osTicket Lessons - Filtering and Exchange

Here is a thing I’ve discovered and it will hopefully save someone else hours of time. 

I have osTicket installed, with IMAP enabled to download emails from our Exchange mail server into the system. I then have filters enabled to apply rules to these emails to automagically point them at the right team / department / user – we use osTicket for marketing, reporting and so on as well as for IT Support.

For example – reports@domain.com need to go the Reporting Department, not support. Seems simple right?

There is a problem though – I do not want to have 10 email accounts (and associated logins) set up for my osTicket emails. In an Exchange environment, you can’t just have a shared folder – it needs to have a full user account and an associated Exchange mailbox to use POP3 or IMAP and this costs us a CAL (Client Access License) every time. Frustrating! So I thought – let’s use an alias instead.

I called the actual user account something like ithelp@domain.com and then aliased reports@ to ithelp@. Emails sent to reports landed successfully at ithelp@ and it looked rosy.

Subsequent testing though proved to be very painful – the filters didn’t seem to be working and the emails being sucked into osTicket were going to the default Department. I experienced some frustration around this (and may have cursed a bit). After trying several different options with changes to the filters, I eventually looked at the headers and had an unpleasant find. When one sends an email internally to an Exchange mailbox via an alias, it drops the alias off in the headers! So my emails to reports@ were being reported as having been sent to ithelp@ and osTicket was accurately processing these emails based on that. AARGH!

Poking around on the net proved fruitless – partly because of the complexity in our set up, but I did find a work around. I removed the alias and instead created a distribution group with one member – ithelp@ and an email address of (you guessed it) reports@. The filter now works properly and it’s all good. I still have a single, aggregating email account costing me one CAL, and a several distribution groups that keep it all hanging together.

I think using G Suite won’t have this effect, but I don’t have G Suite at this time, only Exchange. 

Here’s hoping that if you’re looking for this answer, I’ve saved you an hour or two.

osTicket - updated review

Some time ago I published a comparison of OTRS and osTicket. I've now had the chance to use osTicket as a daily task management tool, so I thought it might be worth updating my initial impressions.

It has taken a bit to get used to osTicket coming out of a CRM and OTRS as my task management platforms. Specifically, understanding how tickets and tasks relate to one another. The way I've been thinking of it is this:

A ticket is almost like a mini-project - it can be used standalone, with references back to a client creating the ticket and keeping it updated, with tasks (like a work breakdown structure) applied against the ticket. The ticket can't be closed until all the tasks are completed.

Tasks on the other hand, can be autonomous of a ticket and are quick and easy to start, fill in and then to close. There is no link back to a creating user though.

I've used both extensively - many of the tickets I have running have numerous tasks dependent on them (although it is a mutual dependency) and I can farm tasks out to different people to get the job done. In fact, within the work I'm doing now, I've been using OpenProject (which I'll make some notes on soon) to manage the top level project stuff, then breaking the project down into tickets and tasks within osTicket to keep on top of the whole process. It's working pretty well. The project review meetings look at both products and bring it together.

OpenProject isn't great at task management - rudimentary at best, but is great at the higher level project management activities. osTicket isn't good at bigger project work, but handles the lower level complexity very well.

It's important to note too that I have had to migrate osTicket from a XenServer VM to an Azure VM. I simply ran an SQLdump of the whole database and a backup of the install folder (/var/www/html/osticket), set up a brand new osTicket installation, then copied the data I'd backed up across. Restarted the webserver and away we went. I'd like to also point out that I love Let's Encrypt for providing SSL certificates to secure it all.

osTicket reporting is something to be investigated further - the dashboard isn't bad and satisfies my manager that work is getting done, but I'd like to extend it a bit further. Capturing time on tickets is another requirement I need to investigate. These are relatively minor in the current application of this software though and I'm quite pleased by it.

I installed and configured osTicket based on the walk through here:
http://idroot.net/linux/install-osticket-ubuntu-16-04-lts/

It's well worth a look through and I used Digital Ocean's method of applying Let's Encrypt to make it all work as advertised. You can find that link here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-apache-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-16-04 

Viva la Open Source! A huge shout out to the devs behind these wonderful products and these wonderful walk through pages. We're looking at getting enterprise support for both osTicket and OpenProject to support both. Check them out as alternatives to a paid ticket system and Microsoft Project (and save yourself some real coin!)

Find osTicket here: http://osticket.com/
Find OpenProject here: https://www.openproject.org/

osTicket and OTRS - a comparison

While I have been a fan of OTRS for many years and like the interface, reporting and usability of it, I recently chanced across osTicket (from the TV series Mr Robot). It looked interesting and a client I have wants an internal ticket management system (they had also seen it). After a bit of to and fro, they agreed to some research time and I set up osTicket.

My usual server OS is Ubuntu's latest LTS. In this case, 16.04LTS. The problem is, it ships with PHP7, and osTicket doesn't play nicely with that. There is a good tutorial over on Chubbable that's worth checking out: https://chubbable.com/osticket-install-guide/2#ubuntu-based

Have a look at that if you want to install it - it's pretty straightforward.

So my impression of osTicket is that its pretty good. The interface is reasonable intuitive and I've set it up at home to manage the stuff I'm going (but mostly just to play with it). There is a client interface and an agent interface. The Agent interface gives you access to tickets and tasks. Tickets are the top level action, tasks are a part of tickets. In this way, some basic project management can be applied. Here are a few different views that are available:

osTicket Dashboard

osTicket Task view - got some work to do on NFS No Limits!

osTicket Tickets

You can see in the Tickets there is an NFS No Limits ticket. Under the tasks panel, you can see I've broken this down further into the things I need to do with that Ticket. I imagine with multiple agents, the tasks could be spread around.

So why not migrate to osTicket? The ability to capture time in osTicket seems to be hideously complicated to implement. Perhaps I need to do more research into that, but in OTRS its pretty straightforward. For a company just interested in getting things done, then the time capture isn't so important, but for us - its a big part of the job being completed. Reporting is still something I need to investigate. The reporting in OTRS is great (once you get your head around it) so I'll be interested to play with osTicket a bit more and see how it goes. Stay tuned for more updates...!