On Friday 18 June 2004 02:48 pm, pg@corpex.de wrote: | Hi, | | we are looking into deploying OTRS as a support ticket system. We are | currently working with good old plain email clients. | | How are you all managing this? We have our agents sit with an OTRS screen open all day long. OTRS forces the browser to update every x seconds, so when a new ticket comes in, the agent will see it. Once an agent grabs a ticket, the ticket is "locked" and other agents can't touch it. This prevents two people from working on the same problem at the same time. Tickets are "unlocked" by the system after a certain period of time, so if you have a lazy agent, someone else will be able to solve the customer's problem. Our company provides outsourced support services to a number of companies, so we especially like the filter-by-queue feature. For each customer, we set up a unique email address on the customer's own domain (typically "trouble@customer.com"). A user at each customer creates a ticket by sending a free-form email to "trouble@x.com". OTRS sends an auto-response back letting the user know that the system has created a ticket, and is grabbing an agent out from the pub to go work on it. OTRS deposits each new ticket into separate queues by customer. Each agent can configure their own "personal queues" (these are sometimes called "custom queues"), and the default agent view is to show a combined view of all tickets in all of the custom queues for that agent. This enables you to have different agents be responsible for different customers, and to keep each agents views as small as possible by limiting their tickets to only their own customers. Although OTRS has various ticket "states" (Open, Closed, etc.) we also use sub-queues from each customer (Incoming, Closed, Invoiced) as our billing folks enter data into the accounting system from OTRS. <rant on> OTRS is a wonderful system and we love it. The only drawback for us is the weak reporting and data export capability as compared to other, even free, help desk systems. I gave the OTRS developers a detailed proposal and asked for a quote to do this work for us on a paid basis and although they said they were interested, they never gave me a quote, so, now we are shopping locally for some middleware to do this, hopefully without preventing us from upgrading as new releases are made available. If you don't bill customers for money, then OTRS will likely be excellent for you. If I had it to do over again, I would pick a system that has better reporting and data export capability, without requiring one to have a database administrator or programmer on staff. <rant off> I hope this is helpful, Mark -- _____________________________________________ A Message From... L. Mark Stone Reliable Networks of Maine, LLC 477 Congress Street, 5th Floor Portland, ME 04101 Tel: (207) 772-5678 Web: http://www.RNoME.com