1.7. Why RT?

RT is designed not only to handle all the scenarios explored above, but it also is flexible enough to accomodate almost any variation with little or no specialized knowledge.

RT runs on a number of different mainstream platforms, including various flavors of Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac OS. RT supports several popular database backends: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Finally, RT uses Perl a language familiar to many programmers and systems administrators to make local customization easy.

RT also has a great user and developer community, with active email lists and a handy wiki (http://wiki.bestpractical.com/). And because RT is open source software, you are free to extend and change the core product to suit your needs.

This chapter has described what a succesful ticketing system needs to support a satisfied user base, without focusing on any particular tool or solution. The rest of this book gets down to the nitty-gritty and describes how to use RT itself, from typical installation scenarios to detailed configuration files, and from the commandline to the web-based GUI interface.