Redmine

Hi, all.

I was wondering if there is a plugin available or someone has a patch for the following ( I search but didn't find anything)

We have a lot of tickets submitted by the Internal users, that just phone in. Some don't have network access at the moment, some are just not that sophisticated, some are just plain lazy :-) I'm sure some people who have external customers also have similar problems when people call who don't have access to internal systems. Also there might be multiple users who could report from an external source like a client company that has 2-3 people working on a project: marketing, manager, etc.

So what would be nice to have is to add a user who reported a ticket, whose info (name, username, phone, email) could be either pulled from Active Directory (or some other ldap) or from a customer/client/user table.

I designed a system before (in php) that we used at my previous company, where you had a field where you entered ldap username of the user, and through ajax - it woudl populate their details - so that they would get notified of the changes on the ticket, plus the next person who works on the ticket, had client's / user's contact info right in front of them, and you don't need to type that info in the ticket all the time - especially if you don't have it handy.

Also a big plus for us used to be - if there is a trend of problems being reported by the same user - like VPN problems or something - so that we could either fix her/his problems once a for all or maybe we can see that the user needs extra training. Also it helped us determine to users who abused the system - by reporting problems - and they kept saying they couldn't work - IT was working on their problems (:evil:)

A possible solution would be to have a "customer table" that has all the customers - so that you don't have to bother with ldap , and then that table can be update directly from some external source by some cron job ( that would be the concern of redmine administrator), but the main feature would be to tie in that table with the "issues" view.