Hi Mat,

this is by no means an easy question. In general you can use RTC for ticketing. Like on Jazz.net using https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWelcome you can allow your customers to create work items.

One of the issues with this is the openness of RTC. If you can tolerate everyone being able to see all requests, RTC is ideal. If you want to have customers isolated from each other and from the development team, you would have to solve some issues.

You can specify AccessGroups for RTC that can be used to allow only the Access Group Members to access specific work items. However there is no good automation that would help to automate assigning the access groups as far as I know. I assume you would have to create some kind of automation to do so. I have not thought about it really, so I am not sure which data you could use to group users by customers. Maybe you would have to implement some custom UI to submit the work item that also provides the customer information that you could use to set the access permissions.

In any case, you would have to have the user in the user database (e.g. LDAP) so probably have to have a special LDAP for CLM and the external users, otherwise they would not be able to log into RTC and the dashboard could could not be personalized.

You could use a special RTC instance where the customers have access and can create work items. Here you could use the access restrictions tied to the category for access management. This would require a team for each customer. The developers could link their work items to this one and work with data the customer would not be able to see in different project areas. The caveat would be that status updates on linked work items will not show up there. So the developers would likely top have to communicate with the customer using the customer's work item and would have to update it as well, if the work is done.

As you see, there are a lot of considerations around this dependent from how open you want to work.

Mat,

We have implemented a ticketing system for our helpdesk folks using RTC. We use the simple process. The key is to create a project area with two separate user roles: "requesters" and "team members". Requesters are the users who can request some help. They can only submit a ticket (work item) and comment on it. Team members are the helpdesk techs and they have full access to the work items.

We created a custom field "Technical solution" which is just text and which is only modifiable by team members. It records the steps taken by the helpdesk to solve the problem.

It's helpful to have an LDAP user directory, so users can be imported in the project area as requesters without having to create an ID.

We slightly simplified the default workflow and removed an unnecessary state. A ticket can be in the Assigned, Open, Resolved or Closed state. A ticket is resolved when helpdesk proposes a solution. Upon user acceptance, it is closed. Only team members can transition work items.

You can use this article as a tutorial, it's quite complete: https://jazz.net/library/article/1003