Skip to main content

OTRS 5 Review and Thoughts

Recently I upgraded our several years old OTRS install to version 5. The upgrade procedure is exactly like all the others have been. It was straightforward and I actually found that the documentation was better this time around than it has been in the past. After backing up, upgrading and testing, I like, mostly, what I see. There are a couple of things that are a bit annoying though.

When closing a ticket, the previous version would automatically put in subject in the closure note. Likewise, in the Owner Update note it doesn't do it either. So each time, I have to update it. Not a problem if you're only getting a few notes every now and then, but we are changing and closing tickets in some large numbers at times.

Also, I have about 50 statistics generated monthly via a script I run. The syntax for doing this.

From: /opt/otrs/bin/otrs.GenerateStats.pl -n number -blah blah etc

To: /opt/otrs/bin/otrs.Console.pl Maint::Stats::Generate --number number etc

(from: https://otrs.github.io/doc/manual/admin/stable/en/html/statistics-module.html#stats-managing-the-module)

I like the speed of the updated system and the cosmetic changes are nice too. The menus have changed slightly and they are more dynamic with drop downs. The layout is a bit nicer too but generally the speed of the system is better.

Upgrade to version 5 if you have the chance - seems to be a winner!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Plone - the open source Content Management System - a review

One of my clients, a non-profit, has a lot of files on it's clients. They need a way to digitally store these files, securely and with availability for certain people. They also need these files to expire and be deleted after a given length of time - usually about 7 years. These were the parameters I was given to search for a Document Management System (DMS) or more commonly a Content Management System (CMS). There are quite a lot of them, but most are designed for front facing information delivery - that is, to write something, put it up for review, have it reviewed and then published. We do not want this data published ever - and some CMS's make that a bit tricky to manage. So at the end of the day, I looked into several CMS systems that looked like they could be useful. The first one to be reviewed was OpenKM ( www.openkm.com ). It looked OK, was open source which is preferable and seemed to have solid security and publishing options. Backing up the database and upgradin

elementary OS 5.1 Hera - a review and a revisit

 It's been ages since I used a desktop Linux distribution - being up to my ears in the horror of implementing ISO 27001 doesn't leave you much time to play around with computers - too busy writing policies, auditing and generally trying to improve security to a formally acceptable and risk managed level. I need a quick, small OS though to do the occasional network scan, view the contents of a dodgy file on and for general, low impact activities. I remembered reviewing elementary OS ( elementary.io ) some time ago ( see  https://www.ryv.id.au/2015/01/elementary-os-review.html ) from 2015 so I thought it was worth a revisit.  I downloaded the ISO from their website, forgoing to donation for the moment while I review it. If it turns out I'm going to keep using it, I'll send them some love. The ISO is 1.38GB in size and I booted it in a VMware Player instance. From go to whoa (I won't include the install photos here) it took about 10 minutes with a dual vCPU and 4GB of

Musings on System Administration

I was reading an article discussing forensic preparation for computer systems. Some of the stuff in there I knew the general theory of, but not the specifics of how to perform. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that Systems Administration is such a vast field. There is no way I can know all of this stuff. I made a list of the software and operating systems I currently manage. They include: - Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise - Exchange 2003 - Windows XP - Windows Vista - Windows 2000 - Ubuntu Linux - OpenSuSE Linux - Mac OSX (10.3 and 10.4) - Solaris 8 - SQL 2005 - Various specialised software for the transport industry I have specific knowledge on some of this, broad knowledge on all of it, and always think "There's so much I *don't* know". It gets a bit down heartening sometimes. For one thing - I have no clue about SQL 2005 and I need to make it work with another bit of software. All complicated and nothing straightforward. Irritating doesn&