What's New in OTRS 3.1

The new release of OTRS is designed so that organizations can centralize their Customer Service and IT Service Management on OTRS: the newly designed Generic Interface takes back-end integration to your existing data systems to a new level. In addition, OTRS 3.1 has many new features that will benefit Agents and Admins alike on a daily basis.

Generic Interface - Web service framework boosts integration

The Generic Interface is a flexible framework allowing to connect OTRS with third party applications via Web service. OTRS therefore acts in both directions, as provider (server) or requester (client). Save valuable time and money while avoiding well known disadvantages of regular interfaces at the same time.

  • Included OTRS Ticket connector allowing to create, update and search for tickets, via Web services from a third party application.
  • Easy creation of new Web service connections without programming
  • Create new Web services by leveraging existing ones
  • Building complex scenarios by plugging in custom OTRS extensions
  • Support of asynchronous event handling
  • Build in graphical debugger to check the configuration and flow of information 
  • Build in error handling
  • Configurable data mapping GUI for key/value transformations
  • Network transports: SOAP/HTTP

Dynamic Fields - Add unlimited fields to tickets and articles

The Dynamic Fields feature replaces the existing ticket and article FreeText and FreeTime fields with a dynamic structure that allows you to add unlimited fields to tickets and articles. A database update script that is shipped with the new release will transform former FreeText fields and related configuration settings into the new structure.

  • Add unlimited fields to your tickets or articles to store additional information
  • Easy configuration using an own graphical user interface
  • Use your dynamic fields for reporting purposes
  • Field types available by default:
    • Text
    • Multiline text
    • Checkbox
    • Dropdown
    • Multi-select
    • Date
    • Date and time
  • Add new field types (e.g. a dropdown with an external data source) at reasonable effort based on a modular and pluggable design
 

Ticket Management improvements

  • Specify multiple email addresses as 'To:', 'CC:' or 'BCC:' while creating new tickets
  • Separate inbound phone call mask
  • Exclude articles of certain sender types from being displayed in the overview preview
  • Configure specific article types (e.g. internal notes) as expanded by default.
  • Select the screen to be shown after having moved a ticket to another queue. Options are: ticket zoom view or ticket list.
  • New bulk actions allow to simultaneously send emails from multiple tickets and change the ticket type of selected tickets
  • Rather than using the admin address, define an email address like noreply@host to reject the creation of tickets by email if this is not an option you grant to customers.

Process automation improvements

  • OTRS creates events for each of the available escalation types (response, update and resolution). This allows performing actions (e.g notifications) in advance of an escalation, triggered by an escalation or at the escalations end.
  • A new generic agent notification module allows the administrator to define messages that will be shown in the agent web front-end when they login.
  • Time calculation will be performed by and based on the application server only, solving issues caused by variances between the clock times of the application and data base servers.
  • The GenericAgent can now filter for a tickets change time as well as set the responsible agent for tickets matching defined criteria.
 

User Interface improvements

  • Performance improvements for rendering and article display
  • 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, IE9 support improved, resizable dialogs.
  • UTF-8 is now the only allowed internal char set for OTRS. All language files are now formatted in UTF-8, which simplifies their handling and future improvements of the translation mechanism.
  • OTRS can now handle images that have been directly pasted from the clipboard into the rich text editor. A precondition is that the format of the image is base64-encoded. Currently this is supported by Firefox for Windows

Database improvements

  • Added PostgreSQL 9.1 support.
  • A new legacy driver is now available for PostgreSQL 8.1 or earlier versions.
  • 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 (improved Unicode support).

Mail integration improvements

  • When connecting to IMAP mail accounts, it is now possible to handle emails from a specific email folder instead of the INBOX folder only.
  • OTRS can now connect to IMAP servers using Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is useful for modern restricted environments.
 
 

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