Few questions about OTRS.

[cbravo]

Hello guys, I've been trying out OTRS and modding it to fit my company needs. During the test we have, several questions arise.

• 1.- as an agent, when you try to create a new ticket you have two options, phone ticket and email ticket. What's the difference between each one of them?
  
  2.- I have a custom dashlet that shows the owner of the ticket. I have noticed that when a customer creates a ticket using the web interface root@localhost is assigned as the owner of the ticket. When an agent creates either a phone or email ticket even tho the ticket is not locked to him it shows him as the owner of the ticket. How can I change this since is confusing sometimes as you think he is working on the ticket when he only created it.
  
  3.- How do the free fields work in tickets? What are they for? could you give me an example? thank you.

[crythias]

1.- as an agent, when you try to create a new ticket you have two options, phone ticket and email ticket. What's the difference between each one of them?

They do the same thing: FROM a customer TO a queue (by default). Email ticket ALSO sends a "You have a new ticket" to the customer.

2.- I have a custom dashlet that shows the owner of the ticket. I have noticed that when a customer creates a ticket using the web interface root@localhost is assigned as the owner of the ticket. When an agent creates either a phone or email ticket even tho the ticket is not locked to him it shows him as the owner of the ticket. How can I change this since is confusing sometimes as you think he is working on the ticket when he only created it.

You'd have to change the owner at time of ticket creation. Email tickets don't automatically get assigned an owner because it's possible that multiple agents can own a ticket within a queue. Unless you have something like Owner=Dispatcher and Responsible=handler of the ticket.

3.- How do the free fields work in tickets? What are they for? could you give me an example? thank you.

There are article Free Text and Ticket Free text. They hold extra data that you can define either by drop down or free text to fill in.

[cbravo]

thank you for your taking the time to answer me. Would you mind expanding a little more about changing the owner at ticket creation?. What I want is that the owner of the ticket always become root@localhost for all the tickets that get created. Thank you in advance.

[crythias]

I suppose you could make that as the owner if that user exists. You could also just use the customer interface or email to create the ticket.

The point of the admin interface is that the person creating a ticket on the admin side probably has a good idea at the time of creation whom he wishes to assign the ticket. The customer doesn't *generally* get a say in the matter. (Generally, because it is possible to have one agent on one queue, but that's another administrative hassle).

If you don't want ownership of tickets, that's fine. OTRS is designed to track who is handling a ticket. Agents creating tickets are *assumed* to be one of two types of people: 1) Managers/Dispatchers or 2) self-starters. The former should generally know whom to assign a ticket, and the latter would assign a ticket to himself.

If you don't want to assign a specific agent to a ticket, create a dummy agent to hold the ticket.

[cbravo]

but assigning it to a dummy agent wouldn't lock the ticket? what I want is the same functionality as when the customer creates the ticket. When he creates the ticket, the owner of it becomes root@localhost (wich I've renamed to not assigned). So everytime someone looks at the dashboard can easily know if the ticket has been assigned of not. That's not the case with phone or email tickets. I do like the lock funcionality so I wouldn't want to remove that. Would it be too hard or risky to change the code for new phone and email ticket creation? Thank you for keeping up with me through this.

[crythias]

I guess I understand the point ... assigning an owner doesn't necessarily lock the ticket,... If I'm reading this properly, you're trying to create tickets with no owner because it's the only way you know to indicate they haven't been addressed?

may I suggest a new status "unhandled" (or new) of type "open"?