LDAP & customer company support

[davidvanuffelen]

Hi,

we have been using OTRS for some time now and we would like to add a new feature to our configuration.
To make things a little bit easier we would like to enable Customer Company Support.

I haven't found much information about configuring this with LDAP (because we use LDAP to authenticate our customers).

Is it possible to combine Customer Company Support and LDAP?

[root]

AFAIK there is only DB support for CustomerCompany.

Are your companies OUs in your LDAP?

[davidvanuffelen]

I was afraid of that.

I assume there is no easy way to migrate from LDAP to DB Backend and keep all existing data? The impact for our customers should be as low as possible

[root]

There's a sync script for customer user available for OTRS: https://github.com/OTRS/otrs/blob/rel-4 ... LDAP2DB.pl. This could be your starting point to create one for sync LDAP customer to the database.

Do you have an example/anonymized output from LDAP one customer company?

[crythias]

Is it possible to combine Customer Company Support and LDAP?

In what way would you want to do this?

Certainly you may store CustomerCompanies in the database and link via same spelling/case for the CustomerID Map value in CustomerUser.

If CustomerCompanySupport is enabled, the database holds the Companies. Ldap holds the customers. The value of CustomerID links the two.

[davidvanuffelen]

I don't have all the details why it was setup like this. I was only responsible for setting up the server, not for the configuration.

The problem that they're having at this moment is that when they log a new ticket, they might end up with a bunch of dummy companies because of typo's.
The original idea was to make the Customer Company a type-ahead field, but from what I've learned so far is that such a thing does not exist at this moment.

So basically, the problem is that the company field can contain any value. They hope that enabling Customer Company Support will restrict the possibility of entering random/faulty data somehow.

[crythias]

customerid is always available as free text.
However, it automatically fills in when customer is chosen and the customer has a customerID.
It shouldn't be filled in manually unless the customer doesn't exist.

[davidvanuffelen]

Thanks for the info.
So that would be a solution to our problem.

So I've got 2 options:

1) Set up a new configuration with a DB Backend

OR

2) try to migrate the current customers from LDAP to DB Backend and find a way to use the synchronisation option.

Is this correct?

[crythias]

I don't know that either are relevant.

Setting up or changing backend doesn't affect frontend whether the field is usable or that agents fill in customerid manually unless if they add customers manually in the db backend and then misspell from there.

but If you enable customercompanysupport in config.pm, it will look up where customers (not customer users) exist and provide customerID as dropdown for customer OR read customerID from ldap attribute that holds that string, which *does* have problems of data entry at ADUC, because it's an open string and doesn't provide a dropdown of customers.

So that's kinda the problem with LDAP/AD: From an OTRS side, attributes are read only, and OTRS CustomerUser knows what it's being told/what it queries. From an LDAP data entry side, that is handled by the ADUC or other LDAP interface in freeform fields. The database side of Customers (companies) will match if the case and spelling match Customer customer_id = CustomerUser customer_id, however defined CustomerUser customer_id (ldap or DB).