Keeping track of all this IT crap

[Paul Lussier]

Ahhh! It was IRM, not netreg that I was thinking of.

Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> writes:



> IRM also wants to be a trouble-ticketing system and a FAQ system, and  
> I don't think it excels at either.

That's one of the complaints I had about it when I first looked at
several years ago.  IRM and RT approach things from complete opposite
ends of the spectrum.

RT treats everything as a ticket linked to a person
  - A person owns the ticket
  - A person submitted the ticket
  - A person worked on the ticket

In short, it tracks what people do in relation to the complaint that
was logged.

IRM looks at everything from the hardware perspective. 
  - A ticket is about some piece of hardware that has:
    - a history
    - a vendor
    - a serial number
    - a location
    - an owner
    - a contact person
    - etc.

I seem to vaguely recall that IRM wouldn't allow you to enter a ticket
that wasn't linked to a piece of hardware.  And I remember thinking
that IRM would be great if you could enter all your hardware data into
it, then directly link RT tickets to it.

Ideally, RT and IRM would combine and be one product.  There are times
when you really want to know everything about a single piece of
hardware and not search through 5 million RT tickets to accumulate
that history, and there are times when the complaint has nothing to do
with hardware and don't want to force the user entering the complaint
to attempt to link it to something it's not really related to.  

-- 
Seeya,
Paul