OTRS - Open Ticket Request System
8
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 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 transparent.
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.
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 Follow-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.
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>), are freely selectable for
creating triggered messages via the web interface.
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