OTRS App in the top 8 mobile service desk apps

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Dear Readers,

Software Advice recently posted their favorites for customer service on the go. Software Advice stated: “A recent report from Call Center Times showed that 78 percent of consumers use mobile apps for customer service.”….”With this app, businesses can increase the productivity of their on-site support staff, as well as reduce support errors at the customer site.”

The OTRS App can be found in iTunes, and is free of charge. You will need the OTRS Extension iPhoneHandle, available via your OTRS’ Package Manager. After installation, just connect your iPhone to the JSON script provided by the package, login, and start using the application.

You can even connect to multiple OTRSs with the same application.

So, thanks to the people at Software Advice for rating the iPhone App so highly, and valuing the added productivity when using this in combination with the world leader in open source service desk solutions, OTRS.

OTRS Tips & Tricks: Custom Branding the Customer Portal

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Today we’re going look at how to quickly add custom branding to the customer portal of your OTRS Help Desk.

By default, the customer portal has the OTRS logo:

How to change the Customer Portal logo

Navigate to the Admin / SysConfig dialog:

Search for “logo”:

From the search results, select “Frontend::Customer”:

Enable the “CustomerLogo” checkbox:

Replace the URL with the web address of your logo image file. You can place the logo in the ‘skins’ directory on your OTRS server, or link to a 3rd party file. Use the style rules to tweak the position of the logo. The optimal size is 135×50 pixels:

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Update”:

Your OTRS customer portal will now show your custom logo:

On OTRS and web browser support

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The web browser arena has seen lots of changes recently; years ago Microsoft was dominant with its Internet Explorer web browser. This is really no longer the case. Other browsers like Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are constantly gaining market share and also Safari and Opera still have their niches.

We support all browsers mentioned above for OTRS. When we introduced OTRS 3 with its new CSS and JQuery-based frontend, we decided to drop support for Internet Explorer 6 for the Agent interface. With version 3.1 of OTRS, released two weeks ago, we also dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 here. This was based on a survey we held; the vast majority of respondents were either already using Internet Explorer 8 or 9 or had a different browser as their standard.

What this means is that if your organization is still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 you can use it to access OTRS, but only the customer interface. The agent interface (for support staff) will not work, you simply will not be able to log in.

Of course it would be possible to install a different browser, or upgrade Internet Explorer. There might be a scenario where this is very inconvenient; if you have to work on a legacy ERP system that only support IE6 or IE7 and you also need to work in OTRS which requires at least IE8 this means you’ll need to install a secondary browser. So let’s say you install my favorite browser Firefox. Now if you make Firefox the default browser on your computer, incoming links that you click in chat messages, emails and so on will all open in Firefox. But links to the legacy system do not work there. If you make Internet Explorer the default browser, you’ll have the same issue, but then with OTRS links.

Chrome has created specifically for this the Google Chrome Frame. It is a plug in for IE that you can let your users download or deploy on your network if you are a system administrator. What makes it neat (and better than IETab, the popular Firefox extension) is that it will automatically switch the browsers rendering engine to Chrome if the site uses a special header to indicate that it wants to use the ChromeFrame plugin. OTRS sends this header. So you install the browser plugin, connect to OTRS using IE6 or IE7, the plugin will switch the rendering engine to Chrome for this site only, and you now can connect both to legacy systems and to OTRS using just one and the same browser!

I hope this might be helpful for some of our customers about to upgrade to OTRS 3.1. Oh and by the way, other popular web sites such as Gmail and Github also are not working in IE7: Gmail switches you back to ‘basic HTML’ view and Github is just broken. I hope any users still stuck with IE7 in 2012 will be able to upgrade their legacy stuff soon!

My favorite new OTRS 3.1 feature – pasting images from the clipboard

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With the upgrade to OTRS 3.1 come a lot of new nice features. We have the new web services framework called “Generic Interface” which allows us to develop interfaces on top of OTRS much faster; we have a new implementation of the old FreeText Fields called DynamicFields which resolves some of the issues with the old implementation, and we have some nice smaller changes that just make working with OTRS even nicer.

One of those small, but very nice features I’ll explain below:

More than once I’ve heard customers expressed that it is cumbersome to add a screenshot to an outgoing response to a customer. Because OTRS is a web application, and the browser security model on operating systems, OTRS can’t access binary data on the clipboard. This means you can paste text from a PDF file or such into OTRS, but you can’t include a screenshot, without saving it to disk, uploading it in your text editor, and then inserting it into the article that you’re writing. And – you know the saying – because a picture sometimes can say more than a lot of words, sometimes you’d just want to quickly include a screenshot in that email to your customer.

The good news is that Firefox, starting with version 4, has created a very smart workaround for this. If you have an image on your clipboard, and you’ll paste it in the OTRS Rich Text Editor, it will convert it to a Data URI for you. Data URIs are defined in a more than 10 year old RFC, basically they are HTML IMG tags with the image base64 encoded as text inside it. This works like a charm. The bad news is that not all browsers (did I hear anyone say “Internet Explorer?” Yeah, that’s right, Internet Explorer!) and especially lots of email clients don’t do to good a job of displaying those. So while it is very convenient to paste an image using Firefox 4 or up, what good is that if chances are your customer can’t see your helpful screenshot?

In comes OTRS 3.1. Starting this brand new version OTRS will convert any Data URIs it will find in a ticket article and it will convert those to ‘real’ attachments; so if your support staff uses Firefox to work on their tickets, they will be able to very quickly insert images. One of the smaller, but definitely nice, new features of OTRS 3.1!

Talking about our 3.1 release: we released the first beta in November 2011, have seen some more beta releases and will release the first stable version on Tuesday 14th of February 2012. So please feel free to download and install it or upgrade your existing environment with it.

And as always, at OTRS Group we’re more than happy to help you upgrade your environment. This is free of charge for our Professional Subscription users; and we can offer an on-site or remote upgrade for all other users; just contact us at sales@otrs.com or via the contact form if you’d like to learn more.