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OTRS 2.4 - Features

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.)
  • Ticket-Overviews for Reminder-, Escalated-, New- and Open-Tickets
  • Integration of release update information (e. g. security updates)
  • Integration of external pictures and chars
  • Integration of RSS
  • Addition plug-ins like Google-Maps-Customer-Map will be available soon!

New 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 WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get), it is possible to comfortably write using formatted text and even include in-line pictures.

You will really ((enjoy)) this feature!

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 "subscribed", and are able to view them on an individual list. The "Read-Only" Feature - 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. "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.

AJAX based customer search and auto completion

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.

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 (Secure SMTP) has been implemented in order to keep up to the growing security standards.

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).

Licensing changed to AGPL verion 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.

Master/Slave Tickets

After installing the new MasterSlave package, OTRS has support for creating Master/Slave Tickets. This makes it possible to link multiple tickets of a similar nature, and handle them collectively. As soon as a 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

Out of office

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 responsible (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 visible.

If an agent receives a follow-up during a period of absence, the ticket is automatically unlocked and a notification is sent to all agents in the queue. This allows immediate reaction to the customer follow-up by another service employee.

Movement of article storage (attachments)

OTRS saves article attachments in the database by default. As the database grows (> 50GB) this can become an issue for backup/restore operations. From OTRS 2.4 on, it is possible to store the attachments on the servers local file system; this can be done on-the-fly in the live system. It only requires the modification of a setting via the SysConfig. 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 attachments remain in the database. The extension makes it possible to relocate old attachments, in most cases greatly reducing the size of the database. The service program that takes care of this is "bin/otrs.ArticleStorageSwitch.pl". To move attachments from the database to the file system simply execute:

shell> bin/otrs.ArticleStorageSwitch.pl -s ArticleStorageDB -d ArticleStorageFS

Postmaster filter recognizes follow ups to internal forwarded messages

Currently, all e-mail replies to forwarded articles arrive in OTRS as email-external. The problem is that the answers to these internal forwarded articles are visible for 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, that would make it impossible to properly service customers in the same 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 on the original Forward-Article type.

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

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    Configurable event based notifications

    Until now, a very inflexible notification could be sent to an agents and customers, for example Agent: New Ticket or Customer: Status Change. In order to make the notification system more flexible, a complete overhaul was performed on the messaging mechanism. The new system allows messaging to agents, customers, or a dedicated email address, based on the event taking place.

    With this, 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. TicketCreate, TicketStateUpdate, TicketPriorityUpdate, ArticleCreate), and all known message variables (i.e. <OTRS_TICKET_TicketNumber> <OTRS_TICKET_Priority>), can be used for creating triggered messages via the web interface.

    Other features

    Agent Navigation Menu ("Classic" to "Modern")
    The default setting, for the display of the agent navigations bar, has been changed from Classic to Modern. The menu area is now displayed on the left. The area icon remains visible and highlighted, and is not hidden like it did in previous versions.

    Increase in the Admin-Log
    Due to increased requests, the amount of information shown in the Admin-Log area has been raised from 4 to 32K.

    Expansion of the Generic Agent
    You can now also search on Escalation data, when using the generic agent to control tickets.

    Expansion of the ACL feature by using Regular Expressions
    ACL rules were expanded to make use of Regular Expressions.
    ACL Attributes, starting with "[RegExp]" or "[regexp]" as a value means the following will search for the content using the rules applying to regular expressions. The above ACL will match all queues starting with "Misc" and all services starting with "t1" and "t2". So, you no longer need to write large array lists.

    Expansion of the OpenSearch function
    Not only the Ticket#, but now also full text search is offered for OpenSearch enabled browsers.

    Expansion of the Sysconfig to accommodate the "Blinking Queue" option
    This is a configuration option which allows the enabling or disabling of the blinking queue feature.

    Expanded the Ticket Zoom Screen to allow for article filtering
    If turned on, an article filter can be defined, on-the-fly or as an individual default, to help reduce the amount of visible articles in a ticket. For example, if you would just like to see all the customer articles. (deactivated per default)

    Expanded the Admin-SQL-Box
    You can now generate a CSV export of SQL queries in the Admin-SQL-Box (until now only HTML was supported).