OTRS 2.4.0 beta1 - Aitutaki Beach released

[jojo]

Dear Community Members,

+++++++++++++++++++++++++ Release Note ++++++++++++++++++++++++

We are proud to announce that the beta1 release of OTRS 2.4
Codename: Aitutaki Beach (Cook Island) has been released today.

NEW FEATURES:
===============

(1) LICENSING CHANGE TO AGPL VERSION 3
(2) NEW MANAGEMENT DASHBOARD
(3) NEW STANDARD REPORTS
(4) NEW MASTER/SLAVE TICKET FUNCTION
(5) NEW HTML E-MAIL SUPPORT (WYSIWYG)
(6) NEW OUT-OF-OFFICE FEATURE
(7) NEW TICKET OVERVIEWS AND GLOBAL BULK ACTION
(8) AJAX-BASED CUSTOMER SEARCH AUTO-COMPLETION
(9) MOVEMENT OF ARTICLE STORAGE (ATTACHMENTS)
(10) POTSMASTER FILTER RECOGNIZES FOLLOW-UPS TO FORWARED
MESSAGES
(11) READ-ONLY PERSMISSIONS AND NOTIFICATIONS WITH WATCHED
TICKETS
(12) SECURE SMTP
(13) SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

DETAILS:
=========

(1) LICENSING CHANGE TO AGPL VERSION 3

Why AGPL instead of GPL? - AGPL and GPL are identical, with
one exception: For software used in an SaaS environment
Copyleft is effective in AGPL - which is not the case when
using GPL. Keeping in mind the growing world of SaaS, ((otrs))
wants to ensure that future developments continue to return
to the OTRS community. This is the reason for the switch to
AGPL.

Why v3 instead of v2? - GPL v2 is getting older and has,
especially in the USA, various legal uncertainties. In the
opinion of ((otrs)) GPL v3 is keeping the spirit of GPL v2, and
at the same time has been tailored to new needs. ((otrs)) views
GPLv3, more specifically AGPLv3, as being the best balanced
Copyleft Open Source License available today, offering
Protection for copyright owners and users and providing the best
security under the law.

(2) NEW MANAGEMENT DASHBOARD

The need for a system-spanning, next to real-time, and
personalized presentation of useful information led to an
integrated Management Dashboard. It is possible to create
plug-ins to display content from individual extensions
alongside the standard content. Standard plug-ins are:

* Ticket volume (new & open) from the last 24h, 48h and 72h
* Calendar including an overview of upcoming events
(escalations, auto-unlocks, etc.)
* System-wide overview of ticket distribution within the
queues
* First Response Time/Solution Time of Queues
* Integration of RSS

(3) NEW STANDARD REPORTS

The new reports provided with OTRS 2.4 are:

* Created Tickets
* Closed Tickets
* SLA Analysis
* Required working time per customer / per queue
* Solution time analysis per customer / per queue
* Answer time analysis per customer / per queue

(4) NEW MASTER/SLAVE TICKET FUNCTION

With the Master/Slave Ticket, it is possible to link multiple
tickets of a similar nature, and handle them collectively. As
soon as the problem is solved, only the master ticket must
be closed. All other tickets will be closed automatically,
and the solution text for the master ticket will be sent to
all customers of slave tickets.

A new link type 'Slave' will be available. All tickets with
this Type of link will inherit the following actions from their
Master ticket:

* Status change
* Email answers
* Change in FreeText fields
* Notes
* Pending time changes
* Priority changes
* Owner changes
* Responsibility changes

(5) NEW HTML E-MAIL SUPPORT (WYSIWYG)

With this feature, it is now possible to write e-mails, notes,
and notifications in rich text format (HTML format). Using a
WYSIWIG editor (What You See Is What You Get), it is possible
to comfortably write using formatted text and even include
inline pictures.

(6) NEW OUT-OF-OFFICE FEATURE

With this new feature it is possible for all users to activate
"out-of-office" to notify colleagues and OTRS of the period of
their absence. The out-of-office feature is active for a time
frame set by the user. Activation of this feature has the
following effects:

In the lists in which an agent can be selected as owner or
reponsible (i.e. Ticket creation or changing ownership), the
period of absence and the time till return will be shown behind
the user's name. This will help making the absence of the user
more transparent.

If an agent receives a follow-up during a period of absence,
the ticket is automatically unlocked and a notifcation is sent
to all agents in the queue. This allows immediate reaction to
the customer follow-up by another service employee.

(7) NEW TICKET OVERVIEWS AND GLOBAL BULK ACTION

Flexibility of presentation within the ticket overview is a
must. Based on the "S/M/L" (Small/Medium/Large) Ticket View
every agent has the possibility to change the view for each
type of overview (Queue View, Status View, etc) on-the-fly with
a simple mouse click on the appropriate icon. This allows for
the highest possible level of individualization and adjustment
to any operational situation.

Additionally, decentralization of the Bulk Action feature
integrated the Bulk Action in all ticket overviews (Bulk Action
allows processing of multiple tickets at a time).

(8) AJAX-BASED CUSTOMER SEARCH AUTO-COMPLETION

To streamline ticket creation, AJAX-based auto-completion has
been introduced into the customer search feature. With this, as
soon as the first three letters of a customer name have been
entered, the run-time search will offer a list of dynamically
changing names, based on the continued input, for user
selection. This means, that it is now technically possible to
create a ticket without reloading the page, reducing the time
spent on waiting for the page reloads.

(9) MOVEMENT OF ARTICLE STORAGE (ATTACHMENTS)

OTRS saves article attachements in the database by default. As
the database grows (> 50GB) this can become a problem for
backup/restore operations. From OTRS 2.4 on, it is possible to
store the attachments on the server's local file system; this
can be done on-the-fly in the live system. It only requires the
modification of a setting via the SysConfig. In most cases,
this issue arises only after production has started and is
often due to growing backup cycles. In general, above setting
will then be changed to file system storage. Although from then
on all attachments will be written to the file system, all
previous attachements remain in the database. The extension
makes it possible to relocate old attachments, in most cases
greatly reducing the size of the database. The service program
that takes care of this is "bin/otrs.ArticleStorageSwitch.pl".
To move attachments from the database to the file system, please
perform the following: "bin/otrs.ArticleStorageSwitch.pl -s
ArticleStorageDB? -!ArticleStorageFS? "

(10) POTSMASTER FILTER RECOGNIZES FOLLOW-UPS TO FORWARED
MESSAGES

Currently, e-mail replies to forwarded articles arrive in OTRS
as email-external. The problem is that the answers to these
forwarded articles can be seen by the customer in the web-
interface. Although it is possible to classify e-mails of an
entire domain as email-internal, this only shifts the problem.
Also, such step makes it impossible to properly service
customers in the domain, as the customer would not be able to
track tickets in the customer web-interface any more. With this
new feature, e-mail replies can be traced back, and email-
internal or email-external will be set based upon the original
Forward-Article type.


(11) READ-ONLY PERSMISSIONS AND NOTIFICATIONS WITH WATCHED
TICKETS

In the current release of OTRS it is possible for a user to
maintain a Watched Tickets List. This feature is dealing with
tickets marked as "subscribed" by a user. It has the advantage
that users no longer lose track of tickets marked as "sub-
scribed", and are able to view them on an individual list.
The "Read-Only" Feature - Up to now, tickets marked as "sub-
scribed" were shown in a list, however, the agent could only
actually view them if they were in a queue for which the agent
had read permissions. With the "Read-Only" Feature, agents
subscribed to a ticket always have read permissions on the
ticket, even if the ticket is moved to a queue where the agent
has no permissions. "Notify" Feature - Via a personalized
setting, every agent can define whether or not to receive
notifications about tickets, just as the owner and responsible
of a ticket would receive. This allows for active tracking of
watched tickets.

(12) SECURE SMTP

OTRS can receive and send mails in multiple ways. All currently
available methods for receiving emails have been implemented
within OTRS 2.3 (POP3,POP3S,IMAP,IMAPS). Until now, there were
two options for sending emails: using a local MTA (Sendmail,
Postfix, etc.) or per SMTP. In OTRS 2.4.x, SMTPS (Sercure SMTP)
has been implemented in order to keep up to the growing security
standards.

(13) SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

* Perl 5.8.8 or higher
* Apache2 & mod_perl2 or higher, Microsoft IIS 6 or higher,
Webserver with CGI support
* MySQL 4.1 or higher
* PostgreSQL 8.0 or higher
* Oracle 10g or higher
* DB2 8 or higher
* MSSQL 2003 or higher

YOUR CONTRIBUTION:
===================

* We kindly ask for your assistance to update the translation
files! The current status can be found here:
http://users.otrs.com/~me/i18n/

SOFTWARE DOWNLOAD:
===================

* http://otrs.org/download/
* http://www.otrs.com/de/download/software/
* http://www.otrs.com/en/download/software/
* ftp://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/ (Germany/Hamburg)

A complete list of all download mirrors (ftp/http/rsync) is
available at http://otrs.org/download/

MD5 MESSAGE DIGEST (128-bit) CHECKSUMS:
=======================================
f4d4d6ab8d41670065b21c9994f2d132
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/suse/ ... noarch.rpm
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http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/suse/ ... noarch.rpm
f160aa79ab323eb62e4c3ddc7f3edb78
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/suse/ ... noarch.rpm
56bae6f54d7d56ce470a5218dd2341d3
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/suse/ ... .noarch.rp
m
0cc0ff296d826350bc8476de80507b8c
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/redha ... 1.noarch.r
pm
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http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/redha ... 1.noarch.r
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4f3f29094acab3b6c387e68c9b909f33
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/fedor ... noarch.rpm
28b0ce26bde7da2a38c5c7a4dfd151b9
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/otrs-2.4.0-beta1.tar.gz
80621bbb5cb1af28b9e16d165beef40b
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/otrs-2.4.0-beta1.tar.bz2
3427cea8e2d5bd763f2a8163182af939
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/otrs-2.4.0-beta1.zip
bfb134652b332b2be552e40c024a3f90
http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/otrs-2.4.0 ... -2.0.3.exe

UPGRADING:
===========
For those folks who are using OTRS 2.3 and want to upgrade to 2.4
please read the UPGRADING and INSTALL files. We do not recommend to
use OTRS 2.4.0 beta1 for running operations. The stable release is
planned to be published 2009-07-01.

FEEDBACK & BUG REPORTING:
==========================
Although OTRS 2.4.0 beta1 has been tested before, we appreciate
your contributions. As always, you’re encouraged to tell
us what you think, using this feedback e-Mail: [enjoy at otrs.com]
or by filing a bug in Bugzilla [http://bugs.otrs.org].

((enjoy))

--

Hauke Jan Böttcher
Director Sales & Marketing


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Fon: +49 (0) 6172 681988 10 :: Fax: +49 (0) 9421 56818 18
http://www.otrs.com/ :: Communication with success!

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CEO: André Mindermann

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