OTRS Deployment Help - Non Profit Help Desk

[Jerrduford]

I have been given the task of deploying OTRS for a company in which I work both at the helpdesk as well as manage hardware support. I have very little experience with deploying this type of software and haven't been given a lot of time to do so. With that in mind, I have a short list of goals that need to be accomplished, and was curious if anyone who has been in my position before (or is just dang good with the system) could help point me in the right direction for getting this deployed as efficiently as possible.

For starters, we are currently using BMC (Magic). Some issues we have with this system are:
-Incredibly slow data base (sometimes reassigning/searching for tickets takes way too long)
-No dynamic fields (for example, our hardware tickets are just fill in the blank, no lists, no adaptivity)
-Not very intuitive - Takes too many clicks to perform simple tasks such as logging, reassigning, or closing a ticket
-Sometimes the "window" management gets to be inefficient
-Licensing issue with people sometimes forgetting to sign out makes us have to restart the server and bring the system down temporarily

Now, I am not the current Helpdesk or Ticket System manager, but I believe the technical helpdesk logs in excess of 150-200 tickets per day, and Customer Service (a different department that still uses BMC) logs around the same (my guess). We currently use a different ticket system (browser based and very inconvenient, requires refreshing the page etc.) that we intend to also replace with OTRS. So as you can see, we are relatively low volume.

So, here are my established goals for the end project:

Replace Hardware Tracker
-My current system for tracking hardware in our store is horrific. I would like the ticket system to somehow manage the tracking - The name of the devices at each store, how long they've had them, if they have been replaced, and their serial numbers. I would like these to create dynamic/adaptive fields within the ticket. For example, a store has a database of an A machine, B machine, and C machine. When someone has an issue with machine "B", they can fill out a hardware ticket. When they go to select the machine (rather than just typing it in our old system), there will be a dropdown in which they select system B. After that, there will be another dropdown list of items that I have created that apply to System B (for example, blown Power Supply). Does this all make sense? from what i know, this is doable and is a very important goal for me to keep in mind.

Replace All Current Ticket Systems
-As I stated previously, this needs to seamlessly replace BMC as well as our terrible internal ticket system. I am more concerned about the technical helpdesk side of it first (since that is my department), however it is important to keep the other departments in mind. I also would need a way to import current ticket data into the new system. I believe (don't quote me) that BMC works with a SQL database in which I would assume there would be a way to import to a new database.

I think the majority of the other goals for the project are addressed in the OTRS design in and of itself.
I'd like to thank anyone who took the time to read this. Any and all advice is welcome - Even if you have to send me to another link of relevant information for helping me get this task done on my own.