I would like to request there be more fields for customer contact information such as phone, alt phone fax and a few custom fields that can be relabeled to meet the needs of the OTRS implementor.
I understand the need for such a feature, no question about this. In general there is the problem of proper usage and maintenace of the custom fields in the OTRS (and the underlying database).
I can say from practical experience, that once a critical number of companies ans support contracts is reached (two or three dozens probably) nobody will be able to track changes that have been made to your customer database, so these changes will not be available in the OTRS.
well, not neccessarily. If you would use the LDAP customeruser module (ieks, I still haven't finished it *g*) you have only one customer base. What I could do is to write a generic mapping mechanism that would be displayed on a customerinfo page. so you can specify as much info with the aproperiate mapping as you want. Martin, what do you think?
Originally when I saw customer code I thought I could cluster support users under a code and logically group people that way but it caused a little confusion so I skipped that. The way I envisioned this (from the end user POV, and what would be optimal since I'm dreaming of something that doesn't exist, is that you have one table of companies, one table of employees (or customers) for that company, one table of products and a table of purchases with support agreement dates. All of these are tied together and work pretty much as explaned above. From the back end though: 1) You add your product/service line to the products table on initial setup. Since we use software, each major release would be a product name.. liek Gage InSite 2003, 2004, etc. 2) Under company you state the company 3) You add multiple purchases/support contracts per purchase for that company and have a notes field so minor revision notes might be added. As people upgrade or contracts expire you simple change this table. 4) You add employees(customers) to a company (if they are a single entity you just name the company their name and treat the corresponding employee like a contact record). I think the customer users and employee table I'm discussing are one and the same and should be to avoid confusion. To access this, it would be a simple link from a ticket view.. You could click and get something like: Joe's Software Joe Mann 123-123-2322 joe@software.com 123 West Way Hereville, US 29333 Products: Softsoft 2003 Support Expires:2/14/2003 Softwhat 2002 Support Expires:2/12/2002 I wouldn't even attempt to do anything that calculates the dates and says "this contract is expired, cannot send answer", or even search on those fields, etc. I would simply provide some method of relabeling some custom fields so you can specify what a date or text field relates to. CT