Best Practical is very happy to announce the first release candidate of RT::Extension::Assets, an asset tracking extension for RT. The extension leverages RT's custom field architecture, making it a very flexible platform for tracking whatever type of asset data you need to record. It also comes with some roles and rights to allow you to assign assets and manage access permissions.
As you might expect, the extension integrates with RT to allow you to easily link RT tickets to the assets they refer to. Is a user submitting a ticket for a laptop problem? Go to the user's User Summary page, find the laptop assigned to them, and create a ticket. Now you can see all the information you need about the laptop while troubleshooting the issue.
Tracking a service request for a server with a vendor? Locate the server to find out if it's still under warranty and find the details to provide to support. Then you can open a ticket in RT to track the service request from your side.
To help make it easier to try things out, we've put together a simple tutorial that walks through a few use cases. This should get you something up and running quickly so you can experiment. We've included a few custom fields with the tutorial to demonstrate how it might work. You can then add on as many as you need to track your asset data.
If you decide it's a good fit, we've built a CSV importer as a general purpose helper to pull in data from other systems. Whether you're tracking things in a spreadsheet or can export from some other tool, it's a quick way to get your data into RT.
We'd like to acknowledge Reed College, who collaborated with us on this extension and funded the development. They are currently running the extension in their production environment, so they were not only the major contributor, but they are also the currently the primary testers.
And that's where you come in. This is the first RC and we'd like to get to an official release as soon as possible. If you've been eagerly waiting for this extension or are pleasantly surprised to learn about it, we need you to try it out and let us know if you run into any issues. Note that it requires RT 4.2.1 or later to run. We know you'll likely have feature requests as you start to use it, but right now we'd like to focus on bugs and issues. You can report them at assets-bugs@bestpractical.com or even send pull requests via github.