Basic OTRS Ticket Management Visibility

[scampbell]

Hello

I've recently built an OTRS server and have been trying to establish an internal help desk for my company. The help desk is rather small and there isn't much traffic, but I want to make this scalable, and more importantly, well organized. I'm having a hard time with basic ticket management for agents. I've gotten tickets to work, setup some queues, can assign ownership and responsibility, but there doesn't seem to be any categorized ticket visibility for the agents to keep track of what they are doing.

I've played around with several different configurations: having an agent that only takes care of the initial ticket and assigning them to actual agents, using the actual agents as owners, just responsible and making them full admins.

What I'm looking for is a breakdown of an agents tickets by queue taking into account the pending state. I would like an agent to open up (preferably the dashboard but any list will do) a list of their tickets that is marked for them in some way (responsible, owner, locked, etc.), broken down by the queues they are responsible for and only to show active tickets. If a ticket is pending, I don't think it should show up in this list. Right now it seems like there are too many places to go look to see if you have a ticket that is active. The dashboard doesn't seem to be useful for the agent, only the assigning admin for new tickets that have arrived.

It's very possible I'm just missing the boat on this. I really like what the software has to offer and it gets tons of recommendations. If anyone can point me in a direction or give me a little guidance, I'd certainly appreciate it. I'd really like to make a go of this.

Thanks!
Samuel

[WilcoGG]

Hi

There are so many ways to approach this...

From my understand of what you are saying and from an agents point of view you should:
>>tell your agents to use the 'my queues' view
>>Make sure your agents are members of the queues you want them to be
>>Use ticket owner to designate which agents is reponsible for that ticket
>>Use ticket state to track the status of that ticket. OTRS has a number of ticket stats by default including the 'pending' state you mention, but you may want to add more such as 'awaiting customer response

To get the 'pending tickets' removed from the view or indeed to add some other useful columns such as 'last call update' you are going to need to do a little more work via the sysconfig settings or possibbly config files in your installation on the server. I can't remember how I did that off the top of my head but it was from support forums like this one.

Does that help at all?

[scampbell]

Yes, it does help a bit. I've spent a few days working with some test tickets and playing with different agents, owners, views and permissions. I still wish I had a little more control over the dashboard views, but I've come to understand what the views are showing me and the overall ticket access.

It seems that as long as I take your suggestion and have agents pay close attention to the My Queues and Responsible link, then they can filter out their own tickets. I also added the Next State option to the Note screen so that a ticket can progress away from New as quickly as possible. That seems to clean up ticket flow as well.

Thanks!