OTRS <--> OTRS comunication through email.

[mantrox]

Hi there,
i was looking into implementing a somewhat complex way of comunicating with the same tickets on diferent OTRS systems.

The workflow would go as follows:
- I recieve a ticket wich has the "X software" queue.
- I escalate the ticket to the Agent Group wich handles the "software X"(ticket sorting and escalation is allways done by me).
- When i escalate it, i want OTRS to send said ticket, by email, to the OTRS system of the "Software X" company.
- On the Software X company side, their system has a fetch setup on a mailbox.
- "Software X" company, responds to the ticket and it comes back to our mailbox with a fetch setup as well.
- Finally, our OTRS system upon fetching said email agregates all the information pertinent to that Ticket.

Some questions:
1 - Is this kind of workflow too complex to setup properly?
2 - Is there a feature on OTRS, other than the email, that could go about doing a similar kind of information transaction?
3 - If the workflow described is a viable option, can the "Software X" company, close tickets on our side by incorporating some kind of code on the email?

Thank you for your assistance and patience.

[renee]

What does it mean that you escalate the tickets? Is it a special ticket state?

You could write a TicketEventHandler that is triggered on your escalation. That event handler can send an email to the software company. Then you have define what has to be included in that mail (just the initial request or the other articles as well). You won't be able to create the ticket hierarchy on the other system.

When the software vendor sends you an email back, your postmaster will accept it as a follow up (identified by the ticket number in the subject - you have to ensure that your OTRS instance runs with an other SystemID than the software vendors' OTRS).

The software vendor can set X-OTRS-... header values to close the ticket in your OTRS.

So, other techniques to gain information? There is a stub RPC implementation, but to be honest I don't know much about it. I guess the RPC interface can not handle your requirements.

If you need an OTRS addon to handle your requirements and you don't have Perl programmers in your company, you can contact me at info@perl-services.de.