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OTRS
What Is OTRS?
OTRS is a fully-managed service management solution that includes ticketing, workflow/process automation and notification, among its many features. Processes can be customized to incorporate ITIL and/or specific security requirements. ITSM, Customer Service and Corporate Security professionals use OTRS to structure communication and streamline internal processes so that they can respond quickly to any situation and provide the best possible service in a cost effective way.
Who Uses OTRS?
As a service management solution, OTRS is traditionally used by help desks, IT organizations, corporate security teams and customer service teams.
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Reviews of OTRS
Opensource framework with modern front-end and perl backend
Comments: Low-cost, scalabale solution that could handle multiple trouble ticket queues within one software context.
Pros:
Highly customizable. Perl backend "makes sense" and isn't opaque like some designs. It runs as a set of CGI, so that allows it to be wedged into most any webserver environment. We found it simple to run within an Apache / Linux environment.
Cons:
The CGI-based design is relatively inefficient and can be sluggish without making some optimizations on the webserver side -- mod_perl in our case (relatively complicated). Docs are a bit sparse, though customer service is responsive.
OTRS Response
6 years ago
Thanks for taking time to share your experience, Omar.
Alternatives Considered:
OTRS is great for small to midsize businesses
Comments: It's a great daily ticket email system.
Pros:
I love the ticket handling and speed of the interface. It's basic layout offers the basics you need to get up and running with a ticketing system.
Cons:
The support is little to non-existent but that is expected with the free tier.
OTRS Response
last year
Thank you for the positive words. To clarify, OTRS has both support and functionality that extend beyond what is offered with ((OTRS)) Community Edition.
Basic Ticketing tool for customer desks
Comments: Basic software for small organization without advanced features of ITIL.
Pros:
I used it for sometime in one of my assignments. It was a very basic tool with minimum customization. It just does its job and do not provide advanced features of ITIL framework. Reporting was not effective and so was its UI. We replaced this with more advanced CA Servicedesk. However as a freeware, it was good for initial use.
Cons:
It is basic application and nothing much can be expected put of this. Ours is a ITIL compliant organization and need a more robust application.
OTRS Response
5 years ago
Hi Mohit. Thanks for taking time to share your thoughts on OTRS, and I'm glad you found a solution that fits your needs, I did just want to clarify, for other people reading, that OTRS is ITIL-compliant, and we have 6 ITIL-verified processes for incident, change, problem, knowledge and configuration management. Of course, we can't claim that for the ((OTRS)) Community Edition as that's our free unsupported version: in that case, compliance is in the hands of the user - and it can certainly be tough to configure that solo. But, our fully-managed version of OTRS is ITIL-compliant. Thanks again for the review.
We use OTRS to register all the activities/pendencies. It is ease to use and intuitive as well.
Comments: The way we can centralize everything on it is real a benefit.
Pros:
The provided scalability really help us. As a new demand appears, we can set the software to fit to this new need. This is really a power way to work with software.
Cons:
When I send some e-mail to, which is related to some active ticket, the emails go agrupated, so for any new e-mail sent, all the previous text are rewritten. In some tickets, there are a lot of du- or tri or quadri-plicated emails. I know this is just something I can solve by deleting the text before sendind it to OTRS, but, it would be amazing if OTRS could append only the new text to the ticket.
OTRS Response
5 years ago
Thank you for taking time to share your thoughts about OTRS. We're glad for the feedback. I will pass along your comments about the e-mails. It may also help to know that you can submit new improvement ideas to the development team via https://otrsteam.ideascale.com/ Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Keep track of all your support calls
Comments: The user experience with OTRS is amazing. Being able to show all your work to the client is great.
Pros:
If properly used, with the control of calls and "learning" of errors, in addition to a quick response, it is possible to show the user everything that is happening and how it is being done.
Cons:
Its look is not pretty, however, being extremely functional, this goes unnoticed. They could have a more practical way of creating reports.
OTRS Response
last year
Glad you're enjoying it. Thanks for taking time to write in.
