OTRS Help Desk

Аннотация

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.

Основы

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.

Особенности и функциональные возможности

OTRS has many features. The following list gives an overview of the main features included in the OTRS framework.

User interface

  • 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.

Mail interface

  • 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.

  • Уведомления агентов по электронной почте о новых, последующих или разблокированых заявках.

  • 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.

Tickets

  • 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.

  • "GenericAgent" позволяет совершать автоматические и синхронные действия над заявками.

  • OTRS comes with a powerful search engine that allows complex and fulltext searches on tickets.

System

  • 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.

New features of OTRS 3.3

Productivity
  • 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.

Working With External Systems
  • 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.

Installation & Administration
  • 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.

New features of OTRS 3.2

More customer focused
  • 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.

More customizable
Управление Процессами
Customer Interface Improvements
  • 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.

Agent Interface Improvements
  • 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.

Administration improvements
  • 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.

Better scalability
Ticket Archiving Improved
  • 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.

Performance Improvements
  • 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.

More Interoperable
FAQ Connector for the GenericInterface
  • It is now possible to access the data of the FAQ module (OTRS knowledge database) via web service (GenericInterface). This can be useful to embed FAQ articles on your company website, for example.

Новые возможности OTRS 3.1

GENERIC INTERFACE - A Web Service Framework
  • GI гибкий фреймворк, который позволяет веб-сервисам OTRS взаимодействовать с приложениями сторонних производителей.

  • OTRS может работать как поставщик (сервер, который получает запросы от удаленной стороны) или же как клиент (отправлять запросы).

  • Просты подключения к веб-сервисам могут быть созданы путем конфигурации Generic Interface, не требуя дополнительного программирования.

  • Сложные сценарии могут быть реализованы путем подключения пользовательских расширений OTRS, которые добавляют perl-код на различных архитектурных уровнях.

  • 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:

  • Новый веб-сервис в GUI администратора

  • Основные мета-данные (транспортные (SOAP), URL и т.д.) и

  • Существующие операции (часть коннектора) и задать для каждой операции правила, как должны быть сопоставлены данные (входящие и исходящие)

Отладчик Generic Interface поможет OTRS-администратору проверить как поступают запросы и как они обрабатываются в рамках различых слоев.

Current Features
  • Сетевые транспортные протоколы: SOAP/HTTP. Поддержка протоколов REST and JSON будет добавлена в будущем, в зависимости от спроса потребителей.

  • Настраиваемое отображение данных в GUI для преобразования key/value-значений входящих и исходящих данных.

  • Графический отладчик для проверки конфигурации и потока информации от настроеных веб-сервисов.

  • Ticket-коннектор позволяет использовать OTRS для обработки заявок как веб-сервис.

Future Features
  • Дополнительные сетевые транспортные протоколы (REST, JSON).

  • GI заменит iPhoneHandle как backend для мобильных приложений.

  • 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).

DYNAMIC FIELDS

Динамические поля (DynamicFields) заменяют существующие поля FreeText и FreeTime с динамической структурой для заявок и статей. Они также позволяют создавать пользовательские формы в OTRS.

  • Неограниченное количество полей можно настроить с помощью собственного графического пользовательского интерфейса администрирования.

  • Поля могут иметь различные типы, которые могут быть использованы как для заявок так и для статей. По умолчанию доступны:

    • Text

    • Multiline text

    • Checkbox

    • Dropdown

    • Multi-select

    • Date

    • Дата и время

  • Новые пользовательские типы полей (например выпадающий список, который получает данные из внешнего источника) могут быть добавлены с небольшими усилиями, поскольку поля создаются по модульному принципу.

  • 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.

  • Скрипт обновления базы данных превратит поля FreeText и связанные с ними настройки в новую структуру.

TICKET MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENTS
Ticket creation improved
  • Когда создается новая заявка на основе email или телефонного звонка, множество email-адресов может быть задано как 'To:', 'CC:' or 'BCC:' .

Inbound phone call support
  • Теперь для созданых заявок могут быть зарегистрированы входящие телефонные звонки (до этого, можно было регистрировать только исходящие звонки).

Ticket overview preview improved
  • Теперь в SysConfig можно исключать статьи отдельных типов (напримр, статьи от внутренних агентов), это будет предотвращать их появление в режиме предварительного просмотра.

  • Определенный тип статьи может быть настроен таким образом, что будет отображать статьи этого типа полностью, если имеются соответствующие права для их просмотра.

Ticket move improved
  • Страница, которая отображается после перемещения заявки теперь может быть настроена пользователем. Варианты просмотра: просмотр расширенной информации (LastScreenView) или же список заявок (LastScreenOverview).

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.

  • Дополнительные массовые действия позволяют настроить тип заявки для отдельных заявок.

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.

PROCESS AUTOMATION
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.

Notification mechanism improved
  • Новый generic-agent-модуль уведомлений позволяет OTRS-администратору определить сообщения, которые будут показаны в веб-интерфейсе агентов, когда они войдут в систему.

Time calculation improved
  • 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.

GenericAgent improved
  • Теперь GenericAgent можеть фильтровать заявки по времени изменения.

  • Кроме того, GenericAgent может установить ответственность за заявку для схожих (соответствующих) заявок.

USER INTERFACE, RICH TEXT EDITOR, CHARSET
User interface performance improved
  • Улучшена скорость рендеринга и отображения статей, большое спасибо Stelios Gikas <stelios.gikas@noris.net>!

Rich Text Editor Update
  • Добавлена поддержка IOS5

  • Блок цытат можно оставить с помощью клавиши ввода.

  • Обновлен CKEditor 3.4 до CKEditor 3.6, про улучшения можно прочесть перейдя по ссылкеCKEditor 3.5 and CKEditor 3.6.

  • Улучшена поддержка браузера IE9.

  • Диалоговые окна изменяемого размера.

Unicode Support - Non-UTF-8 Internal Encodings Dropped
  • UTF-8 теперь единственная внутренняя кодировка, разрешенная OTRS.

  • Теперь все языковые файлы отформатированы в кодировке UTF-8, что значительно упрощает их обработку и дальнейшее усовершенствование механизма перевода.

DATABASE DRIVER SUPPORT
PostgreSQL DRIVER compatibility improved
  • Добавлена поддержка PostgreSQL 9.1

  • Доступен новый драйвер для PostgreSQL 8.1 или более ранних версий.

MS SQL DRIVER compatibility improved
  • Теперь драйвер MS SQL сохраняет бинарные данные используя тип данных VARBINARY а не устаревший тип TEXT, тип NVARCHAR также используется вместо устаревшего VARCHAR (это делается для улучшенной поддержки Unicode).

MAIL INTEGRATION
Mail handling improved
  • When connecting to IMAP mail accounts, it is now possible to handle emails from a specific email folder, aside from the INBOX folder.

  • OTRS can now connect to IMAP servers using Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is useful for modern restricted environments.

Требования к апаратному и програмному обеспечению

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).

Требования к програмному обеспечению

поддержка Perl

  • Perl 5.10 or higher

Поддержка Веб-сервера

  • Apache2 + mod_perl2 or higher (recommended)

  • Веб-сервер с поддержкой CGI-интерфейса (CGI-интерфейс не рекомендуется)

  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 6 или выше

Поддержка базы данных

  • MySQL 5.0 or higher

  • PostgreSQL 8.0 or higher (8.2 or higher recommended)

  • Oracle 10g или выше

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 или выше

Раздел руководства установка Perl-модулей более подробно описывает как можно настроить модули, необходимые для работы OTRS.

Если для установки OTRS используются бинарные пакеты, собраные специально под вашу операционную систему, то все необходимые модули языка Perl уже включены. Если нет, - используйте менеджер пакетов вашей операционной системы (например (rpm, Windows-Инсталлятор) для установки всех необходимых модулей.

Поддержка веб-браузера

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.

Комюнити

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.

Домашняя страница OTRS-сообщества: http://www.otrs.com/open-source/.

Professional Services for OTRS

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.