Tips for an internship project with OTRS

[brcttr]

Hi and thanks for this great forum opportunity.

For my internship project, I have to setup a service management tool. Hence, I need to upgrade the current help desk of a little company (they do SAP Security support for some companies). So I mentioned OTRS because, in my opinion, is the best powerful open source tool for this task. Therefore, my tutor says that I necessarily have to reach four fundamental goals, namely:

a) Customers must be able to open a ticket remotely with OTRS.
b) SLA management for new tickets (SLA must be different for any customer).
c) Ticket approval concept, in other words any end user that works with OTRS must have a person in charge who's be able to approve the end user ticket.
d) This tool must be able to report:
i. How many tickets are sent by a certain customer;
ii. How does it takes to solve a certain ticket in general;
iii. How many tickets are out-SLA.

On my machine (a netbook windows based) I setup now OTRS Help Desk with ITSM (and some other features) and then tomorrow I'll start with a demo of OTRS.

So, my question is: is it possible to accomplish this tasks with OTRS? Have you any tips to do this work?

[crythias]

a) Customers must be able to open a ticket remotely with OTRS.

Yes, this is standard. Set up a dedicated email address and pop3 it.

b) SLA management for new tickets (SLA must be different for any customer).

Yes, with services enabled and SLAs attached to services and services attached to customers.

c) Ticket approval concept, in other words any end user that works with OTRS must have a person in charge who's be able to approve the end user ticket.

This varies in implementation. A way to do it is to have a queue managed by a Dispatcher, who owns all tickets, and assigns responsible agents to "approved" tickets. (Requires configuration change to enable Responsible)

d) This tool must be able to report:
i. How many tickets are sent by a certain customer;
ii. How does it takes to solve a certain ticket in general;
iii. How many tickets are out-SLA.

i. you could search this
ii. possible to report, check built-in reports
iii. probably searchable.

Reporting isn't my strength, but the requirements are certainly based upon information both stored and retrievable in the database.

[brcttr]

Thanks so much crythias! So, I start with the demo of the three first points, then I try to solve the other ones. And... Another question is: is possibile to create a sort of "knowledge archive" with all the ticket solved for new service desk candidates?

[crythias]

is there a sort of "knowledge archive" with all the ticket solved for new service desk candidates?

There's an FAQ module that is available.
On the other hand, "all the ticket solved" is ... well, they don't just disappear.

[brcttr]

On the other hand, "all the ticket solved" is ... well, they don't just disappear.

Yes, I mean: is there a tool to classify, for example with folksonomies, every closed ticket?

[crythias]

Yes, I mean: is there a tool to classify, for example with folksonomies, every closed ticket?

Sure, I suppose you could require a Dynamic Field on ticket close.


Here's something else ... I was talking to a colleague who asked me, "How do you keep all these clients managed in your head? How do you remember configuration differences between clients?"

I said, "I treat all clients the same: They are all different, and every request is as if they have never had a request before."

He said, "how does that work?"

I said, "Because, generally, it's true. If there is a repeatable issue, something that affects multiple clients, that is something we may document. If it's a repeated issue within one customer, we really need to make sure that doesn't happen again."

A ticketing system, in my opinion, is not optimal for documenting something that is *important* to remember. Oh, it'll be there, but the signal-to-noise ratio is very low. The FAQ system will help greatly -- if you use it.

The team with which I work has changed internally from FAQ to OneNote synchronized on a Web-based Sharepoint Server. We all have a "live" copy of our customer notes which is updated and synced automatically. Whether we create a screenshot or additional documentation, within minutes of it being recorded, we all have that information in OneNote.