9 Days of OTRSevery day a new extra

User Story VI - Help and Inspiration

by Radovan Kubani

Like many other software developers in the world, the "Hallo Welt!" team is using OpenSource tools to develop new OpenSource software.

We have developed two OpenSource business solutions that are based on MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia: BlueSpice, which turns MediaWiki into a fully fledged corporate knowledge management, project management and corporate Wiki solution; and BlueCraft, a collaborative and revision-proof documentation solution.

In numerous client projects we had adopted MediaWiki for our customers specific needs. OTRS helped us to collect, classify and analyze the requirements that businesses had for corporate Wiki, knowledge management and documentation solutions. BlueSpice and BlueCraft are the result of this process. It is fair to say that OTRS has not only been our central support tool but has even played a critical part in our product development process.

We chose OTRS because it was OpenSource and could be easily adopted for our individual requirements. We are happy to pay for the maintenance and support services that OTRS provides because they have helped us to establish a professional, robust and reliable support and development process. As a consequence, working packages and project timelines could be defined so that BlueCraft and BlueSpice beta appeared on time for the CeBIT in March.

OTRS means more to us than just a tool. Rather than that, the company showed us how an open source business model can really work. In that way, OTRS paved the way for BlueSpice and BlueCraft, the leading corporate MediaWiki distributions in the world.

With best regards from the "Hallo Welt!"-Team

Radovan Kubani (kubani@hallowelt.biz)

Extension IV - Google Maps integration

by Martin Edenhofer

You want to enter the next level of customer visualiation? Here you go.

With the Google Maps integration you will be able to see all customer on a map (customers with open tickets marked in a extra color). The map is available in Dashboard and also as an own dedicated one large page map (just click on "more" in dashboard).

1) Installation
Download the package and install it via admin interface -> package manager.

2) Configuration
You need to have customer sources with the following attributes the let the extension work well.

1. UserStreet
2. UserCity
3. UserCountry

Configured in your CustomerUserMap (just take a look in your Kernel/Config.pm to check if you use them).

3) Build geo location data of your customer records
Just execute the following cmd program to build your geo location database. You also can do this by using var/cron/customermap cron job to build it automatically.

shell> bin/otrs.GMapsCustomerBuild.pl
NOTICE: Done (wrote 209 records).
shell>

4) Check if it is working
Go to the dashboard, activate the widget "Customer Map" and check if you see your customers on the map. ;)

Enjoy the inspiration how to use this new kind of view (e. g. for optimizing your travel routes). Many new ideas coming by just watching this now extension.

Prerequisite
OTRS 3.0, OTRS 3.1

Installation
Just install the package via the package manager.

Available via github

1. https://github.com/znuny/Znuny4OTRS-CustomerMap

Martin Edenhofer (m@edenhofer.de)