Planned System Maintenance Notice

Date: October 21, 2026

Time: 9:00 PM – 11:00 PM EDT

Please be advised that the RT system will undergo scheduled maintenance tonight from 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM. During this two-hour maintenance window, RT will be temporarily unavailable.

What We Are Doing

We are proactively upgrading RT from version 6.0.2 to 6.0.3 to apply essential security fixes and ensure the system remains safe, reliable, and up to date.

What You Need to Know

• System Impact: Access to RT will be fully restricted between 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM. Please save your work and log out prior to 9:00 PM.

• Feature Changes: RT version 6.0.3 includes a few feature updates and changes.

• Release Notes: For full details on the changes included in this release, please review the complete RT 6.0.3 Release Notes & Changelog.

We appreciate your patience and cooperation as we work to keep our systems secure.

Help

If you need assistance, please contact the Technology Support Center at UMBC Help or  410-455-3838.

The first draft of the above announcement was generated using AI and edited by the Division of Information Technology Communications and IT teams.

You may have heard the news: RT is better, shinier, and faster than ever before! The move to RT 6 brings a more intuitive experience to our daily workflows. While there are plenty of technical improvements under the hood, here are the standout features that will make your day-to-day tasks smoother and more efficient.

What’s New in RT 6?

1. Avatars: A More Visual Experience
   RT has gotten much more colorful. RT 6 introduces native support for user avatars. Instead of just seeing names, users are now visually identified throughout the interface—such as in ticket history and menus—using either uploaded images or auto-generated initials.
   Pro Tip: Update your look on the About Me! Go to your Initials > Settings > About Me > Picture.
   
   

2. Modern Compose Window
   The editor is newly upgraded and offers a cleaner toolbar and superior native support for dark mode. Most importantly: you can now build links using text! No more messy URLs cluttering your responses. You can now also paste images directly into your reply without having to save them and attach them as an image. 

1. Calendar View
   Need to visualize your deadlines? In any saved search, look for the grid of four boxes on the top right. You can now toggle between a standard table and a color-coded calendar view. Try adding "Date" fields to your searches to see a helpful layout of upcoming due dates.
   
   

2. Smarter Inline Editing
   When you make an inline edit to a ticket, RT 6 automatically reloads the ticket history and smoothly scrolls you to the newly added transaction. Inline Editing is practically everywhere. On the ticket display page, look for the subtle edit icons next to fields like Owner, Status, or Custom Fields. You can change these values right on the display page, and they will save instantly in the background without refreshing your screen.
   
   
   

3. Seamless Mobile Support
   Working on the go? The interface now scales beautifully on mobile and zoomed-in screens. Navigational menus now auto-close on click and dynamically highlight your active sections for better clarity.
   
   

4. Log your time in My Day and My Week
   If you’re a heavy user of the “Time Worked” part of RT, updating tickets individually is a chore. Instead, go to Tools > My Week and see an overview of all tickets worked this week and an easy way to add time to all of the tickets at once. My Day provides an easy way to enter updates all at once with multiple assigned tickets.
   
   

There are many tips and tricks for the beginner to the expert - did you know…

• There’s a dark mode for RT? Set your Theme Mode to dark on the Preferences page (Initials > Settings > Preferences) and hit Save Changes. 

• That if you highlight text on the ticket display screen and reply, it quotes the text in your reply?

• There are handy keyboard shortcuts to quickly navigate and triage tickets - press the ? (Shift + /) on your keyboard to see them! 

• If you type a ticket number into search and hit Enter, RT will take you straight to that ticket?

• At the top of the Ticket History section, look for the little link that says "Hide ticket history" or the option to filter out system messages. You can toggle this so you only see the actual comments and email replies from humans, collapsing all the automated system noise.
  
  

There are many more improvements under the hood, and more to come. Let us know what you’ve been enjoying in the new RT upgrade! If you have any questions or concerns, you can Request Help here. 

In order to facilitate a mandatory upgrade to the RT server environments, it will be necessary to take down the RT (Request Tracker) system.  The system will be down from Friday, January 13, 2023 5:00 pm until 7:00 pm.

During that time, you will be unable to retrieve information or perform transactions in the system.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Joe Kirby, AVP, Business Systems, DoIT

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, DoIT's systems staff  will need to take RT offline for approximately 30 minutes at 10:00pm tonight to perform some system maintenance.

“There would be people stopping at the desk for on the cuff technical support.”

“RT does all the heavy lifting, and gets it done.”

“Other universities point to what we have and say ‘I want that’”