Re: [Opinion] RT versus OTRS

[dave0]

I administer our RT installation at work, and it just about meets all of our needs (aside from some minor annoyances). We use it for both support tickets and for bug tracking, and aside from some initial tweaks needed to make it fit the way we work, everything's been running smoothly.

Local customizations were pretty simple once you learn how the overlay system works, and interfacing it with external code isn't too difficult either. We've got a script that scans the incoming ticket queue and associates each one with the appropriate customer account in Salesforce for the sales team (using the Salesforce SOAP API), and an RT query module for mozbot so we can grab basic ticket status via IRC.

I've never used (and until now, never heard of) OTRS, so I don't really have much to say about it. However, I notice that they use Bugzilla for their own tracking, rather than eating their own dogfood.

[ghenry]

What are your minor annoyances then?

That's a good point about dogfood. I wonder why?

A bit of a techinical question, but when running RT, I take it that it runs on a dedicated box/boxes, but how do you manage the e-mail domain? For example, does it only parse e-mails to [e-mail], what about yourname@yourdomain? Or do you get all normal company e-mails routed somewhere else?

I'm going to join the RT mailing list and forum to ask these questoins there, as I am beginning to stray from the main thread.

[dave0]

The minor annoyances:
• Can't close a ticket as a duplicate of another. You can merge tickets together, but this isn't ideal in all situations.
• You can't take a reply to an existing ticket and make it a new ticket without cutting and pasting it manually. This comes up every once in a while when a customer replies to an old ticket with a new issue.
• Can be insanely slow at times, if you have a large number of replies on a ticket. I understand this is improved in newer versions (we're still on 3.2.x)
I suspect most of these could be solved if I spent some more time on it, but they're really not annoying us enough for it to be worthwhile.

Not knowing anything about OTRS, I suspect the dogfood issue could be a couple of reasons: 1) OTRS possibly being better suited to a trouble-ticket system than to a bug-reporting system 2) a large base of existing info in Bugzilla that can't be easily imported into OTRS.

As for our setup, we've got RT running on an internal machine. It's not entirely dedicated, as it runs a few other services, but it's beefy enough to handle the load. Mail for support@domain and a few other addresses is directed to that box from our main mailserver. All ticket correspondance takes place through RT, but in the rare occurance that something tracking-worthy arrives in our personal mailboxes, we can just bounce the message to support@ and RT does the right thing.