OTRS – Release of 3.0 Beta version

Recently, came across this announcement from the OTRS team for the beta release of OTRS 3.0.

With a new Ajax-powered interface, OTRS claims to improve its tickets dispatch performance by as much as 30%. Amongst other things, the new user-centered design features an enhanced New Ticket dashboard, a dynamic Ticket Zoom view, enhanced search, an interactive Global Ticket overview, ticket archiving, and accessibility compliance.

In the past, I have been involved in multiple installations of OTRS at major client enterprises and some of the very useful OTRS features were:

• Multiple methods of ticket generation like web-based, email and phone
• Auto-routing of tickets (especially of email tickets) to concerned organizational departments for resolution
• Escalation mechanisms to handle ticket resolution delays; we extended this feature to multiple level of escalations and associated management reports
• Definition of work-time schedules for the organizational staff to care of shift schedules, holidays etc.
• Bulk action methods to respond in case of emergencies
• Maintenance of detailed audit trail of every customer interaction
• Comprehensive Knowledge Base which grows with regular usage (FAQs section)
• Quick response templates to improve productivity; most useful for auto-notifications
• Best-in-class reporting mechanisms to generate planned as well as on-demand reports

And of course, we had great fun integrating OTRS with SugarCRM!!

Hope to see the GA version of OTRS 3.0 soon; meanwhile enjoy this Youtube file on the beta version:



P.S. If you are looking to install OTRS on windows then, here's a very useful reference on youtube