Hello to the group - newbie

[p3isys]

Greetings to the group.

I'm an OTRS newbie - I own a small technology services company servicing small businesses. We previously used a proprietary helpdesk system with integrated monitoring. It was built on a Windows JBOSS stack and was a terrible resource hog that would just barely run on an Amazon EC2 Small instance, requiring frequent restarts and tweaking. The interface was okay, but my techs and I were always wanting more.

I had known about OTRS for several years, and when the time approached to renew the license on the old helpdesk, I decided to bite the bullet and deploy OTRS. I wish we had used OTRS from the very beginning.

We deployed a Canonical-supplied image of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on an Amazon EC2 using an EBS boot volume and an elastic IP. Installation was very straightforward, the most complicated part being the deployment of current Sendmail instead of Postfix to have a local, smarthosted MTA.

We installed OTRS 2.4.7 with ITSM 2.0.3 (the CMDB was a much-desired feature) and I was able to dump our existing customers and email addresses from the old system and my billing system to easily build load scripts to populate the customer_company and customer_user tables.

It took a few days to go through OTRS and input most of the customizations we will use (salutations, signatures, notifications, etc) plus setting the kernel.pm to allow use of the customer_company table. These days were not full time; I was tinkering with OTRS while taking care of daily business of running the shop.

In short, OTRS is exactly what we had been looking for. It runs like a top on an Amazon EC2 small instance, is rock solid stable, and is enabling me and my techs to get much more done with greater efficiency and speed than ever. The customer portal is just what we needed to allow our customers an instant view of their service requests and history, and the reporting tool gives me some additional data to add to our monthly MSP billing.

OTRS saved us big $$$$ in license renewals on the old system and also reduced our monthly server cost by 35% since Linux instances are cheaper on EC2 than Windows. In short, we have better functionality and performance for reduced costs. I couldn't be happier, and my techs think that OTRS Rocks. And there's enough headroom on the server to allow us to run the central instance of our Open Source monitoring solution, which can send notifications to OTRS via email.

We have not fully implemented all of the functionalities of OTRS, but we are very excited about what we have been able to put in place, and look forward to more.

Thanks to the OTRS team for building a great ticketing system, and to the community for providing such a great support resource! I look forward to learning more about OTRS and networking with the rest of the community. Perhaps we will be able to give back a little as we learn more.

Kind regards,
Rob M.