Open Source Ticket Request System

The free and open source Web based ticket management system helps you automate processes of your help desk

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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Open Source Ticket Request System (OTRS) comes with two separate Web interfaces - Agent Interface and Customer Interface. From Agent Interface all administrative and ticketing tasks can be performed and Customer Interface is where customers i.e, users can raise new tickets from, check status of the already raised tickets, etc. Other than raising tickets through the Web interface, new tickets can also be created through email and phone (manual). It also comes with a dashboard which gives a quick overview of help desk activities such as, escalated tickets, new tickets, activity in last 7 days etc.

Additionally, OTRS provides comprehensive reports which include created and closed tickets, SLA analysis, solution time, answer time analysis, etc.

How to use?
OTRS binaries are available for Linux as well as Windows. Here, we are going to limit ourselves to the Windows environment. OTRS is very simple to install. Download its binary and run the setup. During installation, it will automatically take care of Web server and MySQL part. Unlike other open source solutions, where you first need to setup a Web server and database and then configure the solution. This can be good or bad depending upon the environment you have. Once its initial setup is completed, it will launch its Web installer where you need to provide password for the admin user -root. Leave rest of the settings to default. Next, it will ask you to provide the FQDN of the machine on which you are installing it and a 'Admin' email address.
Once installed, launch OTRS Agent Interface from the start menu. Next, you will be asked to provide the admin credentials which you provided during the setup. Once logged in, you can manage tickets, view stats and perform other ticketing tasks.

Under Queue, you can view all tickets assigned, with its state, priority, etc, and perform tasks such as, close, lock etc.	Under admin area of OTRS, you can manage groups, create rules for users, create SLAs etc.

Before you put the solution to use, it's important to specify the roles of users. You can do this from admin. Here, you can also perform other administrative tasks such as, managing queues, responses, auto responses, etc. You can simply create a new user by going to Users option. When creating a user, you can also specify if the user should be notified about the tickets. Once you create a user, it will automatically ask you about the group the user should be added to. Under Groups, you can perform group management. By default, it comes with three groups, admin, stats and users.

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