Hi Jason, On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 02:38:47PM -0800, Jason Coltrin wrote:

I will give a brief demo of OTRS to our department heads and compare OTRS to a licensed helpdesk suite called "Turn Over", which runs an AS400 database back-end. Besides the obvious benefits of OTRS (web-based, price, ease of use, email filtering, and support), what are some winning features of OTRS I can highlight?

IMO. * agent interface web and email based * customer interface web and email based * ease of use for agents and customers * email support (filtering, attachments) * web interface attachments support * customize the output templates (dtl) release independently * Multi language support * fulltext search * SQL database * commercial support In other way: http://otrs.org/feature/

Is there a way someone, who knows their ticket number, enter that number into a web-interface and check the status of a ticket? Check to see which tech has been assigned the ticket, age of the ticket, and read notes about the ticket? I understand if this was not the intent of OTRS in it's design; general public is not to have access to the system without a un/pw.

I think you mean the customer panel (no public access to tickets for everyone). Demo: http://otrs.org/demo/

One more issue is our installation does not have graphs installed. I would like to install this but I'm unfamiliar with CPAN. Our OTRS is installed on Debian and I'd like to install the graphs with as little pain as possible. Will following the steps below install graphs on the Stats page? [...] and maybe the GD stuff (stats support, not required!) ... install GD install GD::Text install GD::Graph install GD::Graph::lines install GD::Text::Align ...

You will need this modules to be able to execute bin/mkStats.pl.

Thanks very much, Jason Coltrin AGIA Inc. PCSS IV

Martin Edenhofer -- ((otrs.de)) :: OTRS GmbH :: Norsk-Data-Str. 1 :: 61352 Bad Homburg http://www.otrs.de/ :: Manage your communication!

Jason Coltrin wrote:

One more issue is our installation does not have graphs installed. I would like to install this but I'm unfamiliar with CPAN. Our OTRS is installed on Debian and I'd like to install the graphs with as little pain as possible. Will following the steps below install graphs on the Stats page?

a) Install the RPMs if your distributions provides RPMs for the required CPAN modules.

Of course you can use the respective deb-packages.

b) Install the required modules via CPAN shell (http://www.cpan.org/) perl -MCPAN -e shell; ... install Digest::MD5

"apt-cache search perl |grep -i digest" would help you find "libdigest-md5-perl", which is the required deb-package here.

install Net::DNS install MIME::Base64 (if Perl < 5.8) ...

If you can't find a deb-package, you should use "dh-make-perl --build --install --cpan <modulename>" in order to get it from CPAN, build it, generate a deb-package and install it in one step. For the graphs in OTRS you most probably need GD GD::Graph GD::Graph::lines which should be included in "libgd-graph-perl". by Töns -- There is no safe distance.