OTRS capabilities

[MichaelO]

Hi (tried this on the demo site yesterday, figured this is a better place),

I am currently looking into a ticketing system, and just had a couple of questions that you might be able to help with:

Just wondering if this can be used to provide an effective ticketing system for an IT person that provides IT support for a number of small businesses and companies (independent CompanyA, CompanyB etc., each with their own set-up) and how manageable that is.

e.g. if a new user is added to Company A (to their Active Directory domain), do they also have to be added manually to the OTRS system so that they can use it (or done automatically or if a customerID is used already for their company can they just use that without any extra setup).

Also, I am trying to decide if I should provide customers an email address e.g. helpdesk@mycompany.com to use or could I also have a website that each inividual customer can log in to and view their own tickets (and create new ones), with me being a superuser that can view/ control all aspects of the ticketing system for all customers.

Appreciate your response.
Michael

[crythias]

Just wondering if this can be used to provide an effective ticketing system for an IT person that provides IT support for a number of small businesses and companies (independent CompanyA, CompanyB etc., each with their own set-up) and how manageable that is.

It's pretty much what OTRS does, although "own set-up" is open to discussion.

e.g. if a new user is added to Company A (to their Active Directory domain), do they also have to be added manually to the OTRS system so that they can use it (or done automatically or if a customerID is used already for their company can they just use that without any extra setup).

If you are able to use Company A's LDAP server as a backend for customers, it should happen automatically.

Also, I am trying to decide if I should provide customers an email address e.g. helpdesk@mycompany.com to use or could I also have a website that each inividual customer can log in to and view their own tickets (and create new ones), with me being a superuser that can view/ control all aspects of the ticketing system for all customers.

They'd use their own credentials to log into the customer side of your OTRS implementation.

[MichaelO]

e.g. if a new user is added to Company A (to their Active Directory domain), do they also have to be added manually to the OTRS system so that they can use it (or done automatically or if a customerID is used already for their company can they just use that without any extra setup).

If you are able to use Company A's LDAP server as a backend for customers, it should happen automatically.

Also, I am trying to decide if I should provide customers an email address e.g. helpdesk@mycompany.com to use or could I also have a website that each inividual customer can log in to and view their own tickets (and create new ones), with me being a superuser that can view/ control all aspects of the ticketing system for all customers.

They'd use their own credentials to log into the customer side of your OTRS implementation.

So for what I would like to achieve, it sounds like I will have the OTRS implementation at my site, and will have to do a small bit of firewall configuration on the side of each company that I wish to connect to their LDAP server. Each customer then logs in to my OTRS implementation using their own credentials.

The only other issue that I would wonder about is if I go with this implementation above, would it be also possible for the same customer to also be able to submit a new request to helpdesk@mycompany.com (or would this not be considered best practice)?

Looks like I better get started - my main goal is to implement OTRS correctly the first time around.

Thank you for your response(s) - it is nice to be in a forum where a new or potential user of a product is not blasted for asking such questions.

[crythias]

would it be also possible for the same customer to also be able to submit a new request to helpdesk@mycompany.com (or would this not be considered best practice)?

All roads lead to tickets.

OTRS knows what you tell it for customers and will tag a known customer that matches a from email address. If not, it's handled separately.

There is no wrong way to accept a ticket: phone/email/web.

[troffasky]

e.g. if a new user is added to Company A (to their Active Directory domain), do they also have to be added manually to the OTRS system so that they can use it

They do not. Anyone can email in to helpdesk@ [or whatever] to create a ticket [and I expect you can configure it so that only certain users can]. However...

Also, I am trying to decide if I should provide customers an email address e.g. helpdesk@mycompany.com to use or could I also have a website that each inividual customer can log in to and view their own tickets (and create new ones)

...if you want people to be able to use a web frontend, then OTRS will need a list of users from somewhere, and if you've got a VPN to customers for remote support [or whatever] then you might as well make use of it.

Which you choose to use depends on your customers, and you know them better than anyone else. I can think of a few customers who I wish didn't know the helpdesk email address as we get a ludicrous number of duplicate and irrelevant tickets from them. Not much OTRS can do about that, beyond asking it to merge the tickets.