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.