It adheres to ITIL best practices, bringing together the best in management practices with the best in open-source technology. It supports the ITIL processes most often implemented in companies: incident management, problem management, configuration management, and offers an integrated configuration management database (CMDB) for the management of complex IT infrastructures.
The system is built on the popular OTRS framework, thus it also incorporates its capabilities.
Installation
Download the GeneralCatalog and ITSMCore packages
Login to your OTRS 2.3 installation with admin permissions.
Install the downloaded .opm packages in the following order via package manager: 1) GeneralCatalog, 2) ITSMCore
If your OTRS is able to connect to the internet, you can use now the online repository [--OTRS::ITSM 1.2 Master--] to install the following packages: ITSMIncidentProblemManagement, ITSMConfigurationManagement, ITSMServiceLevelManagement and ImportExport
If your OTRS is unable to connect to the internet, you need to download and install (via package manager) the packages manually.
Here are some key features of “OTRS ITSM”:
Intuitive graphical user interfaces (GUI):
· Separate web front-ends for service staff, customers and administrators
· OTRS is a web application, which can be operated platform-independently in every HTML browser ? even on mobile devices.
· Various graphical interface layouts (themes), easy adaptation to your corporate design, personalization of graphical interfaces and system operation in the user preferences.
· Intuitive handling and straightforward overviews on all requests within a queue
· Quick and easy switching between the 26 languages
Self-Service:
· Separate customer web front-end
· Customers can log, administrate and track their requests, and obtain information at any time regarding the processing progress and status of messages sent
· Easy access to the knowledge database and all FAQs classified as freely accessible
· Individually pre-structurable templates for easy data logging and further classification
· Full real-time transparency about the status, progression of processing and person responsible for your customers at any time
Workflows:
· Modeling of processes and workflows
· Extensive role-based authorization concept allows differentiated access control for transactions, responsibility areas, reports and features
· Comprehensive integration of external service providers or partners
· Multi-client-enabled system for customer and partner account administration
· Integration of multiple working time calendars – thanks to this function, OTRS can also be used in decentralized and internationally operating service organizations. Active working time calendars and the holidays and time zones defined within them affect the service level window and the time-driven escalation and unlocking mechanisms of OTRS.
Service Desk Incident Management:
· Automatic and quick ticket generation upon incident or service request receipt via the customer frontend, E-mail, phone, fax, PDA, SMS, SOAP/XML
· Quick-Ticket templates for standard incident handling
· Self-Service frontend to relief your Service Desk
· Comfortable call answering thanks to special phone ticket masks and CTI
· Flexibly configurable ticket-masks
· Linking splitting of tickets and FAQ-articles
· Automated and manual incident routing
· Automatic follow-up to existing tickets
· Criterion-based filter mechanisms facilitate automated execution of pre-defined actions easing the workload of your service and support staff
· Configurable incident classifications and priorization
· Automated allocation and entering of customer data in the ticket thanks to CTI integration and/or integration of up to 10 customer databases
· Creation and administration of (auto)reply templates for efficient processing of recurring inquiries.
· Event-driven, definable notification mechanisms for service staff, service providers integrated into the process, the management or your customers
· Management of work processes with bring forward functionality and flexible (auto)status change
· SLA and queue based escalation and unlocking mechanisms
· Locking and unlocking mechanisms for secure ticket processing by specific service staff
· Support in bug analysis and diagnosis and documentation of resolution know-how in the knowledge database, and linking to the communication
· Monitoring of individual transactions in personal watch lists
· Integration with System- and Network-Monitoring systems e.g. Nagios, OpenNMS, HP Open View, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Operation Manager.
· Full text search in all tickets
· Linkage of objects such as tickets, FAQ articles etc. within the system
· Queue-based definition of addresses, signatures and standard text element
· Time Accounting
Service Catalog:
· Integrated service catalogue service level agreements. Description and administration of the business process-based services agreed upon with your customers.
· Flexible Modeling of service hierarchies service classification
· Evaluation of services based on their criticality for the business processes ? The services agreed upon are described in the relevant service level agreements (SLA). Those SLAs are the basis of service controlling and continuous improve-ment within service level management (SLM)
· Flexible SLA classification
· Allocation of SLAs services
· Allocation of SLAs working time calendars
· Definition of response time, update time, resolution times and MTTR
· (Auto)escalation and unlocking mechanisms facilitate management of the time acceptable for processing
Service Level Reporting:
· Menu-driven compilation of complex reports for monitoring of SLAs and service quality
· Saving and export of frequently used reports
· Automated generation and time-driven dispatch of saved reports to pre-defined recipients (recipient groups), e.g. service management
· Unalterable, automated logging of all events, time stamps, and activities over the complete ticket history, complying with audit requirements
· Export of reports, graphics and analysis data to a printer, in pdf or csv format
· Logging of the processing duration for all tickets as a base for further analysis
· Unalterable data storage complying with audit requirements
Administration system configuration:
· Separate administrator web front-end
· Menu-driven system configuration
· System event-driven E-mail notification for administrators
· Integrated user and permissions administration
· Powerful administration for queues and templates
· From release 2.2 onwards, OTRS supports the sequential authentication of customers and service staff against multiple data sources (e.g. LDAP backends and SQL databases).
· Single sign-on functionality
· Administration of filter rules
· Administration of event-driven notifications and recipients (recipient groups)
· Encryption of your customers’ and service staff’s passwords in three modes: unix_crypt(), md5() and plain(). Default setting is ‘unix_crypt()’. However, the encryption can easily be changed to unix_crypt() or md5()on the running system.
Open standards sustainable technologies:
· High connectivity and integration capability with existing IT solutions
· CTI integration based on SOAP or XML
· Integration of Network-Monitoring Systems e.g. Nagios, OpenNMS, HP Open View, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Operation Manager.
· utf-8 support for front and back end
· Support of e-mail attachments (MIME)
· Automatic conversion of html into plain text messages to block risky content.
· PGP support, creation and import of own certificates, encrypted and signed mails, display of encrypted and signed messages.
· Encryption and display of S/MIME messages.
· Attachments of data in any format
Requirements:
· OTRS 2.4.7 or higher
· Perl 5.8+
What’s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
Bug fixes:
· Change history shows wrong entries for Condition/Expression/Action-Update.
· Change history shows change in wrong order.
· Change history is slow if many entries exist for conditions, expressions, and actions.
· Change history shows wrong action execution result if selector ‘all’ is used.
· Change history shows entries about sent notifications before the change update entries.
· Notifications are sent to invalid agents and customers.
· No Impact field in AgentTicketEmail.
· AgentITSMChangeMyCAB isn’t available due to error in ITSMChange::ChangeSearch.
· The exported csv file should show the column headers.
· Problem with linking configitems if user has only ro access rights.
· ConfigItems with deployment state “Retired” do not hide in overview lists.