Set up OTRS so other agents can respond to tickets with different owner

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 1 comments

Published on April 4th 2013 - Listed in Internet Linux

I've been using OTRS for a couple of years now and I must say that it has (almost) never disappointed me. Though today I came across a problem which I couldn't find a setting for in the Admin section of OTRS. 

Here's what the problem was about. I've set up three different queues: Tech, Billing and Information. Tech tickets are automatically assigned to me to solve the issue or respond to the question where Billing tickets are assigned to another person. The problem now is that sometimes a customer asks a technical question and a billing question in the same ticket. How to treat that one?

Previously I always re-assigned the ticket to the other agent as soon as I answered the technical part - but then I couldn't respond to the ticket anymore, when the customer later asks another technical question. So the problem is: Only the assigned agent can answer to the ticket.

Today I tried to find a final solution to that "problem". I came across an official article on the OTRS page (Automated Unlocking) which gave me the right information. It is actually not the ownership of a ticket which prevents the other agents of responding, it is the lock feature. A ticket is automatically locked to the assigned agent, unless it is manually or automatically unlocked by launching otrs.UnlockTickets.pl.

So to be able that all agents can respond to tickets assigned to another agent, it is necessary to automate otrs.UnlockTickets.pl  in the crontab of otrs:

crontab -l -u otrs | tail -n 2
# unlock every ten minutes locked tickets (so that other Agents can respond to ticket as well)
*/10 * * * *  $HOME/bin/otrs.UnlockTickets.pl --all >> /dev/null

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Comments (newest first)

Juan Luis Luis Baptiste from wrote on Nov 1st, 2017:

Now there's an easier way, go to sysconfig-> Ticket -> Frontend::Agent::Ticket::ViewCompose and change Ticket::Frontend::AgentTicketCompose###RequiredLock from No to Yes.