Book:OTRS 3.0 - Admin Manual/Chapter 5/2

Agents
By clicking the link Agents, you get access to the agent management screen of OTRS (see Figure 5.2 below). Administrators can add, change or deactivate agent accounts. Administrators can also manage agent preferences, for instance the language and notification settings for their interface.

To register an agent, click on the "Add agent" button, type all the needed data and press the Submit button at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Figure 5.3.

After the new agent account has been created, you should make the agent a member of one or more groups or roles. Information about groups and roles is available in the and  sections of this chapter.

Groups
Every agent's account should belong to at least one group or role. In a brand new installation, there are three pre-defined groups available, as shown in Table 5-1.

You can access the group management page (see Figure 5.4 below) by clicking the Groups link in the admin area.

To add an agent to a group, or to change the agents who belong to a group, you can use the link Agents <-> Groups from the Admin page (see Figure 5.5 below).

An overview of all groups and agents in the system is displayed. You can also use the filters to find a specific entity. If you want to change the groups that an agent is member of, just click on the agent's name (see Figure 5.6 below). To change the agents associated with a group, just click on the group you want to edit (see Figure 5.7 below).

Each group has a set of rights associated with it, and each member agent may have some combination of these rights for themselves. A list of the permissions / rights is shown in Table 5-2.

Roles
Roles are a powerful feature to manage the access rights of many agents in a very simple and quick manner. They are particularly applicable on large, complex support systems with a lot of agents, groups and queues. An example below explains when they may be used.

Suppose that you have a system with 100 agents, 90 of them with access to a single queue called "support" where all support requests are handled. The "support" queue contains some sub queues. The other 10 agents have permission to access all queues of the system. These 10 agents dispatch tickets, watch the raw queue and move spam messages into the "junk" queue.

The company now opens a new department that sells some products. Order request and acceptance, order confirmation, bills, etc. must be processed, and some of the company's agents shall do this via OTRS. The different agents have to get access to the new queues that must be created.

Because it would take a long time to change the access rights for the different agents manually, roles that define the different access levels can be created. The agents can then be added to one or more roles, with their rights automatically changed. If a new agent account is created, it is also possible to add this account to one or more roles.

You can access the role management section (see Figure 5.8 below ) by clicking the Roles link on the Admin page.

An overview of all roles in the system is displayed. To edit a role's settings, click on the role's name. In a fresh new OTRS installation, there are no roles defined by default. To register one, click on the "Add role" button, provide the needed data and submit it (see Figure 5.9 below).

To get an overview of all roles and agents in the system, click on the link Roles <-> Agents on the Admin page. You can also use filters to find a specific element. If you want to change the roles associated with an agent, just click on the agent's name (see Figure 5.10 below). To change the agents associated with a role, click on the role you want to edit (see Figure 5.11 below).

To get an overview of all roles and groups in the system, click on the link Roles <-> Groups on the Admin page. You will see a similar screen as the one shown in the Figure 5.12. You can also use filters to find a specific entity.

To define the different access rights for a role, click on the name of a role or a group (see below the Figures 5.13 and 5.14, respectively).