Hi, today is Valentines Day and here is our gift for all of you! :-) After more than one year of heavy testing, developing and debugging we are proud to release the open source trouble ticket system OTRS v1.0 (codename "Sunset Beach"). The OTRS was created by a group of people who have been developing these types of systems for many years and who wanted to invent the next generation of trouble ticket systems. And we did succeed indeed! It is a state of the art trouble ticket request system which outperformces most if not all commercial and free available trouble ticket systems. It also comes with revolutionary new ideas to handle big volumes of support requests with standard answers and a nifty queuing system. Open interfaces and modules for billing systems, customer databases and LDAP make it easy to integrate this system to your existing enviroment. A set of software robots handle work which normaly has to be done by humans. Interfaces to integrate spam detecting tools, incoming faxes and voice messages are available too. The list of supported languages grows every month and includes German, English, Spanish, French, Portugese, Bulgarien and Finnish. The OTRS is tested on a variaty of different operation systems like many flavours of Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, Mac OS 10.x and even MS Windows. Real-world installations run on a bunch of different hardware like normal i386 PCs but also IBM zSeries. You just have to have a system with Perl, a database (e.g. MySQL or Postgres) and a webserver (e.g. Apache). And of course like any good software the OTRS is GPL! Sunset Beach is a bullet proofed release. It has been already used and heavily tested by major companies world wide which use up to 2,500 concurrend agents on a single installation. The biggest real-world installation handles some 20,000 tickets a day! But let's see what these people say about the OTRS: International University Bremen At the International University Bremen we are currently using the OTRS for our User Helpdesk, the user interaction with the Facility Management, and our webmaster services. All units are impressed by the performance of the OTRS and the ability of distributing the workload among our staff members. One of -- if not the best -- thing is the direct interaction with the authors of that powerful and useful tool, as well as their quick responses to bug reports and additional feature requests. The OTRS fits our needs extremely well, and since OTRS is OpenSource, it is an excellent choice for the future development of the services of our University and for other similar institutions. -- Stefan Schmidt, Server Manager, International University Bremen -- Dr. Diann Rusch-Feja, Director, Information Resource Center, SuSE Linux AG OTRS is one of the most advanced Open Source projects in creating a powerful ticket-based email management software. It follows a clear design, yet completely modular and easily extensible to adapt it to individual needs. The already availaible features provide a good set of ticket management tasks which should be suitable for usual purpose. The scalability of the whole system is really remarkable, it simply does not matter if you wish to manage ten or even some thousand emails per day it always behaves reliably. If you need a powerful system to handle team-based email traffic you should really give OTRS a try. -- Milisav Radmanic, Director Internal IT, SuSE Linux AG MySQL AB OTRS combines a nice design with ease of use - it's simple to install and configure with an intuitive interface, but powerful enough to handle high volume requests. We are pleased that the MySQL database continues to serve well as the high-performance backend for OTRS. -- Lenz Grimmer, product and release engineer, MySQL AB More user feedback, mailinglists, screenshots, manuals, download instructions (the mirrors have been updated with the new release yesterday) and an online demo are available at http://www.otrs.org/ The MD5 message digests for the new packages: ----------------------------------------------------------------- MD5 message digest (128-bit) checksums 086edfcf7d14c76179923c5264193ca1 ./RPMS/suse/7.3/otrs-1.0.1-01.i386.rpm 32cf59604c985f7822ef08ac1a5b5b45 ./RPMS/suse/8.x/otrs-1.0.1-01.i386.rpm 572d2405f5ed30ba45c9ce363adb8626 ./RPMS/redhat/7.x/otrs-1.0.1-01.i386.rpm 6df6e59768b8d381de174623c3316109 ./SRPMS/suse/7.3/otrs-1.0.1-01.src.rpm c1a5a55cf10a7449d897d11201191337 ./SRPMS/suse/8.x/otrs-1.0.1-01.src.rpm e12d30460ea36171d05f4229444d4fb1 ./SRPMS/redhat/7.x/otrs-1.0.1-01.src.rpm 222682fecbfca6355ae41cf6747dd561 ./otrs-1.0.1-01.tar.gz 0470d45dc96b88bb81c3cb7890168374 ./otrs-1.0.1-01.tar.bz2 ----------------------------------------------------------------- And please do not hesitate to contact us by e-mail for additional information about the OTRS. Of course we'd like to use this opportunity to thank the big open source and OTRS community to make it possible. There wouldn't be such a success without you guys! We appreciate your help and support! :-) PS: "Sunset Beach" is the perfect beach on the north shore of Oahu. http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/north_america/oahu/obt.htm take care Stefan -- Stefan Winter There are too many states nowadays. (Abraham Simpson) "The Simpsons"