Hi folks: I'm new to the list, but I'm pretty familiar with the OTRS codebase. We have implemented OTRS at one of the NASA organizations in a support role, supplanting Remedy AR. We have made a large number of changes and additions to OTRS to support our specific needs and requirements. Much of this functionality centers around users, alerts, and assets (systems). We are currently meeting with the NASA attorneys to discuss our OSS policies, but I expect that we will be able to present much of the work we have done as a large unified diff against the 1.3.2 tree. I'm not sure if it will be of any interest, but I just wanted to give advanced notice and see if there are any takers. We would like to keep an open channel of communication with the OTRS development team, so if anyone would like more details on what we have done to advance OTRS in our particular installation, please don't hesitate to contact me on- or off-list. Regards, -- Jason Dixon 301.286.8635 voice NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center jason@nccs.nasa.gov AMTI, Inc. Building 28, Room S212 Code 931
Jason Dixon
We would like to keep an open channel of communication with the OTRS development team, so if anyone would like more details on what we have done to advance OTRS in our particular installation, please don't hesitate to contact me on- or off-list.
I'm not a member of the OTRS development team, but I'm sure everybody
will appreciate any details about your improvements. I ask you to send
an overview of them to this list.
--
Alessandro Ranellucci
Hi Alessandro: Here is a snippet that I just sent off-list to another user. I think I'll just paste it here rather than type it all again. :) Some of our most exciting changes involved an "update" region on all TicketZoom views. This allows agents the ability to change queues, owners, users, priorities, etc., without ever leaving the Zoom view. We have also added the oft-requested ability to a) merge tickets (append all notes from one ticket to another and closing the former), and b) append notes (append a single article to another ticket). We also included some functionality to support assets (systems), which is particularly important in our facility. I plan to do more work to fully extend this module so that it can be used as an asset tracking mechanism. Some other work I've been focused on is usability. For browsers that support it, I'm about to deploy javascript that will include dynamic "auto-complete" input fields similar to those found in Outlook, Google Suggest, etc. This work is complete but has not yet been merged into our codebase. The usability of a support system like OTRS is very important to me and our users, so I've taken great strides to streamline and re-organize the interface where it was possible and made sense. I think that our users have benefitted greatly from these changes (since our original deployment of 1.1.2). Hopefully this gives you some idea of where we've gone with OTRS, and where we continue to move. Thanks, -- Jason Dixon 301.286.8635 voice NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center jason@nccs.nasa.gov AMTI, Inc. Building 28, Room S212 Code 931
In case anyone would like to see the work we've put into TicketZoom, here is a screenshot sample. If the list doesn't allow attachments, please let me know how I can make it available. Regards, -- Jason Dixon 301.286.8635 voice NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center jason@nccs.nasa.gov AMTI, Inc. Building 28, Room S212 Code 931
Jason Dixon wrote:
Hi Alessandro:
Here is a snippet that I just sent off-list to another user. I think I'll just paste it here rather than type it all again. :)
Some of our most exciting changes involved an "update" region on all TicketZoom views. This allows agents the ability to change queues, owners, users, priorities, etc., without ever leaving the Zoom view. We have also added the oft-requested ability to a) merge tickets (append all notes from one ticket to another and closing the former), and b) append notes (append a single article to another ticket).
I'm really interested to get more information on your merge/append tickets stuff. It's something that's really needed in OTRS. Cheers, Tom
On 13-01-2005 at 22:14, T. Kasikci wrote:
I'm really interested to get more information on your merge/append tickets stuff. It's something that's really needed in OTRS.
Yes, I'd love those merge/append features too. Also, I'd appreciate that "Report Category" listbox to allow our customer service to generate statistics on request types. It would be nice to add that "Report Category" to AgentCompose also, so that it could be filled when the operator is writing the followup (thus minimizing the extra amount of work needed to add statistical tracking). - Alessandro
Hi Jason, Jason Dixon wrote:
I'm new to the list, but I'm pretty familiar with the OTRS codebase. We have implemented OTRS at one of the NASA organizations in a support role, supplanting Remedy AR.
It looks really good! :) We really interested in your development. I'm very interested in the assets system. Would be really cool if you could send some infos about it. :-) -Martin -- ((otrs.de)) :: OTRS GmbH :: Norsk-Data-Str. 1 :: 61352 Bad Homburg http://www.otrs.de/ :: Manage your communication!
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
participants (4)
-
Alessandro Ranellucci -
Jason Dixon -
Martin Edenhofer -
T. Kasikci