OTRS 2.4 - Admin Manual

René Bakker, Hauke Böttcher, Stefan Bedorf, Shawn Beasley, 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, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other trademarks and registered trademarks are: SUSE and YaST of SUSE Linux GmbH, 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
1. Basics about trouble ticket systems
What is a trouble ticket system and why do you need it?
What is a trouble ticket?
2. OTRS - Open Ticket Request System
Basics
Features
New features of OTRS 2.4
New features of OTRS 2.3
New features of OTRS 2.2
New features of OTRS 2.1
Hard and software requirements
Community
Commercial Support for OTRS
3. Installation / Upgrade of the OTRS framework
The simple way - Installation of pre-built packages
Installing the rpm on a SUSE Linux server
Installing OTRS on a Debian system
Installing OTRS on Microsoft Windows systems
Installation from source (Linux, Unix)
Preparing the installation from source
Installation of Perl modules
Configuring the apache web server
Configuring the database
Setting up the cron jobs for OTRS
Upgrading the OTRS Frameworks
Upgrading .tar.gz
Upgrading RPM
4. First steps in OTRS
Agent web interface
Customer web interface
Public web interface
First login
An overview to the web interface
What is a queue?
User preferences
5. The admin area of OTRS
Basics
Users, groups and roles
Users
Groups
Roles
Customer users and customer groups
Customer users
Customer groups
Queues
Salutations, signatures, attachments and responses
Salutations
Signatures
Attachments
Auto answers
Email addresses
Notifications
SMIME
PGP
States
SysConfig
Using mail accounts
Filtering incoming messages
Executing automated jobs with the GenericAgent
Admin email
Session management
System Log
SQL queries via the SQL box
Package manager
6. Configuring the system
The config files of OTRS
Configuring the system through the web interface
7. Sending/Receiving emails
Sending emails
Via Sendmail (default)
Via SMTP server or smarthost
Receiving emails
Mail accounts configured via the OTRS GUI
Via command line program and e.g. procmail (PostMaster.pl)
Fetching emails via POP3 or IMAP and fetchmail for PostMaster.pl
Filtering/dispatching by OTRS/PostMaster modules (for more complex dispatching)
8. Time related functions
Setting up business hours, holidays and time zones
Business Hours
Fixed date holidays
TimeVacationDaysOneTime
Automated Unlocking
9. Ticket responsibility and ticket watching
Ticket responsibility
Ticket watching
10. Customize the PDF output
11. Using external backends
Customer data
Customer user backend
Database (Default)
LDAP
Use more than one customer backend with OTRS
Backends to authenticate agents and customer users
authentication backends for agents
authentication backends for customer users
Customize the customer self registration
Customizing the web interface
Customer mapping
Customize the customer_user table in the OTRS DB
12. States
Predefined states
New
Open
Pending reminder
Pending auto close-
Pending auto close+
Merged
Closed Successful
Closed Unsuccessful
Customizing states
13. Modifying ticket priorities
14. Creating your own themes
15. Localization of the OTRS frontend
16. PGP
17. S/MIME
18. Access Control Lists (ACLs)
19. Stats module
Handling of the module by the agent
Overview
Generate and view stats
Edit - New
Import
Administration of the stat module by the OTRS administrator
Permission settings, groups and queues
SysConfig
Administration of the stats module by the system administrator
Data base table
List of all files
Caching
mkStats.pl
Automated stat generation - Cron
Static stats
Using old static stats
Default stats
20. Additional applications
Calendar
Content manager
File manager
Web mailer
FAQ
System status
21. Performance Tuning
OTRS
TicketIndexModule
TicketStorageModule
Database
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Webserver
Pre-establish database connections
Preloaded modules - startup.pl
Reload Perl modules when updated on disk
Choosing the Right Strategy
mod_gzip/mod_deflate
22. Backing up the system
Backup
Restore
A. Additional Resources
Homepage OTRS.org
Mailing lists
Bug tracking
Commercial Support
B. Overview of all configuration parameters
C. Credits
D. GNU Free Documentation License
0. PREAMBLE
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
2. VERBATIM COPYING
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
4. MODIFICATIONS
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
8. TRANSLATION
9. TERMINATION
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
How to use this License for your documents

List of Tables

3.1. Needed Perl modules for OTRS
3.2. Description of the several cron job scripts
5.1. Default groups after OTRS has been installed
5.2. Rights in the user groups of OTRS
5.3. Events for auto answers
5.4. Function of the different X-OTRS-headers
A.1. Mailinglists

List of Examples

5.1. Sort spam mails into a specific queue
7.1. .fetchmailrc
7.2. Example jobs for the filter module Kernel::System::PostMaster::Filter::Match
7.3. Example job for the filter module Kernel::System::PostMaster::Filter::CMD
11.1. Configuring a DB customer backend
11.2. Using company tickets with a DB backend
11.3. Configuring a LDAP customer backend
11.4. Using Company tickets with a LDAP backend
11.5. Using more than one customer backend with OTRS
11.6. Authenticate agents against a DB backend
11.7. Authenticate agents against a LDAP backend
11.8. Authenticate agents using HTTPBasic
11.9. Authenticate agents against a radius backend
11.10. Customer user authentication against a DB backend
11.11. Customer user authentication against a LDAP backend
11.12. Customer user authentication with HTTPBasic
11.13. Customer user authentication against a radius backend
18.1. ACL which only allows to move tickets with ticket priority 5 into a queue
18.2. ACL, which disables the closing of tickets in the raw queue and hides the close button
18.3. ACL, which removes the status for all agents, and only provides it for a group
19.1. Definition of a value series - one element
19.2. Definition of a value series - two elements