Abstract
This chapter describes the features of OTRS Help Desk (OTRS). You will find information about the hardware and software requirements for OTRS. Additionally, in this chapter you will learn how to get commercial support for OTRS, should you require it, and how to contact the community.
OTRS Help Desk (OTRS) is a web application that is installed on a web server and can be used with a web browser.
OTRS is separated into several components. The main component is the OTRS framework which contains all central functions for the application and the ticket system. It is possible to install additional applications such as OTRS::ITSM modules, integrations with Network Monitoring solutions, a knowledge base (FAQ), et cetera.
OTRS has many features. The following list gives an overview of the main features included in the OTRS framework.
OTRS comes with separate, modern web interfaces for agents and customers.
It can be used on any modern web browser, including mobile plaforms and is retina ready.
The web interface can be customized with own themes and skins.
Powerful and customizable agent dashboard with personal ticket overviews and graphical statistics support.
An extensible reporting engine provides various statistics and report scheduling options.
With the ProcessManagement it is possible to define own ticket-based screens and processes (ticket workflows).
OTRS has a built-in rights management that can be extended with fine-grained access control lists (ACLs).
Support for more than 30 languages and different time zones.
Support for MIME emails with attachments.
Automatic conversion of HTML into plain text messages (increased security for sensitive content and enables faster searching).
Incoming mail can be filtered and pre-processed with complex rules, e.g. for spam messages or Queue distribution.
Support for PGP and S/MIME standards for key/certificate management and email processing.
Automatic responses, configurable for every queue.
Email notifications for agents about new tickets, follow-ups or unlocked tickets.
It is possible to define an own Ticket identifier to recognize follow-ups, e.g. Call#, Ticket# or Request#. There are different ticket number generators (date-based, random etc.) and you can integrate your own as well. Follow-ups can also be recognized by In-Reference-To headers or external ticket numbers.
OTRS uses Tickets to gather all external an internal communication that belongs together. These tickets are organized in Queues.
There are many different ways of looking at the tickets in a system (based on Queues, Status, Escalation etc.) in different level of detail (small/medium/preview).
The Ticket history records all changes to a ticket.
Tickets can be changed in many ways, such as replying, forwarding, bouncing, moving to another Queue, updating attributes (state, priority etc.), locking and accounting working time. It is possible to modify many tickets at once (bulk action).
Pending time and escalation time / SLA management allow time-based scheduling and restrictions on tickets.
Tickets can be linked to other tickets or other objects such as FAQ entries.
Automatic and timed actions on tickets are possible with the "GenericAgent".
OTRS comes with a powerful search engine that allows complex and fulltext searches on tickets.
OTRS runs on many operating systems (Linux, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS 10.x, Microsoft Windows) and supports several database systems for the central OTRS back-end (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL).
The core system can be extended by installing OTRS packages. There are many free packages (such as FAQ, OTRS::ITSM and others) as well as FeatureAddon packages that are available for service contract customers of the OTRS group.
Integration of external back-ends for the customer data, e.g. via AD, eDirectory or OpenLDAP. Customers can authenticate via database, LDAP, HTTPAuth or Radius.
With the GenericInterface it is easy to connect OTRS to other web services. Simple web services can be integrated without programming, complex scenarios with custom extensions. The OTRS Ticket connector allows the creation, updating and searching of tickets, via web services from a third party application.
Now let us look at the changes in recent versions of OTRS.
Dashboard ticket lists and regular ticket overviews can now be filtered by eligible ticket columns, and the shown coumns are configurable.
Ticket medium and preview overviews are now sortable.
Added a calendar widget for the dashboard that can show tickets as events.
Added new dashboard widget that shows in a matrix form the number of tickets per state and per queue.
Agents can now mark important articles.
A new tree selection widget makes working with tree data (queues, services etc.) much faster and easier.
Added support to search relative dates ( e.g. more than 1 month ago ) in Date and Date/Time dynamic fields.
It is now possible to specify templates (previously "standard responses") also for creation of new tickets and for ticket forwarding.
The list of available processes can now be filtered by ACLs.
Added support to initiate processes from Customer Interface.
In many places text is not shortened any more by a fixed number of characters ("Queue1..."), but instead by available screen estate. This makes it possible to see more information at once.
OTRS is now Retina-ready. Images have been adapted to match the higher resolutions and most of the image icons have been replaced by font characters from the FontAwesome webfont.
Added new feature "management dashboard". This makes it possible to display statistic charts in the dashboard. Please note that IE8 does not support this feature.
OTRS can now use multiple customer company databases, thanks to Cyrille @ belnet-ict.
OTRS can now automatically store customer user data in ticket dynamic fields for permanent storage in the ticket. This can be useful for reporting.
OTRS is now able correctly assign incoming emails to existing tickets based on ticket numbers from external systems.
OTRS can now fetch email also over POP3/TLS connections.
Web Installer now can setup OTRS on PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server databases in addition to MySQL.
OTRS now has full support for MySQL 5.6.
Generic agent jobs can now be executed for configured ticket events.
The new graphical ACL editor makes ACL editing easier.
Postmaster filters can now use negated filter conditions, thanks to Renée Bäcker.
Postmaster filters can now specify relative pending dates and Owner / Responsible for new tickets based on incoming email data.
Customer and Agent passwords now can be encrypted using the strong bcrypt algorithm, which is better than SHA.
Many icons now use an icon font which makes it much easier to create custom skins with different base colors. This also improves overall performance through smaller amount of (image) files to load.
The new "Customer Information Center" provides a great dashboard-like view on a customer (company). You can see
Escalated, reminder, new, and open tickets of the customer company.
Customer users (contacts) belonging to this customer company, with their individual ticket count and shortcuts for creating new tickets for them.
An overall ticket status view of the customer company.
New "switch to customer" feature makes it possible for an agent with the required permissions to look into the customers's panel with their rights.
The new process management makes it possible to represent processes within OTRS.
The customer web interface now fully supports AJAX and ACLs.
It now requires JavaScript and is not compatible with Internet Explorer 6 or earlier versions.
In the Customer Interface, you can now set the default ticket type for new tickets. Additionally, you can now also hide the ticket type and use a default value for all tickets created via the customer interface.
Agents can now search for tickets based on escalation time.
New option to show DynamicFields by default in ticket search.
Screen usage optimizations in the ticket screens to avoid scrolling in popup windows. For each ticket screen, the size of the richtext editor can now be configured separately.
It is now possible to move tickets to another queue from within the TicketAction dialogs (TicketNote, TicketClose etc.) after activating a configuration option. This is turned off by default.
Ticket search will now directly jump to the ticket zoom screen if only one ticket is found.
New ability to hide the Article Type from TicketActionCommon-based screens which can be helpful to fit more data in the browser window.
There is a new out-of-office dashboard widget that lists all currently unavailable agent colleagues.
New CKEditor 4 makes working with rich text content (such as HTML emails) easier and more stable.
Event Based notifications can now be sent out only for specific Article Sender Types.
The Statistics engine in OTRS now understands 'Weeks' in addition to days, months and years. This grants the ability to, for instance, create a report for tickets 'created last week', or generate a report that shows tickets created per queue per week.
It is possible to place customized DTL (template) files in Custom/Kernel/Output/HTML, so that they override the system's default DTL files just as how this already works for Perl files.
In AdminSMIME it is now possible to display human readable certificate contents.
SysConfig now supports config setting types Date and DateTime.
When tickets are archived, the information which agent read the ticket and articles can be removed, as well as the ticket subscriptions of agents. This is active by default and helps reduce the amount of data in the database on large systems with many tickets and agents.
There is also a new script to remove this data from existing archived tickets.
Archived tickets are now always shown as 'read' by the agent.
Session management is up to 10 times faster, especially with many active users.
It is now possible to limit the number of concurrent agents and/or users to avoid server capacity overload.
Significant reduction in the number of executed database statements in ticket overviews and ticket masks in agent and customer frontend.
This will reduce the load on database servers, especially on large systems. In some cases OTRS will become visibly more responsive (if the system was slowed down by the DB load or latency).
Improved performance of LDAP user synchronization.
Improved cache performance with many cache files.
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. when 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.
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.
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).
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.
Multiple email addresses can now be specified as 'To:', 'CC:' or 'BCC:' when creating a new phone or email ticket.
Inbound phone calls can now be registered within an existing tickets (until now, only outbound calls were registered).
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.
The screen shown after moving a ticket is now configurable. Options are the ticket zoom view (LastScreenView) or the ticket list (LastScreenOverview).
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.
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.
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.
All kinds of times will now be 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.
The speed for rendering and article display was improved, thanks to Stelios Gikas <stelios.gikas@noris.net>!
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.
PostgreSQL 9.1 support added.
A new legacy driver is now available for PostgreSQL 8.1 or earlier versions.
OTRS can be installed on many different operating systems. OTRS can run on linux and on other unix derivates (e.g. OpenBSD or FreeBSD). You can also run it on Microsoft Windows. OTRS does not have excessive hardware requirements. We recommend using a machine with at least a 2 GHz Xeon or comparable CPU, 2 GB RAM, and a 160 GB hard drive for a small setup.
To run OTRS, you'll also need to use a web server and a database server. Apart from that, you should install perl and/or install some additional perl modules on the OTRS machine. The web server and Perl must be installed on the same machine as OTRS. The database back-end may be installed locally or on another host.
For the web server, we recommend using the Apache HTTP Server, because its module mod_perl greatly improves the performance of OTRS. Apart from that, OTRS should run on any web server that can execute Perl scripts.
You can deploy OTRS on different databases. You can choose between MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server. If you use MySQL you have the advantage that the database and some system settings can be configured during the installation, through a web front-end.
For Perl, we recommend using at least version 5.8.8. You will need some additional modules which can be installed either with the Perl shell and CPAN, or via the package manager of your operating system (rpm, yast, apt-get).
Software requirements
Apache2 + mod_perl2 or higher (recommended)
Webserver with CGI support (CGI is not recommended)
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 6 or higher
MySQL 5.0 or higher
PostgreSQL 8.0 or higher (8.2 or higher recommended)
Oracle 10g or higher
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or higher
The section in the manual about installation of Perl modules describes in more detail how you can set up those which are needed for OTRS.
If you install a binary package of OTRS, which was built for your operating system (rpm, Windows-Installer), either the package contains all Perl modules needed or the package manager of your system should take care of the dependencies of the Perl modules needed.
To use OTRS, you'll be OK if you use a modern browser with JavaScript support enabled. We do not support the following browsers:
Internet Explorer before version 8
Firefox before version 10
Safari before version 5
We recommend always using the latest version of your browser, because it has the best JavaScript and rendering performance. Dramatical performance varieties between the used browsers can occur with big data or big systems. We are happy to consult you on that matter.
OTRS has a large user community. Users and developers discuss OTRS and exchange information on related issues through the mailing-lists. You can use the mailing lists to discuss installation, configuration, usage, localization and development of OTRS. You can report software bugs in our bug tracking system.
The homepage of the OTRS community is: http://www.otrs.com/open-source/.
Whether you need help in configuring or customizing OTRS or you want to be on the safe side, don't hesitate to contact us: We offer a wide range of professional services such as world-wide enterprise support, consulting and engineering including process design, implementation, customization, application support, and fully managed service.
Our Service Contracts guarantee instant help and professional support as well as support assessment and last but not least free access to OTRS Feature Add-ons - useful additional features for your OTRS.
The OTRS Group offers specific training programs in different countries. You can either participate in one of our public OTRS Administrator trainings which take place regularly, or benefit from an inhouse training that covers all the specific needs of your company.