tidbit – Introducing The Community Template Module

[Daniel Obee]

Hi all,

The plan has been around for a while and the OTRS Community Board (OCB) already promoted the idea on several occasions including the OTRS Community Meetings in Berlin and Dresden. Now it’s time to go spread the word and find support.
The full presentation of the mindset behind tidbit is to be found in the attached presentation (.pdf). So let’s sum it up and open the discussion:

tidbit – What it’s all about

The standard OTRS lacks a central and versatile template management for tickets, answers and text snippets. There are rather annoying workarounds like the standard answers, using FAQ as templates etc. All of them lack central aspects of a true template management as found in other helpdesk systems.
tidbit is the idea of having a central management for:

• text snippets,
• full answers, and
• ready-made tickets (ticket templates).

Imagine having direct access to a collection of queue-specific text snippets from within the AgentTicketCompose, have a list of pre-formatted tickets for recurring tasks and the option to use a the content of a standard answer in another answer. All that and a more – that’s tidbit.

tidbit – Who’s behind

tidbit is an idea deriving from the daily work of the community members. It was time the OCB would pick up the need and the ideas from within the community and give it a little inertia. So who’s behind? It’s the OTRS community!

Coordination will be handled by the OCB until we put together a project group. If you like to join up, please contact us.

As a community project tidbit will mostly be built on voluntary input. To get a consistent and professional result we will hire professional programmers do the core programming. We will have a pitch/call for tenders as soon as the requirements are outlined and the scope is fixed.

tidbit – What’s the next steps

By now tidbit is “just” an idea, but development will hopefully start soon. We are currently looking for partners that are willing contribute in terms of ideas, knowledge, development, and last but not least financially.

If you think tidbit is worth being supported – feel free contact us. We will find ways to honor contributors in one or the other way. This could be beta releases, mentions in prominent places and other stuff.

tidbit – What about you?

Interested in tidbit? Got some awesome ideas for GUI integration? Know some people who’d spend a fortune on a system like that? Wanna be part of the project team?

Send a mail to do at otterhub dot org now!

[ferrosti]

Good idea!
If I can support you with ideas according its implementation just let me know.

ATM we use PhraseExpress for use cases like that, but it lacks some technical aspects which makes it sometimes very hard to use in our environment.

[Daniel Obee]

I will soon start to post ideas how to implement part of the story into to 3.0 GUI. Text snippets are the easiest - I'd simply add a link next to [customer] [faq] and the others on top of the text editor.

Ticket templates and ready made answers will be more discussion worthy and the biggest part could be the admin interface. I really want to make it as intuitive as possible. We have to keep in mind that not all agents are tekkies...

Greets
Dan

[ferrosti]

Not all agents are tekkies, but at least one admin should be. And hopefully only admins have access to the admin area. And even there I often had the desire for a config history including admins name.

The important thing is to keep it all as clean as possible. Just show the agent what he needs, nothing more. No RMA answers on 3rd level queues, etc.

Another point is the implementation in its RichTextEditor itself. For some reason OTRS does not even translate Bounce messages. I assume that there is no point where the text can be parsed, translated, etc and a new hook would have to be implemented.

Inline images have already been a topic in the CKEditor forums and cannot be implemented due some technical reasons. I am not sure whether this was about images from clipboard or images at all, though.

[Daniel Obee]

The one (or group) who's in charge of the templates is not necessarily admin. That's why I wanna keep the whole administration out of the admin area. Think of the FAQ module.

You already can add pictures to the text in the editor (just not via c/p) as seen in the FAQ. Martin of c.a.p.e. IT told me he managed to paste pictures as inline pictures into mails from the FAQ module. I will have a chat with him about the technology behind, maybe we can use it for tidbit too.

[ferrosti]

Hi, Daniel!

Are there any news regarding tidbit? There is nothing new to the blog.
I just finished OTRS 2.3 to 3.0 upgrade the last weekend and I need some new challenges

After all I must say you are quite right about the admin link and templates. To have it more open I´d suggest to expand the menubar by a button like 'master data'. One could possibly think of moving signatures, replies, motd etc. into this group. This would enhance permission control a lot throughout OTRS administration.

Regards,
Chris

[Daniel Obee]

Sorry, I'm uber busy these days. That's why there hasn't been any update. Still the idea is growing and maybe I'll have something that's a big leap in the right direction. Can't promise though so I keep my mouth shut.

Meanwhile: keep it coming!

Dan

[vinnie2k]

Any news on this promising feature?

[brann]

I still don't really get the difference to the already existing text modules and ticket templates within KIX4OTRS.

For the OTRS 3.0, you get KIX4OTRS 4.0 with following options:
- Quick-Tickets = ticket templates with already pre-defined matching of specified fields like ticket type, queue, text body, etc.
- flexible text modules (text templates for answering mails, documentation within agent or customer notes or while documenting a phone call) --> text modules were already available for the OTRS 2.4 in the same range.

rgs, Anna