I sit ten thousand feet above the earth in a coffin made of steel and plastic, hurtling through the air at a velocity I have a hard time fathoming. But it is not my location to which my mind wanders, but the events oft he past few days. I flew to Louisiana to meet with the creator and lead dev Peter of the Open Source project called osTicket, and his protege and fellow developer Jared. We spent two days talking and brainstorming and breathing all things osTicket. Yet what resonates in me the most is how passionate they are about the project.
“The times… They are a changing” – Bob Dylan
There is some fantastic New features, some good news, and some of it I’m even allowed to tell you about!
First and foremost is that you can look forward to regular updates being pushed out on a time table as development is going to continue at a breakneck pace pushing ever closer towards an eventual 2.0 version. Version 1.8 is due out next quarter and brings several new features which I’m actually excited about.
The forums software that osTicket.com is run on is going to be updated shortly which should make providing support and news about the project even easier. The version it’s running on now is fairly deprecated, and no longer supported by the authors. The upgrade should coincide with the launch of the osTicket Blog. The blog should cover things such as release notices, articles on configuration cases, new feature expose, sneak peaks at upcoming features, interviews with the we project staff, and anything else that we think might benefit the public in using osTicket.
One of the most requested features on the forums is how to add additional fields to your tickets, so one of the new features in 1.8 that you can look forward is dynamic forms. Each tickets form fields will based on the help topic, and you will be able to dynamically add form fields to a ticket which will ask for more information pertaining to the subject. For example, a ticket marked as billing could have an account number or customer identification number that is useful for the billing department to enable them to look up the client in your billing system. Meanwhile a support ticket might not have that field, but may instead have a operating system field. These additional fields are user customizable and have a whole slew of features that you can use to customize the data allowed in the field such as being able to select a data type for the field (such phone number).