External notes - hide the from (agent) name?

[bayerex]

Hi all,

Our agents want to give customers the possibility to download a large attachment. The best way for that seems to be writing an external note and then answering the customer advising them that they can now download the file from the ticket.

We are required to contact the customer via a generic support email address and not disclose individual details of agents. If the customer accesses the external note then the from name i.e. the agent who created the external note, is displayed.

A simple workaround would be to create the note via a generic account but the real solution would be to hide the from name from the customer. How can I do this please?

Many thanks in advance.

[crythias]

create an anonymous agent user for this purpose?

[bayerex]

create an anonymous agent user for this purpose?

Yeah, as I said I'm already ok with using this as a workaround. I was just hoping to allow the agents to stay within their own account and not need to switch. So the option do hide the from name would be ideal as we've really no need to ever display that.

[crythias]

Remove the names from the agent list?

[bayerex]

Remove the names from the agent list?

I can't see that working somehow because if you hover over it the email address is still displayed. What's more, the agents wouldn't know very easily who has updated the ticket!

[crythias]

I can't see that working somehow because if you hover over it the email address is still displayed

Why would the personal email address of the agent be displayed?

[jojo]

I created a bug for this. So I suggest not to use external notes.

[bayerex]

I can't see that working somehow because if you hover over it the email address is still displayed

Why would the personal email address of the agent be displayed?

The email address of the author of the note is displayed in the customer interface if you hover over the From name

[bayerex]

I created a bug for this. So I suggest not to use external notes.

Thanks jojo but external notes are currently the only way to give customers large files per OTRS unless we send them FTP links. I wanted however to use just one system. We will use a generic account for external notes until there is a solution.

[StarDestroyer]

I was going to reply to this and suggest you modify Kernel/Output/HTML/Standard/CustomerTicketZoom.dtl in order to simply not render the "From" information. But as I was looking at that, I see that the real issue for you is that when you do a "Reply", OTRS makes the article be from the generic address of the queue whereas when you do a note, the it is recorded as being from the agent logged in. I'm sure this is something you can modify in the perl code, but I'm not sure if you want to go to that extreme.

[crythias]

You might also be able to provide files via FAQs, but on the other hand, not using OTRS to actually store the large files for distribution and linking to a cloud storage for them might also be an alternative.

[bayerex]

This is a tricky one. It's not just us that send customers files through the ticket system it's also customer sending us large files too. We set our upload limit to 500MB, store them in the filesystem instead of the database and periodically run a cronjob to delete uploads/attachments. So again it would be really nice for us to stick with one system.

We'll look into modifying CustomerTicketZoom.dtl. If we have any success I'll post the changes here!