Hi Martin:
It looks really good! :)
Thanks! We've put a lot of effort in porting our original OTRS 1.1.2 customizations over to 1.3.2 (due to many changes to core method names), in addition to all the new features and aesthetic tweakings. I'm really excited about the upcoming Javascript enhancements we've made to the text input fields. They will allow users to dynamically input/search fields similar to the functionality found in Google Suggest (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en). This is a huge usability feature for our users, as it negates the need to search through (potentially) hundreds of values in a drop-down or select window. This has not been fully merged into our development version yet, but I hope to have it done and deployed into production by February.
We really interested in your development. I'm very interested in the assets system.
In our production deployment, it amounts to an additional table or two and the code to tie it in. The schema for the redesign is complete; the new assets "engine" requires a very complex schema almost the size of the original OTRS schema. It is currently being design on PostgreSQL with foreign key support, so I expect it should continue to perform quite well, regardless of database choice.
Would be really cool if you could send some infos about it. :-)
We want to share back with the community as much as possible. As an employee of AMTI contracting for NASA, we are under obligations within NASA to make sure everything meets their guidelines. I wouldn't expect this to be a long process, but we're not there yet; just trust that we are working to get these patches pushed back to you guys as soon as possible. As I play around with it again this morning, I came across a list of things I thought you might be interested in as potential feature merges into the CVS tree. Let me know what you think about these ideas, so I can gauge the direction of OTRS. - "Ticket to Ticket" appends: This feature allows a user to append all articles in the current ticket to the input ticket number. The "old" ticket is then marked closed. - "Article to Ticket" appends: This feature allows a user to append only the currently viewed article to another ticket. This is useful for sharing information across related tickets. - "Print All" view: This feature allows a user to view a concatenation of all articles within linked tickets. This is simiilar to the "Print" view, except for the additional articles related to all tickets. The header of the view contains anchor links to quickly browse down the page to the target ticket. - New "Sidebar": The right-hand sidebar has been streamlined and reorganized to more effectively present information to the agent. Items like State, Priority, Queue, etc., are located in the immediate view at the top. Customer Info is located just below, with "actions" (email, phone, etc) just below that. - Link to Queue: In the sidebar region mentioned above, the Queue value contains a hyperlink to the selected queue's Queue View. This is incredibly helpful, as users no longer have to drill down through the entire Queue View to find the target queue. If they have other tickets in the same queue to address, they can simply click this link. - Customer Info "Update": Also in the sidebar, there is an "Update" hyperlink to the new Customer User Management page. On this page, you can search, edit, and add new users. If you are editing a ticket, please note that once you save your changes, it automatically redirects you to the Ticket View you just came from. :) - New "Buffer" search: This new search result format presents minimal information in a "last touched" sort order. This provides vital information to our agents who don't necessarily need the ticket content summaries available for a quick search of aging tickets. - New "Header" search: This new search is similar to a preview, except that it shows only the email headers and the State, Priority, Queue, and CustomerID values. - Fulltext Search: A new input field at the top which allows the user to search (chosen via checkbox) against the email header fields (From, To, Cc, Subject, Body). Accepts wildcards. - Systems (Assets) Management: New Admin interface to allow an admin to add or edit an asset to the system. It allows sub-systems, so it works quite well with the trove list design. I don't know if these are commonly requested features, but they were all solutions to problems uncovered during our time using OTRS 1.1.2 and experimenting with an upgrade to OTRS 1.3.2. We like the functionality that OTRS has provided us with this project, but we also see room for improvement and extending. For the time being, I'll keep my posts isolated to the dev list so as not to create any unwanted "feature request storms" from the user list. :) Thanks, -- Jason Dixon 301.286.8635 voice NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center jason@nccs.nasa.gov AMTI, Inc. Building 28, Room S212 Code 931