OTRS 2.3 - Admin Manual OTRS 2.3 - Admin Manual Bora Bora Edition Copyright © 2003-2008 OTRS AG René Bakker, Hauke Böttcher, Jens Bothe, Udo Bretz, Martin Edenhofer, Manuel Hecht, Christopher Kuhn, André Mindermann, Henning Oschwald, Thomas Raith, Stefan Rother, Burchard Steinbild This work is copyrighted by OTRS AG. You may copy it in whole or in part as long as the copies retain this copyright statement. UNIX is a registered trademark of X/Open Company Limited. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. MS-DOS, Windows, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other trademarks and registered trademarks are: SUSE and YaST of SUSE AG, Red Hat and Fedora are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. Mandrake is a registered trademark of MandrakeSoft, SA. Debian is a registered trademark of Software in the Public Interest, Inc. MySQL and the MySQL Logo are registered trademarks of MySQL AB. All trade names are used without the guarantee for their free use and are possibly registered trade marks. OTRS AG essentially follows the notations of the manufacturers. Other products mentioned in this manual may be trademarks of the respective manufacturer. Table of Contents Preface ........................................................................................................................................................x 1. Basics about trouble ticket systems......................................................................................................1 1.1. What is a trouble ticket system, when do you need it? ...............................................................1 1.2. What is a trouble ticket?..............................................................................................................2 2. OTRS - Open Ticket Request System ..................................................................................................3 2.1. Basics ..........................................................................................................................................3 2.2. Features .......................................................................................................................................3 2.2.1. New features of OTRS 2.3..............................................................................................5 2.2.2. New features of OTRS 2.2..............................................................................................6 2.2.3. New features of OTRS 2.1..............................................................................................7 2.3. Hard and software requirements .................................................................................................8 2.4. Community..................................................................................................................................9 2.5. Commercial Support for OTRS.................................................................................................10 3. Installation / Upgrade of the OTRS framework ...............................................................................11 3.1. The simple way - Installation of prebuilt packages...................................................................11 3.1.1. Installing the rpm on a SUSE distro.............................................................................11 3.1.2. Installing OTRS on a Debian system ...........................................................................16 3.1.3. Installing OTRS on Microsoft Windows systems ........................................................16 3.2. Installation from source (Linux, Unix) .....................................................................................17 3.2.1. Preparing the installation from source..........................................................................17 3.2.2. Installation of needed Perl modules .............................................................................18 3.2.3. Configuring the apache web server ..............................................................................21 3.2.4. Configuring the database ..............................................................................................22 3.2.5. Setting up the cron jobs for OTRS ...............................................................................26 3.3. Upgrading the OTRS Frameworks............................................................................................31 4. First steps in OTRS..............................................................................................................................32 4.1. Agent web interface ..................................................................................................................32 4.2. Customer web interface.............................................................................................................32 4.3. Public web interface..................................................................................................................33 4.4. First login ..................................................................................................................................34 4.5. An overview to the web interface..............................................................................................35 4.6. What is a queue? .......................................................................................................................38 4.7. User preferences........................................................................................................................39 5. The admin area of OTRS ....................................................................................................................41 5.1. Basics ........................................................................................................................................41 5.2. User, groups and roles...............................................................................................................41 5.2.1. User...............................................................................................................................42 5.2.2. Groups ..........................................................................................................................42 5.2.3. Roles.............................................................................................................................45 5.3. Customer users and customer groups........................................................................................48 5.3.1. Customer users .............................................................................................................48 5.3.2. Customer groups...........................................................................................................49 5.4. Queues.......................................................................................................................................50 5.5. Salutations, signatures, attachments and responses ..................................................................51 iii 5.5.1. Salutations ....................................................................................................................53 5.5.2. Signatures .....................................................................................................................54 5.5.3. Attachments..................................................................................................................55 5.6. Auto answers.............................................................................................................................56 5.7. Email addresses.........................................................................................................................58 5.8. Notifications ..............................................................................................................................59 5.9. SMIME......................................................................................................................................60 5.10. PGP .........................................................................................................................................61 5.11. States .......................................................................................................................................62 5.12. The graphical configuration frontend (SysConfig) .................................................................63 5.13. Using mail accounts ................................................................................................................64 5.14. Filtering incoming messages...................................................................................................65 5.15. Executing automated jobs with the GenericAgent..................................................................68 5.16. Admin email............................................................................................................................70 5.17. Session management ...............................................................................................................71 5.18. System Log .............................................................................................................................72 5.19. SQL queries via the SQL box .................................................................................................73