OTRS-

otrs AG

OTRS offers many new and exciting features and enhancements to strenghten the performance of your Service Desk. All features are also available with the ITIL based IT Service Management solution OTRS::ITSM.

• Licensing change to AGPL Version 3
  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.
• 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 hrs - 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
  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.
• WYSIWYG - 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.
• Event-based notifications
  In order to make the notification feature more flexible, a complete overhaul was performed on the messaging mechanism. The new feature allows messaging to agents, customers, or a dedicated email address, based on the event taking place. It is now possible to just inform the customer when the ticket has been closed. Or, for example, when a VIP customer creates a ticket, a message can be sent to a specific address. Events (i.e. Creation of a Ticket, Ticket-State update, Ticket Priority Update, Creation of an Article), and all known message variables, are freely selectable for creating triggered messages via the web interface.
• 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