Making OTRS changes...

[new2otrs]

Hi,

To set the scene. New employee at a company, OTRS is basically unmaintained by anyone despite a multi office global presence. Basically around 2-5 employees per region use OTRS at any given time and i have been tasked to find out how easy some quality of life changes would be to make.
I have had a little play with an OTRS client i have installed on my computer but it doesn't seem the most user friendly.
I'm basically going to list off what a senior technician has given me and hopefully you can advise how to do something/ if its too hard/not possible etc. Thanks in advance.

1. "when a ticket is closed, the message that is sent to anyone involved should also have the following messaged included in their closed email : Subject of ticket and Name of customer who last responded/ List of respondees within the thread.

2.

Currently when tickets are categorized for statistically purposes a fault area is chosen I.e. signal problems, authorization problems, Product A, Product B, Product C etc.
How easy would it be to have sub areas I.E. Product A > Signal. Or would the best way be to just expand all the answers to be Product A signal problems, Product B signal problems etc.

3.

Another pane on the dash to show the responsible/owned tickets.// more ideally the tickets you have contributed to i.e. NOTE/response.

4.

Here's a big one, having more than one ticket open for replying/ having a save progress/draft feature(these later 2 I imagine would be less likely to be possible/a lot of work).


5.

Another big one, Currently the age is the age of the ticket, would this be easily changed till "age since last any response"?


They're the only ones that have been raised to me, I have tried searching and have read some of the guides.

It was also mentioned about having a chat feature, I attempted to follow the guide to it posted by a fellow forumer but got stuck with an empty iframe at which point i concluded that implementing that would require a lot more OTRS familiarity also leading me to conclude that some of the above aforementioned may be hard without a lot of effort.

Worth an ask I thought!

Many thanks to anyone that can help me out, if I haven't described anything to a good standard please

Jamie.

[CSL]

Please, let me try to explain why asking it this way is not going to get you far, and why your employer has unreasonable demands of a new employee unfamiliar with otrs.

1. Why this isn't going to get you very far:
You've basically said (eloquently and politely, but still) to a forum of volunteers: "Here's the stuff I have to for my job: can you do all my work for me, so that I get paid for it and you get me saying 'thanks much'?".

2. Why your employer's demands are unreasonable:
Many of these things are either very difficult or impractical. ALL of them require a good working knowledge of OTRS and web applications in general. If you don't know enough about OTRS to decide if these things are too difficult or not, then you don't have much chance of implementing them yourself without a fair investment of time into learning and testing.

The best thing you can do is work toward upgrading your OTRS install to the latest version before any more customizations are put in place. OTRS is not easy to upgrade, and changes like the ones you are talking about will make it very much harder in future, as you will have to hand-port them and alter them for compatibility yourself. Some of the features you talk about are included in the latest version, so it's a good idea to make that your first goal.

You need a test system that is set up the same way as your current install. (You'll want to look at Framework -> Core::Sendmail -> SendmailModule Setting, and change it to 'DoNotSendEmail' if you don't want your test system to spam the employees). Practice upgrading this test system to the latest version without breaking it, and when you do, practice and test some more to make sure it's really not broken in some way you haven't noticed. Only then give upgrading the production instance a go (with backups on hand to roll back at any time, of course).

Bitten off a fair amount to chew? You bet

[new2otrs]

I expected a response like this

I probably should of set the scene in more of a:

" are any of these changes easy enough to make that they could be written down in a few lines of explanation/// is there a guide anywhere?"

Anything passed that sort of level of playing around and I would simply say I'm not familiar enough// The changes are hard etc etc **Insert excuse that would get me out of doing it**

Basically hoping that if anyone had done anything on the list with their OTRS impart wisdom/ if nobody had done it before i certainly didn't expect someone to go and learn how to do it from scratch . I merely presumed 1-2 of them would potentially be something someone had done etc.

And with that being a bit clearer i'll also clarify that its not so much a me getting paid thing, I work as part of the support so this was meant to be a side project in times of low ticket numbers/ an an investigation into how easy OTRS would be to tailor to our needs i.e. when not busy learn stuff about OTRS with the aim of being able to better maintain it.

Personally I'm highly intimidated by the look and feel of OTRS with my main background being c/C++/Java based coding from my degree and that was a year ago with no use of any coding skills since.

Hope that clears up my expectations, Even if people went through saying
1, ALOT OF WORK,
2, REQUIRES X KNOWLEDGE,
3. NOT POSSIBLE
4. COMPLEX
5. possible but requires X

then it might put me in a better position when it comes to reporting back.

Thanks for anyones time who responds, Just from playing with OTRS I imagine you've had to invest a lot of time in learning!

[crythias]

1)

when a ticket is closed, the message that is sent to anyone involved should also have the following messaged included in their closed email : Subject of ticket and Name of customer who last responded/

Probably not worth it. Send them a link. There's no point in duplicating the website.
OR: Have fun. this will not be easy if you don't know the code.

2)

urrently when tickets are categorized for statistically purposes a fault area is chosen I.e. signal problems, authorization problems, Product A, Product B, Product C etc.
How easy would it be to have sub areas I.E. Product A > Signal. Or would the best way be to just expand all the answers to be Product A signal problems, Product B signal problems etc.

probably easier to report the fields that store this information.

3)

Another pane on the dash to show the responsible/owned tickets.// more ideally the tickets you have contributed to i.e. NOTE/response

again, probably not relevant. (Yes, for you, but you should save this as a search. Chances are, you contributed to thousands of closed tickets. And even if you contributed to open tickets, they aren't your tickets. If you want to be a watcher, enable that, but otherwise, consider your contribution lost in the ether until/unless the owner of the ticket wants to get you involved again.

4)

ere's a big one, having more than one ticket open for replying

multiple tabs...

having a save progress/draft feature

yes - not likely to be implemented (?) any time soon, although you might just add multiple notes.

5)

Another big one, Currently the age is the age of the ticket, would this be easily changed till "age since last any response"?

Easily? Not per se, Like most of this, it's *kind of* irrelevant. I'm sure it's hackable. Of the requests that take some time, this is likely to be among the easier (?) perhaps, but to what end? You can tell the last correspondence from the timestamps on the list of articles in TicketZoom.

[new2otrs]

1)

when a ticket is closed, the message that is sent to anyone involved should also have the following messaged included in their closed email : Subject of ticket and Name of customer who last responded/

Probably not worth it. Send them a link. There's no point in duplicating the website.
OR: Have fun. this will not be easy if you don't know the code.

2)

urrently when tickets are categorized for statistically purposes a fault area is chosen I.e. signal problems, authorization problems, Product A, Product B, Product C etc.
How easy would it be to have sub areas I.E. Product A > Signal. Or would the best way be to just expand all the answers to be Product A signal problems, Product B signal problems etc.

probably easier to report the fields that store this information.

3)

Another pane on the dash to show the responsible/owned tickets.// more ideally the tickets you have contributed to i.e. NOTE/response

again, probably not relevant. (Yes, for you, but you should save this as a search. Chances are, you contributed to thousands of closed tickets. And even if you contributed to open tickets, they aren't your tickets. If you want to be a watcher, enable that, but otherwise, consider your contribution lost in the ether until/unless the owner of the ticket wants to get you involved again.

4)

ere's a big one, having more than one ticket open for replying

multiple tabs...

having a save progress/draft feature

yes - not likely to be implemented (?) any time soon, although you might just add multiple notes.

5)

Another big one, Currently the age is the age of the ticket, would this be easily changed till "age since last any response"?

Easily? Not per se, Like most of this, it's *kind of* irrelevant. I'm sure it's hackable. Of the requests that take some time, this is likely to be among the easier (?) perhaps, but to what end? You can tell the last correspondence from the timestamps on the list of articles in TicketZoom.

Great stuff cheers, its basically all i wanted to here.

regards 4 - multiple tabs. Currently each new response opens in a single window. I.e. respond to ticket 1, leave open unfinished, respond to ticket 2, ticket 2 opens in the same new window that the first response opened in i.e. getting rid of response 1.

Perhaps this is our implementation or because its an older version of OTRS// the browsers behavior I dunno. But thanks for your time

[CSL]

If you're on version 3 at least, then this setting may be useful for you:

Sysconfig -> Framework -> Core::Session -> SessionUseCookie

"Makes the session management use html cookies. If html cookies are disabled or if the client browser disabled html cookies, then the system will work as usual and append the session id to the links."

Setting this to 'No' will stop OTRS from setting the session ID inside a cookie, and instead put it inside the URL, like http://servername/otrs/index.pl?Session=2453453455....

This will let you have completely independent sessions in different tabs, because each tab will use a different URL. Each session can have one sub-window open (like writing a reply) so you can answer one ticket per tab. Note that copying / pasting the URL from one tab to another will make them both use the same session.

You should also look into this firefox extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... -recovery/

If you accidentally close a reply window, you can right-click -> Recover text, and it will recover everything you'd typed before, saving you having to type it in again.

[new2otrs]

top response, easy to follow and simple.

I'll look into getting this done. thanks!