one internal (for staff/friends). The external area can for example be used for creating a FAQ (Frequently Asked Question), a HOWTO area. The internal knowledge base is intended for the Staff and/or Friends, and may for example store information such as address lists, how to fill in the expenses form, or contain description of the work process, etc. Multi-language support Currently BTT supports English, French, German, Spanish and Galician. Adding new languages is easy, one language definition file has to be created with a translation of all text that can be displayed. (If you do this, make sure to send the new language file to the maintainers so that it can be incorporated into the standard release) Unix Command Line Interface Tickets can also be retrieved and stored via a Unix command line interface.