OTRS (originally Open-Source Ticket Request System) is a service management suite. The suite contains an agent portal, admin dashboard and customer portal. In the agent portal, teams process tickets and requests from customers (internal or external). There are various ways in which this information, as well as customer and related data can be viewed. As the name implies, the admin dashboard allows system administrators to manage the system: Options are many, but include roles and groups, process automation, channel integration, and CMDB/database options. The third component, the customer portal, is much like a customizable webpage where information can be shared with customers and requests can be tracked on the customer side.

History

In 2001, OTRS began as an open source help desk ticketing software. In 2003, OTRS GmbH was formed and a professional company entered the EMEA market. This was followed in 2006 by entry into the North American market. In 2007, the company was renamed to OTRS AG with the intention of going public, which it did in 2009. This is the same year in which OTRS was brought to Latin America with the Mexican subsidiary officially being founded in 2010. Entry into the APAC region occurred in 2011. In 2015, a new version of the software, known as ''OTRS Business Solution'', was launched. This commercial version was designed for professional users who needed additional support, configuration and features. Also in 2015, STORM powered by OTRS was launched. In 2018, both OTRS-specific products were renamed: The open source version became ''((OTRS)) Community Edition''. The commercial and managed version is named ''OTRS''. A third offering is called ''OTRS On-Premise'' for professional customers who intend to host the platform in their own data centers. In December 2020, OTRS AG announced the end of life of support for the Community Edition which led to several

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. Alongside its customers was

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

, which used ((OTRS)) Community Edition to run Wikimedia OTRS system; after its discontinuation, in April 2021, it was migrated to Znuny, a fork of ((OTRS)) Community Edition. Being no longer ran on original OTRS software, the system was renamed Wikimedia VRT.

OTRS Group

OTRS GmbH was originally founded in 2003 by André Mindermann (CEO) and Burchard Steinbild (chairman of the supervisory board). In 2007, the company became OTRS Group, also known as OTRS AG. In addition to the two, today's management board includes Christopher Kuhn (COO), Sabine Riedel (board member, Marketing, HR), Gabriele Brauer (VP Finance) and Manuel Hecht (VP Global Software Development). OTRS AG is the source code owner of OTRS. The OTRS Group has its headquarters in Germany. There are six subsidiaries worldwide, including OTRS Inc. (USA), OTRS S.A. de C.V. (Mexico), OTRS ASIA Pte. Ltd. (Singapore), OTRS Asia Ltd. (Hong Kong), (Brazil), and OTRS Magyarország Kft. (Hungary). OTRS AG is listed in the Basic Board of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Additional OTRS-related products

OTRS is very often used independently, but it is also the foundation of two other solutions. STORM powered by OTRS is a SOAR that is used by CERTS, SOCs and product security incident response teams (PSIRTs). It uses the OTRS service management suite as its backbone, but incorporates security-relevant processes and information. CONTROL powered by OTRS is an ISMS. It configures OTRS in such a way that it can track and document ISO 27001, TISAX and other controls for compliance teams. OTOBO is an Open Source Help-Desk based on OTRS.

Technical notes

Since its beginnings OTRS has been implemented in the programming language

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. The web interface is made user-friendly by using

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

(which can be switched off for security reasons). The OTRS web interface uses the Template::Toolkit rendering engine to dynamically generate the HTML output of individual frontend modules. This approach allows the underlying logic of the OTRS frontend modules (written in Perl) to remain separate from the presentation of each module's user interface (served as HTML to the user). Originally, OTRS supported only the use of a

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RDBMS for use as the webserver database. Support has since been added for

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the ...

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IBM Db2 Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON a ...

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

, and

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

(a community-developed fork of MySQL). OTRS may be used on many

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or UNIX-like platforms (e.g.

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

, etc.) as well as on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

. The scalability of OTRS systems may be increased by using

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for the

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Webserver or by separating the database and web server systems, allowing a large number of simultaneously working agents and high volumes of tickets.

References

External links