Initial setup

[Declanmlong]

Hi,

I am looking at setting up OTRS in my company for our customer support,

We have a 30 person company which is seperated into IT, developers and 5 teams of support.
I am not exactly sure how I would set this up in OTRS.

My initial thoughts would be create a admin account for all support staff,
create a queue for each team
add users to each team

for external users (customers)
set up a customer account for each customer
and allow them just add service request to each queue which would be the teams.

has anybody got any other suggestions of how i could do this better.
I am very impressed with otrs and hope to get using it soon.

thanks in advance

[crythias]

So far what you've said sounds proper.

[yuri0001]

Hi,

My initial thoughts would be create a admin account for all support staff,

To my mind it's not a proper way to create a admin account for all support staff. It's be better to give them another account with proper rights in queues for each team & group. Otherwise all staff will see all tickets in all queues. It's wrong.
Forgive me for my bad English

[Declanmlong]

Ok,

Thanks for the replies, As far as i can tell I have been looking at the wrong so far.

Support users should not see all queues, thanks for noting that for me. I have seen somewhere
that it is best to create groups and give the groups permissions to the queues, In that way I can then
assign admins to different groups allowing them to only see the queues they need to and manage it quite easily.

I am very new, I need to next figure out how to use services as i don't really understand what its is and how i
relate them to a queue, if anyone can give me an insight into this I would be greatful.

Thanks!

[ferrosti]

Permissions go like this
Agent => Roles => Groups(Queue)

Bind one group to one queue each. Setup Roles and define specific permissions on several groups.
e.g.
Role_MainDispatcher
Group_Inbox (rw)
Group_1st_level (ro, create, move, move_into, owner, priority, compose, note)
Group_2nd_level (ro, move_into, note)

[Declanmlong]

Thanks for the help,

Where is this information documented? Is there a manual for this etc?

I want to make sure the initial set up is perfect, because I really don't want to have to come back
and start changing things and break it.

Permissions for internal staff are important, but my main concern is that there is no possible way
for external users to see each others cases. there will be a lot of confidential data within the tickets
which only the customer them selves should be able to see and of course supporting agents.

Can I be confident that customers will only ever see there own service request?

[jojo]

did you had a look at the docu on doc.otrs.org? Whats about getting some external commercial help for the conceptional desing and first time setup?

[Declanmlong]

Yes I have had a look at the documentation but its all a bit fuzzy still,
I think that external help would be an option, how would I go about this
and any idea how much this would cost?

[ferrosti]

Experience shows that you WILL need a development and testing system e.g. in a virtual machine.
After going live you will at least need it for update and upgrade testing anyways.

Commercial support is offered by xxx itself. It is woth its price and we had some very good engineers at our site for initial planning and customizing.

[Declanmlong]

Point noted on the Development and testing environments, Is it possible to have all three in the same apache server running on different ports? that would be useful. Our company does not have a VMware licence so thats not an option.

I will contact Otrs and see what the pricing would be for that,
Thanks

[ferrosti]

This is possible, but you will have to run perl in CGI mode instead of mod_perl which makes it a lot slower.
This is well documented in these forums.

VMWare Player is free of charge. I do not see a problem with it. And even if it were not it will save you days of work that you should calculate against a license fee.

[crythias]

virtualbox is also available and free...