OTRS 2.4.0 beta1 (Aitutaki - One Foot Island, Cook Island) is released!
The OTRS Team is pleased to announce the release of OTRS 2.4.0 beta1.
Major-News:
"Licensing changed 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, ((otrs))
wants to ensure that future developments continue to return
to the OTRS community. This is the reason for the switch to
AGPL.
Why v3 instead of v2? - GPL v2 is getting older and has,
especially in the USA, 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. ((otrs)) views
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.
"New 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 & open) from the last 24h, 48h and 72h
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
"New Standard Reports"
The new reports provided with OTRS 2.4 are:
Created Tickets
Closed Tickets
SLA Analysis
Required working time per customer / per queue
Solution time analysis per customer / per queue
Answer time analysis per customer / per queue
"New Master/Slave Ticket Feature"
With the Master/Slave Ticket, it is possible to link multiple
tickets of a similar nature, and handle them collectively. 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.
A new link type 'Slave' will be available. All tickets with
this Type of link 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
"New Rich-Text/HTML E-Mail Support (WYSIWYG)"
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.
"New Out-Of-Office Feature"
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. This will help making the absence of the user
more transparent.
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. This allows immediate reaction to
the customer follow-up by another service employee.
"New Ticket Overviews and global Bulk Action"
Flexibility of presentation within the ticket overview is a
must. 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.
Additionally, decentralization of the Bulk Action feature
integrated the Bulk Action in all ticket overviews (Bulk Action
allows processing of multiple tickets at a time).
"Postmaster Filter recognizes Follo-Ups to internal 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. Although it is possible to classify e-mails of an
entire domain as email-internal, this only shifts the problem.
Also, such step makes it impossible to properly service
customers in the domain, as the customer would not be able to
track tickets in the customer web-interface any more. 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. This feature is dealing with
tickets marked as "subscribed" by a user. It has the advantage
that users no longer lose track of tickets marked as "sub-
scribed", and are able to view them on an individual list.
The "Read-Only" Feature - Up to now, tickets marked as "sub-
scribed" 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. "Notify" Feature - 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. This allows for active tracking of
watched tickets.
"Secure SMTP"
OTRS can receive and send mails in multiple ways. All currently
available methods for receiving emails have been implemented
within OTRS 2.3 (POP3,POP3S,IMAP,IMAPS). Until now, there were
two options for sending emails: using a local MTA (Sendmail,
Postfix, etc.) or per SMTP. In OTRS 2.4.x, SMTPS (Sercure SMTP)
has been implemented in order to keep up to the growing security
standards.
[ftp://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/]
[full announcement]
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After several years of using a closed commercial system, we have
switched to OTRS for all our end-user support.
