Release Note: OTRS Help Desk 3.1.0 beta1

November 22, 2011 -- OTRS OTRS, the world's leading provider of open source Help Desk and ITIL® V3 compliant IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, announces the beta release of OTRS Help Desk 3.1 today, featuring the Generic Interface, Dynamic Fields and various new Ticket Management improvements.

 

Release Details

  • Release name: OTRS Help Desk 3.1.0.beta1
  • Release type: beta
  • Release date: Nov 22, 2011

  

 

 

 
 
 

 

Release Schedule

  • Beta1: Nov 22, 2011
  • Beta2: Dec 06, 2011
  • Beta3: Dec 20, 2011
  • Beta4: Jan 17, 2012
  • Beta5: Jan 31, 2012
  • Release candidate: Feb 07, 2012
  • Stable release: Feb 14, 2012
 
 
 
 

1. GENERIC INTERFACE - A Web Service Framework

  • GI is a flexible framework to allow web service interconnections of OTRS with third party applications.
  • OTRS can act in both ways - as a provider (server, requested from remote) or requester (client, requesting remotely).
  • Simple web service connections can be created without programming by configuring the Generic Interface.
  • Complex scenarios can be realized by plugging in custom OTRS extensions that add perl code to the GI infrastructure on different architectural layers.
  • Connectors expose parts of OTRS to Generic Interface web services.For example, a ticket connector exposes the ticket create/update function, so that they can be used in a web service regardless which network transport is used.
  • A scheduler daemon process supports asynchronous event handling. This is useful to asynchronously start web service requests from OTRS to another system, after the agent's request has been answered (e. g. a ticket has been created). Otherwise, it might block the response, resulting in increased response times for the agent.

With the Generic Interface new web services can be configured easily by using existing OTRS modules, without additional code. They can be combined to create a new web service. When configuring a new web service connection, the administrator has to add:

  • A new web service in the admin GUI
  • The basic meta data (Transport type (SOAP), URL etc.) and
  • Existing operations (part of a connector) and specify for each operation how the data must be mapped (inbound and outbound)

A Generic Interface Debugger will help the OTRS administrator to check how requests are coming in and how they are handled through the different layers.

1.1 Current Features

  • Network transports: SOAP/HTTP. Others like REST and JSON are scheduled to be added in the future depending on customers demand.
  • Configurable data mapping Graphical User Interface for key/value transformations with respect to incoming and outgoing data.
  • Graphical debugger to check the configuration and flow of information of configured web services.
  • A ticket connector allowing the use of OTRS as a web service for ticket handling. (Note: This connector is not yet implemented but scheduled for the beta cycle of OTRS 3.1). 

1.2 Outlook on future features

  • Additional network transports (REST, JSON).
  • The GI will replace the iPhoneHandle as the backend for mobile apps.
  • Additional connectors will be added to provide more parts of OTRS for use with web services (e.g. to allow the creation, update or deletion of agents, users, services or CIs).

2. DYNAMIC FIELDS

The DynamicFields Feature replaces the existing ticket and article FreeText and FreeTime fields with a dynamic structure that will also allow to create custom forms in OTRS.

  • An unlimited amount of fields can be configured using an own graphical user interface for administration.
  • The fields can have different types that can be used for both, tickets and articles. Available by default are:
    • Text
    • Multiline text
    • Checkbox
    • Dropdown
    • Multi-select
    • Date
    • Date and time
  • New custom field types (e.g. custom field type dropdown with an external data source) can be added with small effort as the fields are created in a modular, pluggable way.
  • A future scenario is, that DynamicFields can be used for objects other than tickets or in custom modules. For example, a custom module adding objects to handle “orders” in OTRS could use the DynamicFields to attach properties/data to these orders.
  • A database update script will transform historic FreeText fields and related configuration settings into the new structure.

3. TICKET MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENTS

3.1 Ticket creation improved

  • Multiple email addresses can now be specified as 'To:', 'CC:' or 'BCC:' when creating a new phone or email ticket.

3.2 Inbound phone call support

  • Inbound phone calls can now be registered within an existing tickets (until now, only outbound calls were registered).

3.3 Ticket overview preview improved

  • It is now possible to exclude articles of certain sender types (e.g. articles from internal agents) in the SysConfig from being displayed in the overview preview mode.
  • A certain article type can be configured which will display articles of that type as expanded by default when the view is accessed.

3.4 Ticket move improved

  • The screen shown after moving a ticket is now configurable. Options are the ticket zoom view (LastScreenView) or the ticket list (LastScreenOverview).

3.5 Bulk action improved

  • With the new bulk action, outbound emails can now be sent from multiple tickets at the same time. As tickets can have different queues, and these queues each can have different templates, salutations and signatures, these are not used in the Bulk Action email.
  • An additional bulk action allows configuring the ticket type for selected tickets.

3.6 Configurable Reject Sender Email Address

  • The feature allows configuring an email address instead of the administrator address to reject the creation of new tickets by email. This feature can be used in all cases where customers are not allowed to create new tickets by email.

4. PROCESS AUTOMATION

4.1 Escalation events added

  • OTRS will now create events for each of the available escalation types (response, update and resolution). This allows performing actions (such as notifications) before the escalation occurs, in the moment it occurs and in the moment that the escalation ends.

4.2 Notification mechanism improved

  • A new generic agent notification module allows the OTRS administrator to define messages that will be shown in the agent web front-end when agents log into the system.

4.3 Time calculation improved

  • All kind of times are from now on calculated by and based on the application server only solving the issues that were caused by variances between the clock times of application and data base servers.

4.4 GenericAgent improved

  • The GenericAgent can now filter for tickets change time.
  • In addition, the GenericAgent can set the ticket responsible for matched tickets.

5. USER INTERFACE, RICH TEXT EDITOR, CHARSET

5.1 User interface performance improved

5.2 Rich Text Editor Update

  • IOS5 support added.
  • Block quotes can be left with the enter key.
  • Update from CKEditor 3.4 to CKEditor 3.6, so improvements refer to the releases of CKEditor 3.5 and CKEditor 3.6.
  • IE9 support improved.
  • Resizable dialogs.

5.3 Unicode Support - Non-UTF-8 Internal Encodings Dropped

  • UTF-8 is now the only allowed internal char set of OTRS.
  • All language files are now formatted in UTF-8, which simplifies their handling and future improvements of the translation mechanism.

6. DATABASE DRIVER SUPPORT

6.1 PostgreSQL DRIVER compatibility improved

  • PostgreSQL 9.1 support added.
  • A new legacy driver is now available for PostgreSQL 8.1 or earlier versions.

6.2 MS SQL DRIVER compatibility improved

  • The MS SQL driver now stores binary data in VARBINARY rather than deprecated type TEXT as well as NVARCHAR to store text strings rather than VARCHAR (for improved Unicode support).

7. MAIL INTEGRATION

7. 1 Mail handling improved

  • When connecting to IMAP mail accounts, it is now possible to handle emails from a specific email folder, other than the INBOX folder.
  • OTRS can now also connect to IMAP servers using Transport Layer Security (TLS), useful for modern restricted environments.</stelios.gikas@noris.net>
  • From OTRS 3.1.x: Make sure you run bin/otrs.RebuildConfig.pl after the upgrade so that the configuration is refreshed. Otherwise the system may not work.
  • From OTRS 3.0.x: Please read the UPGRADING and INSTALL files for detailed instructions. There is a known issue in the DBUpdate-to-3.1.pl script of beta1 that may erroneously report a data migration error. If you encounter this, try the corrected version from http://source.otrs.org/viewvc.cgi/otrs/scripts/DBUpdate-to-3.1.pl?revision=1.62&view=co.
  • Bug#7454 - MSSQL should use NVARCHAR to store text strings rather than VARCHAR.
  • Bug#7824 - Tickets locked through 'tmp_lock' lock type aren't shown as locked tickets
  • Bug#7168 - Ticket Overview Control Row can only be one line high.
  • Bug#7684 - PostMaster Filter Module fails to create ticket if state set in filter is invalid.
  • Bug#6718 - error when running otrs-initial-insert.postgresql.sql by making otrs.xml2sql.pl write out utf8 files and by adding 'SET standard_conforming_strings TO ON'.
  • Bug#6444 - OTRS rc scripts checks and stops local mysql database and complains about having no database if you use a remote one.
  • Bug#2365 - Removed dependency on MySQL in RPMs.
  • Bug#7538 - CustomerSearchAutoComplete###!QueryDelay has incorrect pattern match.
  • Bug#4946 - Notification mails lack "Precedence: bulk" or similar headers.
  • Bug#7257 - Stats CSV outputs report name and timestamp as first line.
  • Bug#7236 - Ticket::!TicketTitleUpdate() does not update change_time of ticket.
  • Bug#7243 - Problem if current_timestamp of database system is different to system time (e. g. time()).
  • Bug#3549 - ACLs don't work against queues with nonlatin characters.
  • Bug#7216 - Company names containing "&" pulled from Active Directory cause errors in error.log when using Company Tickets.
  • Bug#7182 - AgentDashboard preferences are always translated.
  • Bug#6994 - AgentSelfNotifyOnAction is ignored for event based notifications.
  • Bug#6981 - ReadOnly CustomerUser sources should not be selectable for creating new customers.
  • Bug#7057 - Kernel::System::StandardResponse->StandardResponseLookup() is broken.
  • Bug#7053 - Installer page titles are not localized.
  • Bug#6867 - CustomerCompany external source requires change_time and create_time columns.
  • Bug#2452 - SMIME encoded E-Mails are not decrypted properly by OTRS.
  • Bug#3125 - No translation for ticket-state in notifications.
  • Bug#6618 - TicketIndex can not be created if queue name of > 70 characters exists.

The detailed ChangeLog can be found at:
http://source.otrs.org/viewvc.cgi/otrs/CHANGES?revision=1.2029&view=markup

  • JavaScript is required to use the agent interface
  • The following browsers are not supported:
    • Microsoft Internet Explorer before version 8
    • Firefox before version 3
    • All versions of Netscape
  • OTRS 3.1 supports only UTF-8 as internal character set. Non-UTF-8 installations of OTRS must switch to UTF-8.

openSUSE / SLES

Fedora Core / RHEL / CentOS

Windows installer (otrs4win), contains Apache, Perl, MySQL and OTRS

Source Archive - tar.gz