Few Questions if you dont mind

[qazi1214]

actually i work in healthcare company which manages about 40 nursing homes with one corporate head office...nursing homes are linked to corporate office with either vpn or frame relay. so our end users most of the time call us and we solve their problems on the phone by logging in to their computers remotely.we wanted to log every call of them in database so if something goes wrong we can fall back to database and find the solution what we did ....so then i started using otrs because its open source and free....but there r few questions coming to my mind which i need to ask

would customers also need to connect to otrs if yes then how ?? and if we don't choose that way.would it be okay considering our environment as we receive phone calls most of the time
there is one field valid.what is the purpose of it ?
can we customize the fields ??
can we add more fields while filling in blanks for queue ,tickets,etc etc
when i click on tickets tab it shows me queue view.but when i click on it it shows my queue(0) why ?? in fact i made new queues and put tickets in different queues
what is the meaning of tickets locked ??
can we customize the dashboard ??
can we customize the OTRS OVERALL in everything?
are there any advanced features of reporting in otrs like if i want to make up a report that how many calls did we receive on a particular date ??? can we make a report like that ??
are there any managed services offered by otrs?? is there any number to call help support about the problems we face ??
what is itsm ?? is it a patch of otrs ??? do i need to install it ?? currently i am running otrs 3.0.10
is there any proper in depth user manual of otrs available.???

thanks so much in advance for answering these questions

[crythias]

It might be beneficial to separate a specific question in to its own topic, but here goes:

would customers also need to connect to otrs if yes then how ??

need? no. Available to do, yes.
http://somedomainnameyouprovide/otrs/customer.pl

and if we don't choose that way.would it be okay considering our environment as we receive phone calls most of the time

Yes

there is one field valid.what is the purpose of it ?

Because OTRS relies on keeping tabs of everything, "deletion" is usually not a good idea, so "invalid" is used to remove entries from interfaces.

can we customize the fields ??

Yes

can we add more fields while filling in blanks for queue ,tickets,etc etc

TicketFreeText is available for that purpose

when i click on tickets tab it shows me queue view.but when i click on it it shows my queue(0) why ?? in fact i made new queues and put tickets in different queues

Check your preferences. If you have them highlighted in your preferences, tickets in those queues will show where "My Queues" is relevant.

what is the meaning of tickets locked ??

It means an agent has control over the ticket so that another agent doesn't take it and consider it "available" to address. This reduces confusion to the customer so the customer deals with a single agent during a ticket.

can we customize the dashboard ??

Yes

can we customize the OTRS OVERALL in everything?

Yes. You have the source code.

are there any advanced features of reporting in otrs like if i want to make up a report that how many calls did we receive on a particular date ??? can we make a report like that ??

Yes. The easiest way is to use the search functionality, but you can also use statistics.

are there any managed services offered by otrs?? is there any number to call help support about the problems we face ??

Yes. http://www.otrs.com/solutions/managed-otrs/

what is itsm ?? is it a patch of otrs ??? do i need to install it ?? currently i am running otrs 3.0.10

It's a "package" or add-on ... if you don't know what it is, or what ITIL is, you probably don't need it.

is there any proper in depth user manual of otrs available.???

http://doc.otrs.org

[qazi1214]

thank you so much for your quick response...it helped