A big change that you hopefully won’t notice

As of yesterday, new support tickets are now being handled in our new support system, which is powered by Request Tracker (RT). Hopefully from the outside, things look exactly as they did before: you email support@mythic-beasts.com, your request gets assigned a ticket number, and you get a timely and helpful response from our non-dedicated support team.

From the inside, this change is pretty daunting. Our support system is absolutely critical to our day-to-day work, and learning a new tool, and adapting all of our customer-facing process to use it is a big change. There are lots of little things like the canned “snippets” that we use when composing replies to common questions, and the processes to be followed when contacting customers in response to automated alerts. Doing this from a clean slate would be hard enough, but we also have to provide continuity for existing tickets, which can remain active for weeks, months or very occasionally, years.

We’ve been tackling the migration as incrementally as possible. Most internal, and certain external tickets have been handled in RT for some weeks now, but yesterday was the day that we flipped the switch on the support@ fire hose.

Our previous system has served us well for the 16 years that we’ve been using it, but it suffers from being closed source. There have been various enhancements that we’d like to have made, but we couldn’t, and ultimately our migration away from it has been forced by the fact that the standalone product is no longer maintained, having been replaced by SaaS version – an option that is out of the question for us.

Of course, not having access to the source code has made migrating away from it harder.

Open Source or bust

We actually evaluated RT a bit over twenty years ago, and decided that it wasn’t right for us, based mostly on some requirements that in hindsight seem a bit odd (RT has also matured a bit since then!) In selecting RT this time, we carried out a thorough evaluation of available ticketing systems, with one absolutely non-negotiable requirement: must be open source and hosted in house. We simply cannot afford for such a critical and hard-to-migrate part of our business to be locked in to closed source software, let alone a SaaS service.

Our primary goal with the new system so far has been to replicate the functionality that we had before, but once it is bedded in, we plan to make further enhancements to improve integration with our other software. Whilst in the short term we hope that you’ll see no change, in the long-term we hope that customers will see improvements to how we handle support.

We’re considering adding Request Tracker to our list of managed applications. Please drop us an email if this is something that you might be interested in.