OTRS-

otrs AG

•  Licensing change to AGPL Version 3
  
  • Why AGPL instead of GPL? - AGPL and GPL are identical, with one exception: For software used in an SaaS environment Copyleft is effective in AGPL - which is not the case when using GPL. Keeping in mind the growing world of SaaS, we would like to ensure that future developments continue to return to the OTRS community.
  • Why v3 instead of v2? - GPL v2 is getting older and has, various legal uncertainties. In the opinion of ((otrs)) GPL v3 is keeping the spirit of GPL v2, and at the same time has been tailored to new needs. We view GPLv3, more specifically AGPLv3, as being the best balanced Copyleft Open Source License available today, offering Protection for copyright owners and users and providing the best security under the law.
• Management Dashboard
  
  • The need for a system-spanning, next to real-time, and personalized presentation of useful information led to an integrated Management Dashboard. It is possible to create plug-ins to display content from individual extensions alongside the standard content. Standard plug-ins are:
    • Ticket volume (new and open) from the last 24, 72, and 48
      hours
    • Calendar including an overview of upcoming events
      (escalations, auto-unlocks, etc.)
    • System-wide overview of ticket distribution within the queues
    • First Response Time/Solution Time of Queues
    • Integration of RSS
• Additional Standard-Reports
  
  • e.g. Created Tickets, Closed Tickets, SLA Analysis, Required working time per customer, Required working time per queue, * Solution time analysis (per customer, per queue), Answer time analysis (per customer, per queue).
• Master/Slave Feature
  
  • With the Master/Slave Ticket, it is possible to link multiple tickets of a similar nature, and handle them collectively at a later stage. As soon as the problem is solved, only the master ticket must be closed. All other tickets will be closed automatically, and the solution text for the master ticket will be sent to all customers of slave tickets. All slave tickets will inherit the following actions from their Master ticket:
    • Status change, Email answers, Change in FreeText fields,  Notes, Pending time changes, Priority changes, Owner changes, Responsibility changes
• HTML e-Mail support
  
  • With this feature, it is now possible to write e-mails, notes, and notifications in rich text format (HTML format). Using a WYSIWIG editor (What You See Is What You Get), it is possible to comfortably write using formatted text and even include inline pictures.
• Out-of-Office function
  • With this new feature it is possible for all users to activate "out-of-office" to notify colleagues and OTRS of the period of their absence. The out-of-office feature is active for a time frame set by the user. Activation of this feature has the following effects: In the lists in which an agent can be selected as owner or reponsible (i.e. Ticket creation or changing ownership), the period of absence and the time till return will be shown behind the user's name. If an agent receives a follow-up during a period of absence, the ticket is automatically unlocked and a notifcation is sent to all agents in the queue.
• Small/Medium/Large Ticket-Overview & global Bulk Action
  • Flexibility of presentation within the ticket overview is a must. In an IT situation, with few tickets of a long life-cycle, the preferred method is a table-like structure (without preview). In a service center environment, on the other hand, with many tickets of a short life-cycle, a ticket preview structure is preferable. Based on the "S/M/L" (Small/Medium/Large) Ticket View every agent has the possibility to change the view for each type of overview (Queue View, Status View, etc) on-the-fly with a simple mouse click on the appropriate icon. This allows for the highest possible level of individualization and adjustment to any operational situation.
  • The decentralization of the Bulk Action feature integrated the Bulk Action in all ticket overviews allowing the processing of multiple tickets at a time.
• Optimized Customer Search (Autocompletion)
  • To streamline ticket creation, AJAX-based auto-completion has been introduced into the customer search feature. With this, as soon as the first three letters of a customer name have been entered, the run-time search will offer a list of dynamically changing names, based on the continued input, for user selection. This means, that it is now technically possible to create a ticket without reloading the page, reducing the time spent on waiting for the page reloads.
• Movement of Article Storage
  • OTRS saves article attachements in the database by default. As the database grows (> 50GB) this can become a problem for backup/restore operations. From OTRS 2.4 on, it is possible to store the attachments on the server's local file system; this can be done on-the-fly in the live system. In most cases, this issue arises only after production has started and is often due to growing backup cycles. In general, above setting will then be changed to file system storage. Although from then on all attachments will be written to the file system, all previous attachements remain in the database. The extension makes it possible to relocate old attachments, in most cases greatly reducing the size of the database.
• PostMaster Filter recognizes Follow-ups to Forwarded Messages
  • Currently, e-mail replies to forwarded articles arrive in OTRS as email-external. The problem is that the answers to these forwarded articles can be seen by the customer in the web-interface. With this new feature, e-mail replies can be traced back, and email-internal or email-external will be set based upon the original Forward-Article type.
• Read-Only Permissions and Notifications with Watched Tickets
  
  • In the current release of OTRS it is possible for a user to maintain a Watched Tickets List. Up to now, tickets marked as "subscribed" were shown in a list, however, the agent could only actually view them if they were in a queue for which the agent had read permissions. With the "Read-Only" Feature, agents subscribed to a ticket always have read permissions on the ticket, even if the ticket is moved to a queue where the agent has no permissions.
  • Via a personalized setting, every agent can define whether or not to receive notifications about tickets, just as the owner and responsible of a ticket would receive.
• Secure SMTP support
  • SMTPS (Sercure SMTP) has been implemented in order to keep up to the growing security standards.

• Higher performance due to AJAX technology
  Quick recording and service request management with reduced reloads.
• Enhanced transparency due to an optimized full-text search
  Indexed full-text search; support of logical expressions; quicksearch feature for ticketnumber lookups with browsers supporting OpenSearchDescription (i.e. Mozilla Firefox); search for ticket titles and 'closed time' fields.
• Save time due to an optimized ticket management
  Expandable articletrees, enhanced views on articletrees; printing of single articles; preview on titles of linked tickets; adding attachments while moving a ticket; automatic copy of time fields to splitted tickets; configurable reproduction of URLs; enhanced e-Mail filtering covering timebased attributes.
• Enhanced ability to integrate
  Additional support of IMAP, IMAPS & POP3S mail accounts.
• Higher security
  Improved password security due to 'Lost Password' feature
• New escalation view
  Benefit from an additional preview on tickets that will escalate in the near future
  

• Automatic and quick ticket generation upon incident or service request receipt via the customer frontend, E-mail, phone, fax, PDA, SMS, SOAP/XML
• Quick-Ticket templates for standard incident handling
• Quick recording and service request management with reduced reloads.
• Self-Service frontend to relief your Service Desk
• Comfortable call answering thanks to special phone ticket masks and CTI
• Flexibly configurable ticket-masks
• Expandable articletrees
• Linking & splitting of tickets and FAQ-articles
• Automatic copy of time fields to splitted tickets
• Automated and manual incident routing
• Automatic follow-up to existing tickets
• Criterion-based filter mechanisms facilitate automated execution of pre-defined actions easing the workload of your service and support staff
• Configurable incident classifications and priorization
• Automated allocation and entering of customer data in the ticket thanks to CTI integration and/or integration of up to 10 customer databases
• Creation and administration of (auto)reply templates for efficient processing of recurring inquiries.
• Event-driven, definable notification mechanisms for service staff, service providers integrated into the process, the management or your customers
• Queue View: showing all queues you have subscribed to
• Escalation View: showing tickets sorted by the remaining time to escalation
• Status View: showing tickets sorted by their current status
• Management of work processes with bring forward functionality and flexible (auto)status change
• SLA and queue based escalation and unlocking mechanisms
• Locking and unlocking mechanisms for secure ticket processing by specific service staff
• Support in bug analysis and diagnosis and documentation of resolution know-how in the knowledge database, and linking to the communication
• Monitoring of individual transactions in personal watch lists
• Integration with System- and Network-Monitoring systems e.g. Nagios, OpenNMS, HP Open View, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Operation Manager.
• Indexed full-text search in all tickets; support of logical expressions; quicksearch feature for ticketnumber lookups with browsers supporting OpenSearchDescription (i.e. Mozilla Firefox); search for ticket titles and 'closed time' fields.
• Linkage of objects such as tickets, FAQ articles etc. within the system
• Queue-based definition of addresses, signatures and standard text element
• Time Accounting

• Integrated service catalogue & service level agreements. Description and administration of the business process-based services agreed upon with your customers.
• Flexible Modeling of service hierarchies & service classification
• Evaluation of services based on their criticality for the business processes  The services agreed upon are described in the relevant service level agreements (SLA). Those SLAs are the basis of service controlling and continuous improve-ment within service level management (SLM)
• Flexible SLA classification
• Allocation of SLAs & services
• Allocation of SLAs & working time calendars
• Definition of response time, update time, resolution times and MTTR
• (Auto)escalation and unlocking mechanisms facilitate management of the time acceptable for processing

• Separate customer web front-end
• Customers can log, administrate and track their requests, and obtain information at any time regarding the processing progress and status of messages sent
• Easy access to the knowledge database and all FAQs classified as freely accessible
• Individually pre-structurable templates for easy data logging and further classification
• Full real-time transparency about the status, progression of processing and person responsible for your customers at any time

• Separate web front-ends for service staff, customers and administrators
• OTRS is a web application, which can be operated platform-independently in every HTML browser ? even on mobile devices.
• Various graphical interface layouts (themes), easy adaptation to your corporate design, personalization of graphical interfaces and system operation in the user preferences.
• Intuitive handling and straightforward overviews on all requests within a queue
• Quick and easy switching between the 26 languages

• Modeling of processes and workflows
• Extensive role-based authorization concept allows differentiated access control for transactions, responsibility areas, reports and features
• Comprehensive integration of external service providers or partners
• Multi-client-enabled system for customer and partner account administration
• Integration of multiple working time calendars - thanks to this function, OTRS can also be used in decentralized and internationally operating service organizations. Active working time calendars and the holidays and time zones defined within them affect the service level window and the time-driven escalation and unlocking mechanisms of OTRS.

• Menu-driven compilation of complex reports for monitoring of SLAs and service quality
• Saving and export of frequently used reports
• Automated generation and time-driven dispatch of saved reports to pre-defined recipients (recipient groups), e.g. service management
• Unalterable, automated logging of all events, time stamps, and activities over the complete ticket history, complying with audit requirements
• Export of reports, graphics and analysis data to a printer, in pdf or csv format
• Logging of the processing duration for all tickets as a base for further analysis
• Unalterable data storage complying with audit requirements

• Separate administrator web front-end
• Menu-driven system configuration
• System event-driven E-mail notification for administrators
• Integrated user and permissions administration
• Powerful administration for queues and templates
• From release 2.2 onwards, OTRS supports the sequential authentication of customers and service staff against multiple data sources (e.g. LDAP backends and SQL databases).
• Single sign-on functionality
• Administration of filter rules
• Administration of event-driven notifications and recipients (recipient groups)
• Encryption of your customers' and service staff's passwords in three modes: unix_crypt(), md5() and plain(). Default setting is 'unix_crypt()'. However, the encryption can easily be changed to unix_crypt() or md5()on the running system.

• Support of IMAP, IMAPS, POP3, POP3S, SMTP, SMTPS
• High connectivity and integration capability with existing IT solutions
• CTI integration based on SOAP or XML
• Integration of Network-Monitoring Systems e.g. Nagios, OpenNMS, HP Open View, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Operation Manager.
• utf-8 support for front and back end
• Support of e-mail attachments (MIME)
• Automatic conversion of html into plain text messages to block risky content.
• PGP support, creation and import of own certificates, encrypted and signed mails, display of encrypted and signed messages.
• Encryption and display of S/MIME messages.
• Attachments of data in any format