Make ticket article private

[SSI Justin Paquin]

Hello,
We are a software company and use OTRS for our customer support helpdesk. Our organizational structure is such that we have an international reseller network responsible for selling our software in their geographical regions. When providing technical support to a customer, we cc the appropriate reseller on any communication so they are aware of issues affecting their customers. We have a process in place that dictates that resellers should not reply to a technical support ticket with information that should not be visible to customers because OTRS will pickup the reply and add it as a customer (email-external) article to the ticket. As OTRS picks up the e-mail as a customer response, it is viewable by the customer in the customer web interface even though the communication should be internal and private. This scenario also applies to other individuals in the organization replying, with internal information, to a ticket on whose response they were cc'd.

Even though the proper process should prevent this unwanted scenario from occurring, mistakes do happen. My question is, is there any way to mark a particular ticket article as private? I have found the following thread in the forum (http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f= ... ory#p19821) which discusses article filtering and JoJo seems to indicate that it is not possible to do this but the thread was oriented on a different theme so I wanted to ask this question directly.

I appreciate any assistance in advance.

Best Regards,
Justin Paquin

[jojo]

Hi Justin,

it is not possible to change an article which was created article (only via database). You could create a postmaster filter to set emails from some domains as article tpye: email-internal

[SSI Justin Paquin]

Thanks for such a quick response Jojo,
Do you have any measure of negative side effects that could occur if the article_type_id for a particular article was changed, using a database query, from a 1 (email-external) to 2 (email-internal) ? My ideal situation would be that making this change would just:
- Change the type for that article.
- The article still shows up under the same ticket
- The e-mail represented by the article is now only visible in the agent interface. It is no longer visible in the customer interface.

Best Regards
Justin