OTRS customization

[Loki_4wd]

We are currently evaluating OTRS in our search for a simple help-desk system.
There are several questions that we've got, so I would appreciate if you can help me to clarify the following aspects:

1. Is it possible to have a database with companies, while particular clients are the employees of that company?
Our support is company-based, so we need to map every ticket to a company. People that we contact with tend to change even throughout the resolution of one problem/ticket.
Conseqently all the reporting and statistics must be company-based.

2. When entering a ticked there are several required fields (e-mail, topic, desription). It is possible to make any of them not to be required? For example, we do not write down the cusomer e-mail when entering a phone call.

3. How to remove an entry completely? We don't want to store any spam which is automatically fetched from the incoming mailbox.

[crythias]

I think you'll need to include the customer email as OTRS is email centric. Since you want to be company-centric, (check out Customer Groups)

If you want to delete specific tickets, you can use the Generic Agent. If you want to block spam, you can try spamassassin, ASSP, or other things like exim filter

[Mike_B]

1. Is it possible to have a database with companies, while particular clients are the employees of that company?
Our support is company-based, so we need to map every ticket to a company. People that we contact with tend to change even throughout the resolution of one problem/ticket.
Conseqently all the reporting and statistics must be company-based.

Sure, usually, the best way to do this is to set the same COMPANY_ID for the different employees of one company. This way they can for instance via the customer portal see each others' tickets --> No need to use customer groups!
It's really straight-forward to report on a company_id.

2. When entering a ticked there are several required fields (e-mail, topic, desription). It is possible to make any of them not to be required? For example, we do not write down the cusomer e-mail when entering a phone call.

The email field is required, and it would not be easy to make that different. What you can do is pre-populate the records, for instance by hooking up OTRS to your CRM system or so. This is really easy. If not, you can maybe create 'dummy' records with fake email addresses.

3. How to remove an entry completely? We don't want to store any spam which is automatically fetched from the incoming mailbox.

what most customers do is to create a separate queue for spam. You can then set up a GenericAgent job to remove spam, for instance once a day. This will actually delete the ticket from the database. If you use SpamAsassin or the like you can use Postmaster Filters to send the tickets to the spam queue directly.

--
Mike.

[crythias]

Mike: is Company_ID the same as CustomerID? (thanks for setting me straight on the Customer Groups).

[diginin]

2. When entering a ticked there are several required fields (e-mail, topic, desription). It is possible to make any of them not to be required? For example, we do not write down the cusomer e-mail when entering a phone call.

The email field is required, and it would not be easy to make that different. What you can do is pre-populate the records, for instance by hooking up OTRS to your CRM system or so. This is really easy. If not, you can maybe create 'dummy' records with fake email addresses.

We do have users that have gotten around the issue of an email address by setting the syntax check to off, and then remapping the customer key. This is how some users do things like have machines (serial numbers of machines to be serviced) as customers rather then customers for example.