Hi,
This is definitely going to have to be thought about. Every one of this opinions have merit and everyone has something they can use out of it. I guess the biggest issue here is what is really going to work for the masses. Obviously, OTRS is working great for all of us because we continue to use it. We need to thank those people such as Martin and others who have taken the time to better our lives with this program.
I thank him now on a regular basis. Please understand - I am bringing up a problem, and I am willing to help. I am not demanding, whining or anything like this.
The other part of this is, how do you work the ideas into a program without over complicating it? Think of the install and the setup issues we are going to run into when you start thinking about controlling otrs from email or a variation thereof.
I view this addition as a big help in migrating from existing email based system (like we currently have), and as "last resort" option, like answering from PDA/Cellular. Looking at it this way, I do not expect full control over each and every option of the system. I think that a combination of LOCK email and the sanity mechanism of automatic lock and disposal of multiple answers is very easy to implement, makes the migration process easier and in many ways add powerful functionality to the system. Most (if not all) of the components for this already exist in the system. Actually, for implementing agent answer without lock, the only thing that needs to be done is the assigment to the agent based on the email. Other then that, it works even today (but the answer is inserted as customer email).
The biggest question out of all I guess is how do you prevent more than one person from working a ticket at a time and more importantly, how do you make sure a ticket is being taken care of?
The mentioned above mechanism is good enough, IMHO. The "how do you make sure" is the same as with regular web system. You get email notifications if certain time has passed and no one answered. Moshe