OTRS Help Desk 3.1 implements advanced features needed to deliver superior service to customers. 'With the power of our help desk still growing, we needed to come up with new possibilities to deliver that power to our customers.' said Manuel Hecht, Vice President Global Software Development. 'The solution was to create new features employing the latest technologies. In designing our improved help desk, we brought the user's experience and workflows front and center to drive our programming. The result is a state of the Art Generic Interface on top of enhanced features and accessibility.'

New Features in Help Desk 3.1

The Generic Interface is a flexible framework to allow integration of OTRS with third party applications via web service interconnections. OTRS thereby can act in both ways - i.e. as a provider or requester of information. With the Generic Interface, additional web services can be easily configured using existing OTRS modules. They can also be combined to create a completely new web service. The Generic Interface will therefore expand the range of calls you can make to OTRS, simplifying and enhancing the interchange of data in and out of OTRS to other applications.

The DynamicFields Feature replaces the existing ticket and article FreeText and FreeTime fields with a dynamic structure, which will also allow creating custom forms in OTRS. With this new feature an unlimited amount of fields can be configured using a graphical user interface for administration. New custom field types can also be created with small effort, as the fields are created in a modular, pluggable way. OTRS will provide a seamless upgrade path of former field types to the enhanced structure of OTRS Help Desk 3.1

The new Feature Add-On "External Escalation Notification" has been integrated into the standard version of OTRS HelpDesk 3.1

OTRS Help Desk 3.1 comes with several ticket management improvements. Ticket creation now offers the possibility to specify multiple email addresses as 'To:', 'CC:' or 'BCC:' when creating a new phone or email ticket. Inbound phone calls can now be registered with existing tickets using an own mask and the ticket overview preview allows to exclude articles of certain types from being displayed. Further more, certain article types can be configured that will be displayed expanded by default when accessing the overview.

OTRS is the world's leading provider of open source Help Desk and ITSM solutions. The OTRS product suite comprises a Help Desk, an ITIL^® V3 compliant IT service management (ITSM) solution, and an associated iPhone App. Over 85,000 corporate groups worldwide use OTRS to improve service, increase customer satisfaction and lower costs. OTRS is available in 32 languages, enabling multi-national corporations to consolidate their service operations into a single, unified solution. OTRS Group, the source code owner, provides world-wide enterprise support, consulting and engineering including process design, implementation, customization, application support, and fully managed service. Key customers include industry leaders such as NASA, Siemens, Nokia, Toshiba. For more information on OTRS products and services, please visit www.otrs.com and www.otrsondemand.com.