November 04, 2014 – OTRS, the world’s leading provider of open source Help Desk and ITIL® V3 compliant IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today announces the fifth beta release of OTRS Help Desk 4.
Release Details
Release name: OTRS Help Desk 4 beta5
Release type: beta
Release date: November 04, 2014
What’s New in OTRS Help Desk 4 beta
WHAT’S NEW IN OTRS HELP DESK 4 beta5
Updated translations, thanks to all translators.
Added Excel export as an alternative to CSV export.
Added calendar specific weekday start options for date picker.
Reimplemented otrs.SetPermissions.pl. It is now much faster and has a –skip-article-dir option.
Added possibility to search for ‘NotTicketFlags’, thanks to Moritz Lenz.
Added the possibility to define a custom logo per skin. Fallback will be still AgentLogo.
Improved IndexAccelerator SQL to use proper JOINs, thanks to Moritz Lenz.
IN GENERAL
1. PRODUCTIVITY
A new cleaner flat design has been implemented.
Agents can now reply directly to a ticket note. The original notes body is quoted in the new note.
Agents can now make use of templates in all screens with internal notes.
Added new screen for outgoing emails on a ticket that are not replies.
Ticket action screens (such as note, owner etc.) now allow to do actions without always creating an article (configurable).
New ticket overview based on “my services” that an agent can subscribe to. Notification options for new tickets and follow-ups can now be based on “my queues”, “my services” or combinations of both.
OTRS can now display tickets with thousands of articles.
Customer online list in Dashboard now links directly to CustomerInformationCenter page for the customer.
Agents can now persistently reorder their main menu with drag&drop.
Agents and customers can now search tickets by attachment name.
Added functionality to search for the last change time of the ticket (TicketLastChangeTimeOlderMinutes, TicketLastChangeTimeNewerMinutes, TicketLastChangeTimeNewerDate, TicketLastChangeTimeOlderDate).
New Dashboard Widget for running process tickets.
Added Excel export as an alternative to CSV export.
Added calendar specific weekday start options for date picker.
2. SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE
OTRS 4 can handle more concurrent users/requests on the same hardware, and response times for single requests are shorter as well, especially for pages with lots of data.
3. WORKING WITH EXTERNAL SYSTEMS
The GenericInterface now also supports HTTP REST as network transport protocol.
4. INSTALLATION & ADMINISTRATION
Postmaster filters are no longer limited to 4 match/set fields. They can now have a configurable amount of fields (default 12, up to 99).
A new configuration option Ticket::MergeDynamicFields makes it possible to specify which dynamic fields should also be merged when a ticket is merged to another ticket.
Added new options to check dynamic fields of type text on patterns relating to error messages (translated), if they do not match.
Added new options to restrict dynamic fields of type date/datetime on future or past dates.
OTRS can be configured to automatically unlock a ticket if articles are added and the owner is out of office.
Linked tickets of a specific type (e.g. merged or removed) can now be hidden via SysConfig option.
ACL handling has been improved, made more consistent and easier to debug.
Added new ACL option PossibleAdd to add items to a possible list without resetting (like Possible does).
Added new ACL value modifiers [Not], [NotRegExp], [Notregexp], for all ACLs parts.
Process handling has been improved, made more consistent and easier to debug.
A new GUID-based entity naming scheme for the OTRS Process configuration makes it possible to safely transfer processes from one system to another without duplicating the entities.
Added new Transition Action to create a new ticket.
Added possibility to define variable Transition Action attributes based on current process ticket values.
The possibility to schedule System Maintenance periods is available from the System Administration panel in the Admin interface.
A notification about an incoming System Maintenance period will be shown with some (configurable) time in advance.
If a System Maintenance is active, a notification about it will be shown on the Agent and Customer interface, and only admin users can log on to the system.
An overview screen informs admins about active sessions, which can be ended all on one click or one by one.
Added possibility to disable sysconfig import via configuration.
Added Apache MD5 as a new password hashing backend, thanks to Norihiro Tanaka.
Added the possibility to restrict customer self registration by email address whitelist or blacklist, thanks to Renée Bäcker.
Added new dashboard module that shows the output of an external command, thanks to ib.pl.
5. DEVELOPMENT
New powerful template engine based on Template::Toolkit.
A central object manager makes creating and using global objects much easier (thanks to Moritz Lenz @ noris network).
The OPM package format was extended to signal that a package has been merged into another package, allowing the package manager to correctly handle this situation on package installation or update.
Caching was centralized in one global cache object which also performs in-memory caching for all data.
Added cache benchmark script, thanks to ib.pl.
Important for Upgrading
From a previous version of OTRS 4:
Make sure you run bin/otrs.RebuildConfig.pl after the upgrade so that the configuration is refreshed. Otherwise the system may not work.
From OTRS 3.3.x: Please consult our admin manual for detailed instructions.
Bug Fixes
Bug#10656 – Generated CSV file cannot display Chinese characters in MS Excel.
Bug#8460 – Smart tag <OTRS_CUSTOMER_EMAIL[]> is display with HTML coding tags.
Bug#10587 – Find.pm “Can’t cd to ..” error in DynamicField subdirectories.
Bug#10665 – Backup script should delete incomplete backups.
Bug#10828 – MyServices select misbehaves on empty values.
Bug#10820 – memory cache does not get updated.
Bug#5252 – For pending- and escalation-notification only the standard calendar is used.
Bug#10041 – Queue Based Calendars not shown only the standard calendar is used.
Bug#10817 – generic agent ticket date filter ‘year’ one year has 365 instead of 356.
Bug#10813 – GenericInterface event handler only listens to ticket events.
Bug#10810 – Reference of uninitialized value at login.
The detailed ChangeLog can be found at: https://github.com/OTRS/otrs/blob/rel-4_0_0_beta5/CHANGES.md.
Browser Support
JavaScript is required to use OTRS.
These browsers are not supported:
Microsoft Internet Explorer before version 8
Firefox before version 10
Safari before version 5
Please note that OTRS 5 will not support Internet Explorer 8 and 9.
We recommend to use the latest version of your browser, because it has the best JavaScript and rendering performance. Dramatical performance varieties between the used browsers can occur with big data or big systems. We are happy to consult you on that matter.
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