Re: Evaluating Roundup for our needs

On Tue, 13 Jan 2015 12:55:34 +0100, Miklos Hollender <[email protected]> wrote:
> Use case: Internal IT with nether users nor IT really wanting to use an
> issue tracker, but we still need to log changes somewhere because auditors
> require it. Most likely scenario:
> 
> 
> 1)      1) User sends an e-mail to the IT person directly, not wanting to
> send it to the issue tracker
> 
> 2)      2) IT person responds back with question, putting RT into CC, which
> logs the message

At this point an issue gets created, with an issue number.  If you set
the tracker to send emails even to the originator, you'll get back
an email with the issue number in it.  It may be desirable to tweak
the default detectors so that the user gets added to the ticket (see
step (6) below).

You'll also want to set Roundup's email interface to *not* try to strip
anything out of the incoming messages (it has an option to try to trip
reply text; you don't want that).

> 3)      3) User does not bother to answer, IT person replies to the mail
> putting the RT into the To: field and writes something like
> @status=waiting_for_reply , RT updates the status

They can reply to the email from the tracker that has the issue number
in the subject field, that way they don't have to type in the issue
number by hand.  The syntax to update issue status by email is
[status=waiting_for_reply]

> 4)      4) 3 months later the user asks why is it not done yet. Instead of
> having to  find the old e-mail, IT person logs in to the web interface and
> makes RT send the whole history of the case to the user as a reminder  that
> it was waiting for the user.

This will require a bit of coding.  Emailing the issue contents is not
built in to the Roundup code base, but would not be hard to add.  (I'm a
consultant, feel free to contact me if you want to contract out this
work.)

> 5)      5) User replies to the IT person, who forwards the e-mail to RT
> which logs it as a comment

Here the IT person will need to insert the issue number into the Subject
line (eg: [issue XXXXX]).

> 6)      6) IT person does the work and replies to the user’s email with
> something like “OK done, please restart your software and you will see the
> change” and puts RT into CC and writes something like @status=done and RT
> updates the case

Again, if you have "always send email" set, there will be a copy of
the email from step 5 with the issue number already in it.  If you have
set Roundup to add the original user to the ticket, then the IT person
could reply to that message and it would go not only to the ticket but
also the user, and the issue number would already be in the subject.
Either way, you tack on the [status=done] to the end of the subject
to close the issue.

If you don't have the user automatically added then you just need to
insert the issue number by hand into the subject, as well as the
command to close the issue.

> 7)      7) When the auditors want to see a list of changes the whole thing
> can be printed out nicely for them

To the extent that your browser will print a web page nicely, this would
be built in.

> Can Roundup do this?

Yes, with one code tweak to add the one missing feature (adding a button
to email the whole history of an issue on demand).  Although you might
also be able to accomplish that by using a web browser to save a copy of
the page and email that (you may also find a browser that supports
emailing the page directly).

--David

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